Posts tagged “structure”
Little Machines in Your Zettelkasten
A basic description of a Zettelkasten could be that it is just a hypertext of your notes. But this definition falls short of the intended goal to create a tool that assists your thinking. Technically, an interconnected quote collection could be a tool to assist your thinking and it would meet the above definition of a Zettelkasten: It is a hypertext of your notes (which consists of just quotes in this example). But it violates the spirit of what a Zettelkasten is. An interconnected quote collection does not express the full potential of the Zettelkasten Method since your past self could have created vastly more value for your current self. It is up to you how much you want to invest in your future self.
How Value is Created in a Zettelkasten (and Any System of Knowledge Work)
The first question we need to ask ourselves is: What is value? I propose a simple answer to this question: Valuable is what is useful to us. Let’s look into knowledge on nutrition as an example: Knowing how to eat healthy is not very useful to a lot of people because this knowledge is not put into practice. Most of the time this knowledge is not what is needed. Eating healthy is rather about building habits. Then again, knowledge on healthy nutrition becomes useful when those healthy habits are built.
Use Case: Investing with the Zettelkasten Method
I am not an investment professional. I do invest in stock and some other assets to create passive income through dividends and to build a safety net. I don’t make the time-commitment for in-depth research. I merely want to avoid dumb decisions. So I created a table of conditions that a company needs to meet before I buy stock. This is a snapshot in time. It is a work in progress of course:
Understanding Hierarchy by Translating Folgezettel and Structure Zettel
Please note: This is a post that requires a bit of prior knowledge. There are links for some of the terms. If you are interested in taking knowledge work to the next level, join the forum and become part of the community. This post is directly inspired by the great discussions by the folks over there.
The Zettelkasten as a Lattice of Thought Strings
Please welcome Gerrit Scholle, aka gescho from the forums! Gerrit kindly took the time to write up his recent thoughts as a self-contained blog post, with colored pencil drawings and all! Enjoy. A recent forum post led me to an idea that seemed to be brewing in my subconscious for a little while.
The Difference Between Good and Bad Tags
When I search in my archive for the tag #diet I get really annoying results. I don’t only get notes on diet. I get notes on carbohydrates, insulin sensitivity and many other. “Why is that a problem?”, you might ask. “All the above topics are relevant for diet, aren’t they?” No, and here is why.
A Tale of Complexity – Structural Layers in Note Taking
A Zettelkasten is neither a neatly structured filing system for notes easy to access nor a turmoil deep sea generating ideas out of the ununderstandable chaos. There are three layers in my archive which emerged from the years of working with the Zettelkasten Method. I didn’t plan them in advance. It rather was an organic process.