(2022-06-19) Aldrich Reframing And Simplifying The Idea Of How To Keep A Zettelkasten

Chris Aldrich: Reframing and simplifying the idea of how to keep a Zettelkasten. Hopefully this distillation will get you moving in a positive direction for having a useful daily practice, but without an excessive amount of work and perhaps a bit less cognitive dissonance.

perhaps it may be helpful to dramatically reframe the question of how to keep a zettelkasten

Perhaps we should briefly consider the intellectual predecessor of the slip box?

read about what a commonplace book is and how that (simpler) form of note taking works

If you’re a writer, researcher, or journalist, perhaps Steven Johnson’s perspective may be interesting to you instead: https://stevenberlinjohnson.com/the-glass-box-and-the-commonplace-book-639b16c4f3bb

If you like call these your “fleeting notes” as some do.

As you do this, start building an index of subject headings for your ideas, perhaps using John Locke’s method

Once you’ve got this, you’ve really mastered the majority of what a zettelkasten is and have a powerful tool at your disposal

Next instead of keeping the ideas in a notebook, put them on index cards so that they’re easier to sort through, move around, and re-arrange

in practice many will have their ideas in a metaphorical slip box using a digital note taking app.

Next, maybe keep some index cards that have the references and bibliographies from which your excerpting and note taking comes from. Link these bibliographical cards to the cards with your content.

Perhaps you’re looking for more creativity, serendipity, and organic surprise in your system? Next you can link individual notes together. (interestingness)

Beyond the first few steps, you’re really just creating additional complexity to a system to increase the combinatorial complexity of juxtaposed ideas.

The benefit of this method is that beyond creating your index, you’ll always have something useful even if you abandon things later on and quit refining it.

His Aug16 comment: thinking more about progressive enhancement (incrementall) in the #ToolsForThinking affordances space. Here’s an example of text-based note taking evolving into commonplacing, and from there into a more complex zettelkasten. (he was triggered by (2022-08-16) BetaWorks Render Tools for Thinking)