My Notetaking System

Article Link: https://zettelkasten.de/posts/collectors-fallacy/

• I collect things mainly because of loss aversion I don’t want to potentially lose some knowledge I find meaningful
  
• merging content, information, ideas, and thoughts and processing it is what integrates knowledge into our brain connecting ideas is powerful
  
• bookmarking is great for navigation when you want to revisit something but is NOT good for learning photocopying items doesn’t help with learning
  
• I don’t really get the reward like these doves. For me it’s just an unnecessary step.
  
• I don’t think reading is pointless without note taking. It still helps us but the portion of information we absorb is a lot less.
  
• first step to conquering collectors fallacy is to realize that collecting notes does not increase knowledge
  
• brain is better with small cycles of info
  

Books can give you the motivation to do something, but ultimately you have to do that thing

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V-UvSKe8jW4
You don’t remember what you just read/watch/listen to, even if it’s only what resonates and what could be useful
It happens when I finish chapters of books, episodes of television, movies, podcasts, articles… you name it.
You feel like you know something without actually knowing it.

But thanks to content overload from the internet, we’re constantly bombarded with new information from various sources. It’s difficult for us to retain knowledge when we’re constantly acquiring new knowledge. The solution to this problem is simple—regularly review past concepts.

I don’t think the solution is as simple as “regularly review past concepts”. Reviewing useless information is a waste of time, so we first need to develop skills of discernment to evaluate and be more selective of what information to turn into knowledge.
Front-End Discernment or “reducing the input”
Fighting Infomania: Why 80% of Your Reading is a Waste of Time argues that most of what we read is of low quality, yet we’ve acquired a habit of hoarding information as “just in case” knowledge, when this information can easily be looked up “just in time” as-needed. “If it doesn’t answer a specific question you’re currently asking, cover philosophical knowledge, or entertain you, then don’t read it.”
Back-End Discernment or “pruning the irrelevant”
Further, as you’re reading a longer body of text, it’s often difficult to know what knowledge/concepts are relevant/important/worth while. You likely need to actively create separate, atomic, concept notes and link these concepts together and with existing knowledge while working through a text.
At the end, you can visualize the relationships and potentially delete disjointed islands of knowledge that didn’t prove relevant.

https://www.reddit.com/r/RoamResearch/comments/igfnkv/roam_workflow/ I have
Morning Pages with some prompts to do some writing in the morning, daily mantras
with quotes .o.remind myself each day, attributes for habit tracking, a lookback
to my dai.y note from 1 week ago, 4 weeks ago, 12 weeks ago, and 1 year ago,
then I plop .nything there that I might stage for later in my writing inbox (Shu
Omi has some videos about this), meeting notes, etc.

Meditate and take a recorder so that you record by audio

Hi! I’m Andy Matuschak. You’ve stumbled upon my working notes. They’re kind of strange, so some context might help.

These notes are mostly written for myself: they’re roughly my thinking environment (Evergreen notes; My morning writing practice). But I’m sharing them publicly as an experiment (Work with the garage door up). If a note seems confusing or under-explained, it’s probably because I didn’t write it for you! Sorry—that’s sort of an essential tension of this experiment (Write notes for yourself by default, disregarding audience).

For now, there’s no index or navigational aids: you’ll need to follow a link to some starting point. You might be interested in §What’s top of mind.

Any action can be practiced as an art, as a craft, or as drudgery.

“We have no art. Everything we do is art.” We can lead an active life in the world without being entangled in scripts or rigid expectations: doing without being too attached to the outcome, because the doing is its own outcome.

It is well known that one can jump-start the creative process by automatic writing, just letting words floow without censoring them or judging them.

pg150-

https://bulletjournal.com/
Closely related to org-mode, you define a list of types of bullets (TODOs, scheduled, etc, whatever you want)

https://mariepoulin.com/blog/notion-template-the-all-in-one-personal-hq/
https://mariepoulin.com/
https://notionmastery.com/

https://www.reddit.com/r/Python/comments/k57bwy/automate_notion_using_python/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oA1faXVOx5Y&list=PLkHkG0VxT2WgJhdXLh_lvHNZQVDH5YvE0&index=7

Integrated Android+emacs+ripgrep
https://beepb00p.xyz/pkm-search.html

https://nesslabs.com/roam-research

http://jeffsutherland.org/oopsla2000/mccarthy/mccarthy.htm

https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1384157714608050179.html
Personal knowledge management is really about the process of making sense of the world.

http://rtalbert.org/my-gtd-reboot-part-1-rethinking-the-system/

1. I had built a great system for organizing my data about actions to take so that I can search and slice through those data any time, any place to find the right set of actions to consider. But knowing what to do is one thing and doing them is another.
   
2. I’m struggling with GTD because how I’m using it is not simple enough
   
3. what makes GTD so useful and so successful is that it has very little in the way of “rules” and the expectation is that people will remix and adapt the general idea of GTD to fit their situations — and that this will evolve over time with the person.
   

https://medium.com/the-innovation/building-a-second-brain-revisited-week-i-f9d3be72e966

Tiago gets under your skin. I don’t know how I can claim that a productivity system is erotic, but BASB is a turn on.

Tiago teaching his system of personal knowledge management is downright sexy. It’s internal high drama, you want more, and then more.

https://medium.com/the-innovation/building-a-second-brain-revisited-week-2-db5ee6cbbf42

• Why Todo.txt?
  Fast, Flexible, Available (Cross-platform, 100% uptime), Dependable (software must be stable)
  Freedom of workflow/philosophy
  No vendor lock-in
  Text file forces simplicity → more focus on the actual tasks
  Ubiquity of text editors
  You own your to-do list (backup, sync, version, archive, delete, still readable 10 years from now)
  Small files means working with them is fast
  Greater community
  
• How I Organize My Todo.txt File
  Projects, Priorities and Contexts (~tags)
  
  0. Rule #0: My to-do list is only going to contain tasks I plan to do in the near future.
     
  1. Rule #1: All my tasks are tagged with a project.
     
  2. Rule #2: Use only the top few priorities, A-D, and make them mean something specific and time-based.
     
     1. The task I am working on now. My current or next action. Ideally, I will always have only one task in category A. Why do I bother with this? I get interrupted at work and have to return to what I was working on, sometimes minutes or hours later. Having my current action split out and at the top of my to-do list helps me get back on track more quickly.
        
     2. Tasks that I plan to do today.
        
     3. Tasks that I plan to do this week.
        
     4. Tasks reserved for next week. I tend to use this category only on Fridays, and even then almost never use it.
        
     5. E-Z: I don’t use them at all. All my other tasks are uncategorized. Uncategorized tasks are typically new or low-priority tasks. I prioritize them before working on them.
        
  3. Rule #3: I don’t need contexts at work so I only rarely use them.
     
  4. Rule #4: Don’t use due dates unless absolutely necessary.
     
• Due Dates and Todo.txt
  
  • Why does the Todo.txt spec not contain due dates?
    Todo.txt emphasizes priorities over due dates. When a task is due matters, but when you are going to do it matters a lot more.
    

  • Don’t cram the whole future into your task list
    

    • Things that are due more than a couple days out are:
      
      • often too far in the future to worry about today
        
      • projects, not tasks
        
      • should probably be written down in calendar entries, notes, or lists and project plans outside of Todo.txt
        

    If you cram the whole known future into your Todo.txt file, all those future items will just get in your way when trying to figure out your next action.
    Everything on your to-do list should be done as soon as possible
    

  • Lots of overdue tasks are demotivating
    
• Accountability: Todo.txt and Done.txt
  
  • Archiving tasks
    Archiving tasks is useful because it gets your completed to-do items out of your way, which keeps your todo.txt file small, clean, and full of only relevant items
    If you archive regularly, your done.txt file is going to be a file full of lines like those, all with a date and tagged with whatever projects, contexts, or what have you that you recorded in todo.txt. It is a dated, easily searchable log of all your recorded activities. You never have to lose track of the old stuff when you make room for the new stuff
    
  • Having an archive allows you to prove accountability
    Having a searchable, dated record of everything I’ve done allows me to prove my accountability at work, which is important to me because I bill my time to various clients on various projects, and everybody wants to justify their consulting expenses from time to time.
    It provides great comfort to know that I can tell my clients exactly when I completed a deliverable, or exactly what I was working on in a given period or on a given day. Hardly anyone can do that, and, eventually, I’ll be able to do that for tasks further back than just about anyone on my team .
    

• Why PlainText For Notes?
  Writing in plaintext focuses you on content and structure, and frees your mind from formatting decisions.
  

  • My offline brain
    I use my computer as my “offline brain”; it is my long-term memory, and sometimes my short-term memory as well
    

    • Text notes provide are the sweet spot between overorganization and chaos
      

    The problem with notes is that, if you don’t organize them, they end up a jumbled mess in which you can’t find anything. If you do organize them, you may spend too much time dragging and dropping them into folders, or put yourself in time-wasting situations where you don’t know how to classify a note. In the end, a simple, consistent system works best, provided you have full-text searching to use along with it.
    

  • Why plaintext?
    The short answer: I am not a visual thinker, and I can type really fast.
    The long answer: Plaintext is flexible, fully searchable, allows you to use nice text editors and other tools, and doesn’t require you to give up as much as you might think.
    
    • Reasons to use plaintext for notes
      
      • Speed
        
        • I can type fast (vs. handwriting).
          
        • The entire writing process is often keyboard-centric (and therefore fast) rather than requiring frequent mousing (which is slower).
          
        • No fancy graphics, animations, or controls are necessary to write plaintext.
          
      • Simplicity
        
        • Plaintext forces you to separate formatting from content, which allows you to focus better on the content.
          
        • I can write using the most readable and pleasing fonts on my screen, regardless of what the final document is going to look like.
          
        • It avoids the copy-paste-reformat problems in Word and rich-text editors.
          
        • You can use Markdown syntax (or any other, or none) to structure your content and indicate simple formatting.
          
      • Flexibility
        
        • Plaintext is easily searchable by just about any software on the planet.
          
        • Plaintext is easily synced across devices, via Dropbox or other services.
          
        • There is no proprietary format lock-in. You will always be able to open your files, even years later.
          
        • Plaintext can be accessed online or offline.
          
        • It can be read and written to cross-platform. You may not need to worry about Linux
          
        • You have a wide choice of text editors, some of which are geared expressly toward writers.
          
        • Version control (revision history) of plaintext files, and extracting the differences (diffs) between versions, has been possible almost as long as computers have been around
          
• Why Markdown for Drafts?
  
  • Microsoft Word is the worst offender, in my opinion. My biggest problems with it are as follows:
    It has too many features, and some of those features get in the way of productive writing. It’s implementation of Styles is frustrating; when you paste text from another app into Word, Word tries to preserve its original formatting, which I almost never want to do. Even when I don’t do that.
    Working with lists and multi-level outlines is painful, both due to poor list-numbering logic and poor Styles support. I often can’t get a list to look the way I want it to, and it is even worse if you paste something in from outside of Word into a list.
    It crashes more than it should (which is never, ever, ever). You don’t lose your work most of the time, but the “auto recover” feature makes you feel like you did and makes it confusing as to which version of your file you should keep.
    
• Work Journal
  
  • Why keep a work journal?
    Why should you be any different? Work like a scientist. Write things down.
    It helps you think, it records your course of action, and having those thoughts and actions written down may be useful if a course correction is needed down the line.
    Beyond being a record of activities and intentions, a journal is is also a powerful tool for providing focus. It provides you a safe space to type things out while you start to gather your thoughts about them. Doing so encourages planning, strategizing, and forward thinking. Writing short, simple journal entries each day helps me keep my eyes on the big picture things, and encourages me to add perspective to my activities and to-dos that a task list never could.
    
  • What is a work journal?
    A work journal is a private, informal way to structure your thoughts and plan for the day, week, or month ahead. I have kept them, on and off, for years
    
• Activity Log
  An activity log is a daily or even hourly summary of all your work accomplishments. It is the flip side of a journal. Instead of being forward looking, it is backward looking.
  An activity log can be useful to sum up your work for the day, and to read in the morning (as you are updating your journal) to pick things up where you left them. This summing up is most useful if you don’t keep a task list
  
• Standing Lists for GTD or Other Organizational Systems
  

• @Drafts Folder for Plaintext Drafts and Notes
  

  • One root folder
    

  All my drafts, which include my work journal, standing lists and other files, and even my todo.txt files, are in one folder: “@Drafts”. I don’t use subfolders to categorize my drafts at all. The reason: I never want to have to think about where to save a file, or to search all over on my system for where my writing is
  

• File Folder Structure for Life
  
• Windows Explorer Sidebar
  
• Keyboard Shortcuts
  

• Email
  
• Calendar
  
• Password Manager
  
• Autocorrection and Text Expansion
  
• Hardware
  

http://lbrandy.com/blog/2009/12/inspiration-vs-distraction/
Pros of project hopping
Most projects get exactly one burst of effort before permanent abandonment. Some problems though, I find myself coming back to time and again. I view this particular mechanism as healthy. It’s a natural selection of my ideas. May the fittest survive. This is why I don’t really feel guilty for dropping yet-another half-started project and starting something new. If the idea survives a few months off, it’s probably worth keeping. If it doesn’t, so be it.

https://twitter.com/gwatsky/status/1139251118091804672

always work on two projects at once. that way you can procrastinate on project A by messing around on project B, and when you get tired of project B you can waste time by working on project A. you will be twice as productive while doing nothing but procrastinate

https://quoteinvestigator.com/2011/05/13/einstein-simple/

Everything should be as simple as it can be, but not simpler

input

information, patterns received from your senses

output

motor actions (that’s why GTD next action works)

PARA VI

Sometimes hooks are dependencies instead of notifications (check everything that depends on your credit card number when you’re changing it)
Spatial/logical hooks vs temporal hooks (notifications)

……→Action…………. ….→Action…………..
.. .. ……… …..
. ↓ .. ↓
. Write it down Trigger Reflect
. . ↑ ..
. .. .. ….
……Notification … ……….Write it down←……..
retrieval ←…..

The Heart is the Bottleneck

http://www.gnu.org/software/gnowsys/

https://www.metastudio.org/welcome/

https://gitlab.com/gnowledge/gstudio/-/tree/master

https://gitlab.com/gnowledge/gstudio

https://www.roambrain.com/i-tried-to-build-a-zettelkasten-following-andy-matuschaks-notes-and-now-i-have-this-weird-thing/

https://www.roambrain.com/the-power-of-roaman-journaling/

https://www.roambrain.com/getting-started-with-algorithms-of-thought/

https://www.roambrain.com/let-the-kids-roam/

https://www.roambrain.com/finding-patterns-in-the-past-using-roam-as-a-self-therapy-tool/

https://www.roampublic.com/non-fiction-other-texts/
Texts captured in a roam

https://fortelabs.co/blog/knowledge-building-blocks-the-new-meaning-of-notes/
standarization
Once a piece of information has been interpreted through your lens, curated according to your taste, translated into your own words, or drawn from your life experience, and stored somewhere outside your head, then it’s a note.
Unlike a long, formal document, a note is discrete - it makes a single point, comes from a single source, or serves a single purpose. This gives each note clear edges and makes it easy to directly compare and contrast with other notes.
Like a LEGO block, a knowledge building block stands on its own and has intrinsic value. Yet each block can also be combined with others into greater works - a report, an essay, a website, or a video for example.
And just like LEGOs, these building blocks are reusable. You only need to put in the effort to create a note once, and then it can be mixed and matched with other notes again and again for any kind of project you work on, now or in the future.

https://fortelabs.co/blog/gtd-x-pkm/
answers to the question: why combine them?

https://fortelabs.co/blog/a-conversation-with-david-allen-on-quantifying-productivity/
there haven’t been a lot of people that I’ve run across who caught sort of the subtlety of essentially, the art of work. That people just work, but they don’t realize that it’s an art, an art form.
Tiago mentions Design Thinking
Design Thinking → BASB, PARA
System Thinking → PPV

https://fortelabs.co/blog/the-modern-swipe-file/
Put EVERYTING on your second brain. List of things you may put on it

https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2019/07/11/pleasure-as-an-organizing-principle/
Trick yourself into doing something, using intrinsic motivation. Find something you enjoy doing in that task
Atomic Habits does this very well

https://sedatesnail.blogspot.com/2019/08/pleasure-as-organizing-principle.html?m=1

https://karl-voit.at/2020/06/14/Zettelkasten-concerns/

Para disfrutar los beneficios de tener un estándar de notas, TODAS tienen que seguir un estándar. Un heading por link.

Hasta que no escribes un resumen, no sabes si la nota es buena o no
http://dansheffler.com/blog/2014-07-21-two-goals-of-note-taking/

Sólo linkar con el contexto de la nota en la que pones en link y hacia la que
linkas Cerverza -> Favorita -> Mahou En Cerveza_Favorita.org tienes puesta que
tu cerveza favorita es [ [ Mahou ] ]
En Cerveza.org NO puedes poner que tu cerveza favorita sea Mahou, sino sólo un link a [ [ Cerveza favorita ] ]
Analogías con

• Small files for Zettelkasten, atomic ideas, «few internal links»
  
• Big files for managing a project, «a lot of internal links»