§Note-writing systems

• Principles:
  • Evergreen note-writing as fundamental unit of knowledge work
  • “Better note-taking” misses the point; what matters is “better thinking”
  • Knowledge work should accrete
  • Note-writing practices are generally ineffective
  • Note-writing practices provide weak feedback
• Reading and note-writing
  • Write about what you read to internalize texts deeply
  • Evergreen note-writing helps reading efforts accumulate
    • Collecting material feels more useful than it usually is
  • Do your own thinking
    • Understanding requires effortful engagement
    • Writing forces sharper understanding
  • How to collect observations while reading
  • Literature notes are secondary and separate
  • How to process reading annotations into evergreen notes
  • Pocket memo pad to capture into writing inbox while out
  • A writing inbox for transient and incomplete notes
  • A reading inbox to capture possibly-useful references
  • Inboxes shouldn’t be split into multiple places
  • Beware automatic import into the reading inbox
  • Use phones to collect and triage, not (usually) to read
• Thinking and note-writing
  • Evergreen note-writing helps insight accumulate
  • Spaced repetition may be a helpful tool to incrementally develop inklings
  • Leaps of insight emerge from prior thought
  • Brainstorming may often substitute for missing insight accretion systems
  • Evergreen notes are a safe place to develop wild ideas
  • Evergreen notes can increase conversational bandwidth
  • Conversations incorporating multiple discussants’ evergreen notes may promote collaborative sense-making
• Writing and note-writing
  • Executable strategy for writing
  • Create speculative outlines while you write
  • Evergreen notes lower the emotional stakes in editing manuscripts
  • Evergreen notes permit smooth incremental progress in writing (“incremental writing”)
• Structure of the notes
  • Evergreen notes
  • Most people take only transient notes
  • Evergreen note maintenance approximates spaced repetition
  • Evergreen notes should be concept-oriented
  • Evergreen notes should be atomic
  • Evergreen note titles are like APIs
    • Prefer positive note titles to promote systematic theory
    • Prefer note titles with complete phrases to sharpen claims
  • Evergreen notes should be densely linked
  • Notes should surprise you
• associative structure in PKMs
  • Prefer associative ontologies to hierarchical taxonomies
  • Tags are an ineffective association structure
  • Indexed references vs. tags
• implications
• Relation to reference system
  • Creating hyperlinks to my reference archive
  • Advantages and disadvantages of using notes to form associations in content
• tools
  • Digital note-writing systems fixate on the presentation and manipulation of individual notes, mostly ignoring inter-note sense-making
  • the value of plaintext
  • plaintext IDs to link stuff
  • being the human connector in a system which has no app
• history / community
  • Zettelkasten
  • Luhmann
  • Christian and Sascha
  • How to Take Smart Notes - Ahrens

Executable strategy for writing

A naive writing process begins with a rough inkling about what one wants to write and a blank page. Progress from this point requires an enormous amount of activation energy and cognitive effort: there’s nothing external, so you must juggle all of the piece-to-be in your head.

By contrast, if you’ve already written lots of concept-oriented Evergreen notes around the topic, your task is more like editing than composition. You can make an outline by shuffling the note titles, write notes on any missing material, and edit them together into a narrative. In fact, because you can Create speculative outlines while you write, you might find that the first of these steps is already accomplished, too. And writing each note isn’t hard: Evergreen notes permit smooth incremental progress in writing (“incremental writing”).

Instead of having a task like “write an outline of the first chapter,” you have a task like “find notes which seem relevant.” Each step feels doable. This is an executable strategy (see Executable strategy). But beware—don’t let this strategy “poison” the initial note-writing process: Write notes for yourself by default, disregarding audience.

I describe two approaches here: an undirected version, in which writing projects emerge organically from daily work; and a directed version, in which you’re trying to write about something specific.

Undirected version:

1. Write durable notes continuously while reading and thinking. (Evergreen note-writing as fundamental unit of knowledge work)
2. Each time you add a note, add a link to it to an outline, creating one if necessary (Create speculative outlines while you write).
3. Eventually, you’ll feel excited about fleshing out one of those outlines. (Let ideas and beliefs emerge organically)
4. Write new notes to fill in missing pieces of the outline.
5. Concatenate all the note texts together to get an initial manuscript
6. Rewrite it.

Directed version:

1. Review notes related to your topic (and a step or two beyond those—Notes should surprise you)
2. Write an outline
3. Attach existing notes to each point in the outline; write new notes as needed.
4. Concatenate all the note texts together to get an initial manuscript
5. Rewrite it.

One other nice benefit of this approach: Evergreen notes lower the emotional stakes in editing manuscripts.

References

Ahrens, S. (2017). How to Take Smart Notes: One Simple Technique to Boost Writing, Learning and Thinking – for Students, Academics and Nonfiction Book Writers.

Preparing Fragments Helps You to Ease Into Writing • Zettelkasten Method

To see with clarity if your research backs up your text’s structure sufficiently, the next step is to assign notes from your Zettelkasten to the items of your outline. When an item of your outline seems to be neglected because you don’t have enough notes that fit, you can continue your research, focusing on the missing pieces. As soon as you’re confident you got enough coverage for a start, you string the notes’s contents together according to the outline. Thus you create the very first draft. That’s all it takes to move from a plan to outline to manuscript. Then you begin to re-write, organize the material and start to make the text coherent.

There’s no magic involved in writing texts with the help of a well-fed Zettelkasten. To compile a first draft you put the contents of selected notes at the appropriate places in the outline, putting meat on the bones of your text’s skeleton. That’s how a Zettelkasten helps you complete your first draft.