Zettelkasten

Next Book: The Deep Knowledge Work Practice

The next book for the Zettelkasten project is The Deep Knowledge Work Practice. While the book The Zettelkasten Method is a purely technical book on the Zettelkasten Method, The Deep Knowledge Work Practice is all about implementing knowledge work into your life.

Photo by NWimagesbySabrinaE on Pixabay

Who Is This Book For?

This book is about building a complete way of engaging with knowledge. So, this book is for you if you want to build a coherent system of knowledge work instead of accumulating disjointed practices. This book is also for you if you want to move one step towards depth and meaning. You will find methods and techniques, but the book is not a collection of tools, techniques, and hacks.

What Is in the Book?

  • Foundations. The concept of the deep knowledge work practice is somewhat uncommon. So I will use a classical structure of first laying out the foundations.
    • What is a deep knowledge work practice? We attend to the foundational concepts: knowledge, depth, and practice.
    • Why develop a deep work practice? We ask what the benefits are of such an approach to knowledge. We won’t apply a narrow, purely utilitarian lens. We will also explore the aesthetics and existential layer of such a practice.
    • The psychological challenges of a deep knowledge work practice. Working with knowledge is very different from working with material like wood or stone. Knowledge workers have a serious psychological challenge, as knowledge work is not natural in the least. There are always costs to the wildness of being captured in the zoo. But we will also discuss issues like the perfectionist trap.
  • Disciplines of a Deep Knowledge Work Practice.
    • The concept of disciplines. I will take great inspiration from the book “Celebration of Discipline” by Richard Foster. I look forward to this section because it allows me to apply an approach to concept recycling that I wanted to use in an essay for a philosophy seminar that I wasn’t allowed to write. (I wanted to use the information concept of Luhmann to solve a theoretical issue of the book “Evolution in Four Dimensions” by Jablonka/Lamb.)
    • Resource Management. Typically, self-organization is thought of as mainly organizing your time. However, energy and attention are critical resources for knowledge work as well. So, we’ll include these to arrive at a broader approach to self-organization.
    • Reading. Reading is special. Learning to read rewires the brain in a fairly comprehensive way. Reading books is a special practice that is different from reading shorter content. While I will provide some reading techniques, I like to present a specific approach to reading. I think of books and other sources as fuel. In today’s age, the ability to read many books per year seems to be the way to think about reading. But are we talking about reading Tolstoy and Nietzsche, or run-of-the-mill personal development slop? We will rediscover reading as both an activity measured in time and in amount.
    • Thinking.
      • Mindscape and the thinking medium. Thinking isn’t an activity that is only related to the content of our mind. Our physical environment, writing, our emotional state—there are a lot of things that serve as the platform and also the medium of our thinking.
      • Writing to think. We will think about free writing methods like journaling, but also note-taking, writing mini-essays, and outlining. We will develop a methodology for writing to think. The goal is to structure our writing to think better, or just differently. We ask whether free writing techniques are actually needed for our specific case. But we will also explore how the various methods synergize.
      • Contemplation. This might be the purest section on thinking. A rare instance of a scheduled thinking session is Cal Newport’s productive meditation walks. Once, deliberately thinking about an issue was a standard scholarly practice. We will rediscover this practice and explore the benefits and synergies with other disciplines to evaluate the benefits of “just” thinking.
    • Writing to communicate. All the other disciplines are about us as thinkers. This discipline is about our relationship to others. The main topic of this subsection is how to integrate writing to communicate with the other practices. It appears to me that writers focus heavily on writing to communicate and think as much as needed to finish the writing piece (or the YouTube video). So, this chapter is purely for writers (or creators). Those who don’t want to publish will use the material of this chapter as yet another chance to think more deeply instead of publishing.
    • Building repositories. There is a reason that the Zettelkasten Method gained its fame. The activity of storing is a highly intriguing practice for us people. The ability to store value is one of the major focal points of human history. Storing reputation, storing food, storing money, storing energy, storing knowledge—storing is special. What and how to store as a knowledge worker will be a fun topic. One subsection is about building a library.
    • Drilling. We will engage with topics like card learning and the memory palace. These are practices of methodologically re-engaging with what we learned but feel that we need to increase the availability in our minds.
  • The Knowledge Work Assembly Line. The disciplines of deep knowledge work practice think about knowledge work as an ongoing activity with no beginning and no end. The knowledge work assembly line will take a purely materialistic view of knowledge work. We will use tools from entrepreneurship to add a pragmatic view of knowledge work, which is rarely done. As knowledge workers, we tend to develop too much intellectualism, which becomes both a practical and a spiritual problem. This chapter aims to offer practical value, but indirectly, through reflection, spiritual value to the knowledge worker as well.
  • Designing your deep knowledge work practice. We will explore how to plan individual sessions, but also how to develop a weekly schedule to include all deep knowledge work disciplines in a structure that makes sense.
  • Lifestyle Design for Deep Knowledge Work. A deep knowledge work practice rests on our ability to implement the various disciplines. The disciplines are not modules that we can plug and unplug from a machine. They are habits to develop and expressions of our deep beliefs. But we will also talk about auxiliary practices like exercise and diet. Our mind has its home base in our brains. Our brain is an organ that needs nutrients and healthy stimuli. Our brain sits in a body that needs to be healthy to support what we ask our brains to do.
  • Utilities. We will talk about notebooks, pencils, desks etc.

Why I Write This Book

The motivation is quite similar to my third book Conduct of Life: Reflections and Analysis (only available in German: Lebenswandel – Reflexion und Analyse). There is a lot of material out there for parts of one’s life. The gap is a unifying system that brings everything together. The third book works as a foundational work, similar to Luhmann’s “Social Systems”, that opens the door to my thinking.

Once, my life was divided into two areas of responsibility: exemplifying an extreme version of my theory of the conduct of life (extreme because I didn’t have to compromise at all) and a deep knowledge-work practice. I leaned heavily into knowledge creation and didn’t care about publishing my work, which showed in my publication record.

A central pillar of my work is the meaning principle of harmony. Imagine two people who aim to jog once per day. Clara will do it whenever they see fit. Clark builds a habit of running in the morning. Imagine a run will provide +1 to health. Both accomplish this goal. But only Clark will reap the benefits of building a habit. Habits are little decision-making engines. Building a habit means building a machine in your mind that increasingly makes the decision for you. Clark will run once per day, but at some point doesn’t need to make a decision. This frees up mental energy you can use elsewhere in life. So, building the habit hits more birds with one stone. Habit building balances working on health with the constraints of the human mind.

Originally, I focused on health, fitness, and meaning. Now, I will apply the underlying principles to knowledge work. I aim to provide a foundational platform for knowledge work.

Learn More

If you are interested and don’t want to wait until the book is published, you have the following options:

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  2. Become a member of the forum.
  3. Write me an email: sascha@zettelkasten.de