(2024-03-06) How To Start A Zettelkasten From Your Existing Deep Experience

WritingSlowly: How to start a Zettelkasten from your existing deep experience. An organized collection of notes (a Zettelkasten) can help you make sense of your existing knowledge, and then make better use of it. Make your notes personal and make them relevant. Resist the urge to make them exhaustive.

start with what most matters to you right now, and work from there. That’s because it’s more useful and feasible for your system of notes to be personally relevant than to be generally encyclopaedic.

tool to help you make and maintain personally useful trails through the deep forest of accumulated knowledge. (digital garden)

there’s no point in trying to recreate, say, ‘20 years of project experience’ in a Zettelkasten. That would be like building your own Wikipedia.

On Reddit u/cratermoon pointed me to Alfred North Whitehead’s classic essay about “inert ideas”. According to the philosopher and educationalist, there is a great difference between what you remember and can repeat, and what you can actually apply.

The Zettelkasten method is at the very least a means of throwing your ideas into fresh combinations, to see what’s useful and what’s merely received knowledge.

What the Zettelkasten excels at is systematising information that matters to you right now and that might matter in the future for a specific purpose.

You have a bright idea in the present moment but your brain forgets it. Take a note, link it, and your Zettelkasten will resurface it for you. Your brain can probably remember this idea, given the right prompts, but the Zettelkasten is useful because it remembers the idea slight differently from how you do.

In this sense your Zettelkasten is not so much a tool for remembering as a creative conversation partner about shared memories. (rubberducking)

the Zettelkasten is also best when it’s aimed at the creation of products beyond itself. In other words, it’s primarily a working tool for creating new info products.

Where (and how) you go is more important than where you start from

because it’s all connected, you don’t even need to start with the most important idea. You can just start with the first idea you think of right now. Where does it lead? The Zettelkasten process will take you there.

This unfolding process is the opposite of the standard practice. In the case of 20 years of project management experience the standard practice might be to take a conventional set of PM categories as your table of contents and then to write the same thing everyone else already wrote. The Zettelkasten method is specifically to deny the established categories and to allow the process to uncover new, better ones - new and unique trails through the forest of knowledge.