Bryan Kam wrote two posts about his embarking on a Zettelkasten journey in recent months. Especially if you’re getting started, posts like his can be a nice place to get inspiration and a feel for the early days.
In his first post, he talks about his understanding of the method as a “methodology for thinking in writing.” Which is a pretty apt summary of one of its benefits already. He also draws connections to Getting Things Done, which I’d argue the Zettelkasten Method is not an alternative, but an extension of for personal productivity. Either way, Bryan lists a few core principles and their immediate, actionable results. For example this:
Each “zettel” (aka note) can only contain a single thought. […] Massive interlinking. […] The size limit encourages the recording of inchoate thoughts, to be developed by their relationships. If they’re not linked strongly enough, they may be lost forever in the network. (Less likely in software, but still possible, if you forget to link/search. Also sounds sort of like your brain, doesn’t it?)
A month later, he wrote a follow-up to his post with reflections on the process, and a very nice graphical visualization of note connections. One gem from that post:
The biggest benefit seems to be that a wider variety of thinking is closer to the surface of my mind at all times. I feel that I think more clearly and can make better analogies. I also feel more confident that I have mastered the material I’ve read (or alternatively, that I know when I haven’t understood, and need to learn more before returning to the material).
A second benefit is the serendipity that Luhmann and Ahrens predict. I often find notes that I’d forgotten about, either by a search or by realising that one note connects to another, then finding more links on that note. This produces novel and insightful connections.
So go ahead and read Bryan’s first and second post to immerse yourself further in the Zettelkasten experience!
This chapter’s outline started out was pretty short – and most of the stuff that I did add was anecdotes and stories. Interesting stories, sure, but nevertheless not much to brag about in front of your friends who study humanities. The actual sources will be interesting, but I didn’t get to them this time.
Instead, I decided to go with placeholder notes: I added the stuff from Epstein’s account and a reference to the original, but also left a note to myself both in the note (as a warning!) and in my to-do-list so I knew this is not supposed to be the end of that particular branch.
Still, the visualization from the structure note looks interesting:
After this chapter, it looks less like an onion with many layers because it grows an appendix of sorts.
By accident, I started this episode with an outline that was surprisingly long and lended itself well to my favorite Zettel refactoring, called “Extract Zettel”, where I take part of an existing note and put it into a new one, leaving a link in place of the cutout.
Took me 3 weeks to get into the groove, and since last time things flow quite smoothly as I hunt for precious information in this journalist’s take on a complex topic.
The web of notes after episode 5 shows a second layer around the core, like an onion
This episode is shorter, because I didn’t find many useful ideas in Chapter 3. And the ideas I did find interesting were not citable, so I had to look the originals up. That took most of the time, but did ultimately not produce many new notes.
I did add a couple, though, and in the last 5 minutes extracted a few notes from a comment I left behind that also affected the previous chapter’s outline.
It’s interesting that after a couple of session I already begin to form an opinion of the quality of Epstein’s research. There’s lots of endnotes, but the quality is … well, enjoy this episode to find out more!
Everything was a ton easier this time. In the previous episode, I processed the classic study by Ericsson et al on deliberate practice1. That was by far the hardest nut to crack, and on top everything was recorded. That took a noticeable amount of cognitive capacity, too. And the studies I wanted to have a closer look at were either not available in full-text or irrelevant in detail, so I could focus more on the actual connection-making and writing. (The part I actually like, heh.)
Part of Sascha’s feedback last time was that I should decide for myself what I want from a study: Do I want to acquire expertise in the fields of cognition, learning, or sports? Certainly not right now. So I limited what I was looking for in the papers tremendously in this episode, aiming for a very superficial understanding.
Looking at the footage, I also notice I added more commentary on top of the paraphrases. You could say there’s more of my voice in the notes this time.
Update 2019-10-02: Here’s a visualization of the notes before I recorded Episode 3.
Web of notes after episode 2
K. Anders Ericsson, Ralf Th. Krampe, and Clemens Tesch-Römer (1993): The Role of Deliberate Practice in the Acquisition of Expert Performance, Psychological Review 3, 1993, Vol. 100, S. 363–406. ↩
The video is live! Please comment in the forums; we’d like to know what you think of the format.
Sascha’s discussion starter, repeated here so you know the context when you comment below:
We are very curious about your opinion. We don’t do bias your comment with specific question. So we ask in general: What are your thoughts about this format?
Please enjoy episode 3, hitting early this week because I’ll be traveling for a couple of days – and cannot muster the strength to wait until Friday to hit the “publish” button.
This chapter was harder to process. There seemed to be parts missing in the story. Maybe I’m too sloppy and haven’t noticed the missing pieces? Either way, something’s amiss in Range land. I also notice that the topics from chapter 1 were connected to the topics here somehow, but it’s just a hunch how things will fit together eventually. I’m looking forward to the next episodes, because I hope it “clicks” and I know how to split the sequence of notes in the structure note up into new Zettel notes and then work with the more powerful web of notes instead of this monolithic book overview.
Anyway, here’s a picture of the work-in-progress web of notes, starting from the book overview.
@diogenes, a student of philosophy, psychology and history in Vienna, asked some questions on the forum. I’d like to elaborate a bit on that. There will be specific use cases for the Zettelkasten Method. The method itself is a meta method of knowledge work. It translates what we understand of knowledge acquisition into basic actions that can be incorporated into any (knowledge work) workflow. Here, I will show a couple of applications to a more specific case.
Personal Cognitive Work Load
Even though I would consider myself as a relatively good student I often struggle to process all the stuff that i’ve learn about during the lectures + processing the stuff for an upcoming exam.
My maximal cognitive Work Load (=Capacity for Deep Work) seems to be only 3-4 Hours. But on most of the work-days the lectures alone require three hours of concentration. So therefore I run out of cognitive energy to process the stuff of previous lectures or stuff for an upcoming exam.
What are you’re experiences with your personal cognitive work load?
As a coach, I have one benchmark for my clients. Unless they are able to concentrate for six hours straight with an approximate 80–90% effort, I consider them to have attention and concentration issues. That means that there is work to do on this matter.
My personal capacity is, depending on the day, 6 to 10 hours at this level of effort. Of course, there are some days I cannot manifest this capacity fully. Christian’s capacity is, in my estimate, quite similar.
We have different bottlenecks in our attention system.1 My orienting system is my bottleneck. I am quite sensitive to specific kinds of distractions. I am not so distracted by other people. But I tend to fall into rabbit holes. Sometimes, in my deep work sessions, I start with a paper on brain lateralization but end with pages on dog training. Christian stays way more on point, though he doesn’t rise to the same intensity as I and his bottleneck is getting up to speed at all.
Concentration is a special form of attention which is governed by the brains own attention system. We all have different bottle necks.
Is it possible to expand the capacity for deep work? Peterson and Newton estimate the maximal duration of focused knowledge work at 3-4 Hours per Day.
I explicitly added the measure of intensity to my comment. I think Peterson is referring to really pushing oneself. That is a different story. Most deep work shouldn’t be done at a hundred percent effort.
If you train for weightlifting or powerlifting in a Russian Style workout, you accumulate high volume with a moderate intensity. You stay very calm and don’t hype yourself up before any lift. It is quite different from our western style of training. See the video below for your own amusement.
Having said that, there are many ways to increase the possible capacity for deep work. At the same time, you will decrease the drain on yourself if you don’t use up all your capacity. Some methods:
Mindfulness Meditation, besides its spiritual aim, is a training method for attention control. Mindfulness is a special state of attention, as there are many others. Start with 5 minutes in the morning and increase it to at least 20 minutes. You will see results after six to twelve months. Though it could be that you feel improvements much earlier because of additional acute effects.
Eat very clean, and rich in micronutrients. Eating brain is not only for zombies. Brain is very nutrient-dense and healthy. There is a simple reason for it: The brain needs a lot of nutrients. Therefore, it is nutrient rich. You doesn’t have to eat brain explicitly. But you concentration will improve if you switch from a pizza diet to a paleo-type diet. Eat fatty fish a couple of times a week. Consume foods like kale, berries and stinging nettles. And consider supplementing creatine and some adaptogens.
Do a combination of strength and endurance training. Both are needed for a healthy brain. Train daily, but briefly. A short 30–45min workout per day (as part of your morning routine) is sufficient. Mix in very light days (one day could be very slow jogging for 30 Minutes)
Engage in temperature stress. Cold training and sauna.
Break up your deep work with small breaks to shake up the tension. 3–5 minutes of movement every 40 minutes of work is good enough.
If you cannot concentrate on specific material, change the subject or the mode. If you wrote on your computer on psychology, switch do drawing a diagram on paper about some historical event.
Drink water!
Consume coffee three times a week, tops. It is a real mental drain.
Block everything not needed. You smartphone needs to be in another room. Switch off the door bell etc.
Cool down. After an exhausting deep work session you should go into nature. Take a walk in a park if you don’t have woods or true nature available. Just walk as long as you need to feel refreshed.
There are many lifestyle choices that matter. The brain is an organ. It needs to be healthy to be able to concentrate.
Should I not consider lectures as deep work and therefore save some concentration?
It depends on how you structure your studying. I wouldn’t do it. I personally had a very hard time to even stay awake during lectures. I think they are way too slow and not very engaging. I can listen to recorded lectures speeded up to 1.5x the original speed. To me, lectures are a drag and would cost me a lot of energy in a very inefficient way. Therefore, I didn’t engage a lot. Obviously, when I slept through them. :)
Structuring Deep Work-Units
As some of you may know, as a student you’re free to organize your time spent studying (I call it Deep Work-Units).
So therefore I would like to know how you organize your learn-sessions on a daily basis.
I had different schedules. Here is one example:
0600: Wake up, morning routine (meditation, mobility)
0700: Creative work like writing new stuff.
1100: Strength Training, eating, relaxing.
1400: Non-creative work like emails or appointments.
1800: Crossfit-Style Training.
1900: Dinner. Read till sleepy.
Would you recommend doing all your knowledge work in the morning in a four hour stretch (of course divided by short breaks) or would you recommend to do two hours in the morning and two hours in the afternoon/evening?
The latter. But aim for more work. Don’t accept those limits.
I have to admit that I’d like the idea of finish the knowledge work for the day in an four hour stretch in the morning but don’t know about the efficacy of this method.
It is not all about efficiency but also on motivation. It is the principle of front-loading. Here it is front-loading of the day. When you have done all the things you consider duty, the rest of the day will feel free and joyful. The same thing goes for the week. If you did most, or even all, of your duties in the beginning of the week you feel very light towards the end. Adopting this habit will make you feel you can get everything done, instead of being stuck in doubt if you will ever get anything done/instead of always thinking about what’s still left unfinished.
Structuring the Semester
Do you process the lectures immediately (on the same day or the day after) or do you wait until just before the exam to process the lectures?
Let’s say I didn’t sleep through the lecture. Let’s say it was a seminar or a recorded lecture that I listened at 1.5 times the normal speed while I am walking in the woods, sometimes stopping to make some notes.
In that case, I would process the notes twice. One time, on the same day to order them, rephrase the knowledge atoms and make an effort to write down possible open questions and connections to different topics.
Example: On a lecture on Freudian psychoanalysis, you can ask if there is differing relevancy in different countries for his work. Is there a difference between Anglo-Saxon and German ways to approach Freud’s work? How would a behaviorist tackle an issue differently? Do similarities exist?
The second time would be days or weeks later. Then I’d process the notes like any notes to integrate them into my Zettelkasten.
How do you take notes during the lectures? Do you just mark down possible connections for the zettelkasten, write down interesting informations or do you take notes at all?
I do drawings and key points. In lectures I tend to do more of engagement notes that notes I actually use. Engagement notes are those types of notes that you do to process the material at the moment but then won’t store them.
How to you process the lecture afterwards? Just processing your notes, processing the PowerPoint-Slides of the lectures and feed them in into the zettelkasten?
I have a problem with processing lectures to my Zettelkasten: The content you gather is what one person says another said. I always go to the primary source. So, I’d use the material that is produced during lectures in three ways:
I use engagement notes for better depth of processing.
I’d process them immediately after that. This increases depth of processing even further. (And in consequence recall).
Then I’d use them as a guide to primary sources to process them fully.
Christian’s Lament: My capacity to concentrate depends. During my favorite days, which are long, uninterrupted work-days, I dry up noticeably after about 5 hours of programming at around lunch time. After a break for exercise and, ideally, some food, I can easily put in another 3 hours. Took me a while to get there, though, and the years prior I was happy if I could squeeze 3–5 hours out of any given day in total. Back when I was going to uni, I was slogging through lecture-filled days most of the time. The first semester was the worst: everything was new, all the people were strangers, and I was attending classes for 2 majors at once. (Which was a bad idea.) It pushed me to stay awake during lectures, but I didn’t post-process much. I was just too happy to be done with the day, exhausted from all the new info (especially all the maths major courses!), and that was that. Most processing, if at all, I crammed into the mornings I had to myself when I didn’t have to commute to uni early. Not all was wasted, but neither did I preserve a lot for my future self. Then again, I learned how to read and how to learn effectively, got accustomed to the way academics write, including 18th century continental philosophers, and got introduced to interesting mental models like systems theory. I value all that, and it shapes my thinking. I’m happy I’m not 16 and stupid anymore. But boy am I curious what I’d be able to write today if had known the basic skills earlier in life, and then had the motivation in uni to actually adhere to all the meta-knowledge. :)
