Main Area and Open Discussion > General Software Discussion

I'm thinking of going primitive, with discursion into zettelkasten

<< < (77/244) > >>

Dormouse:
Luhmann sat down for two hours in the evening.  Matuschak has two hours at 11 am. I'm just not that disciplined and neither do I have that kind of timetable. Matuschak takes some of these ideas from Christian at zettelkasten.de, so I assume he does too.

OTOH, I notice that they take many ephemeral notes they have to process later. I'm lucky in having an excellent memory, and automatically remember much of what they record.

I notice that all three use pen and paper for this initial collection. I agree at times that typing interrupts thinking where writing doesn't,  which is why I buy phones and tablets with good pen functions. Some things I write earlier rather than later,  but I doubt I will ever be able to make notes in book margins as Matuschak does: the irritation of disrupted reading from underlining, highlighting and comments in secondhand books meant I have a total antipathy to doing it myself - feels disrespectful to the books and possible future readers. Can't see myself overcoming that, even if I recognise the efficiency.  At least one member of my family works like that.

Christian hoards, Andy dumps - but both make sure that they have a working inbox that empties as well as fills. iirc they both conceptually use GTD (I rapidly found that system didn't work for me). I notice that Roam is built around forward and backward links and that the waiting list questionnaire mentions GTD, zettelkasten and theories of everything. Seems to be a semi-official zettelkasten system.

Dormouse:
I do recognise a huge amount of excitement about all of these, and two are still effectively in beta. Masses of plugins being written.
I'm a long way down the Roam waiting list and was tired when I installed Obsidian. Notion doesn't seem to have as smooth a workflow as I expected,  but that probably just means I need to learn it better.  Trello seemed more intuitive, but is at the stage of minor tweaks and additions. Obsidian has its development plan on Trello. All have kanban options.

Roam and Obsidian seem to be the most direct competitors.

I doubt if any would exist without plaintext.

I suspect that Big Tech is already following progress with an eye to developing their own or buying one out. Apple would want to take it behind their wall,  Google would want to make it work with their other research products or incorporate it totally. Is it only Microsoft that have any track record in keeping the independent development community? I'm sure they all know that at this stage  the communities need freedom to develop and would be inhibited by any takeover,  so I doubt one will happen soon.

Dormouse:
One of the reasons I'm interested is that I'm very aware that my front end is deficient, especially since the android switch.
I see that they are all grappling with the lack of common instructions and sometimes with sufficient extensions. Obsidian, according to latest discord posts, suggests that they use HyperMD extension of code mirror; alternatively commonmark with a few extras. Development in general would I'm sure be faster if there were a common and sufficient standard.
All the community needs to do is avoid conflicting instructions and have a default acceptance of the need for any extensions proposed (though reserving the ability to change or refine the proposed commands).

I know it won't happen but as a potential user, it's very annoying.

Dormouse:
Everyone involved in these projects and zettelkasten seems to describe themselves as knowledge workers and what they do as knowledge work. Despite a mass of evidence that could be taken to the contrary, I would never describe myself as a knowledge worker. And I actually believe it would misdescribe what I do.

I have an excellent memory over a day/week/month but I have trained myself to progressively bury the detail. When the detail is buried, I retain associations and possibilities in an ever-flowing probability matrix. Useless at University Challenge,  always win at Who Wants To Be A Millionaire. This is a normal process, but many, or most, have tried to train themselves to retain detail when I have gone in the opposite direction. Some people with extreme Aspergers have a natural tendency to remember detail and work with details, but have very fixed associations, with certainties rather than probabilities. There are strengths to both approaches.

So back to knowledge work. I don't want to have a system that is detail oriented, though many people may. I don't need a system that will add flexibility although I do want one that supports it. I want a system that will store pointers to the detail.

Which brings me to the issue of tags and links. Links are always fixed and hard, even if a link network has a degree of fluidity. Tags are often described as fixed categories - but ad hoc tags can be regarded as a set of fuzzy associations. Ideally,  I believe, links should be variable in strength.

Everything depends on who is using it and how it is used.

Dormouse:
I'm visualising the input system as being like the system for a watermill.  The need is to get useful work out of a very large water flow that's variable in volume and speed. So you cut a side channel,  usually designed with an easy gradient at the beginning, which will eventually return to the river. There will be a grill, or grills, to remove rubbish. A side channel off that, again with a filter, which will go to the mill. A large pool to hold water as a reserve against a low flow in the river. A small pool ready for immediate use. A sluice with sluice gates so that the wheel receives the exact amount of water needed to drive the machinery in use at the time.

So lots of stuff is seen or read but never enters the system. There's a holding area with stuff that may never be processed (searchable, but not tagged or processed). An inbox ready for processing (any excess being returned to the reserve pool or archive). The processed stuff leaves the wheel tagged, and maybe linked, joining the central zettelkasten source archive. The machinery produces proper usable notes suitable for building who-knows-whats.

So for names:
Hoard Archive (the large reserve pool)
Inbox Vestibule (small pool ready to power processing)
Sources Library (archive that's been processed in the production of Notes)
Scriptorium (notes and all other unpublished material I have written myself,  essentially work in progress at all stages)
Reading Room (my published work)
Attics (processed items not considered worth keeping in Library -  I realised that simply putting them in Archive (unprocessed) or throwing them away completely might mean that they were processed again in future because they give initial impression of being interesting).
Chapter House - for anything requiring action: todo lists, emails etc.

Andy and Christian each have complex systems of initial scribbles which they sort into piles with each pile as a collection being capable of producing a single Note. I may do less scribbling.

Navigation

[0] Message Index

[#] Next page

[*] Previous page