Zettelkasten

  • Zettelkasten is a popular method among academics and writers. I am neither of those (at least as a profession).
  • I do however write for myself. With the breadth of topics and interests I have, it has been proven for many years (of my experience) that I cannot keep up with it.
  • The main audience I want to reach is my future self and possibly the few people who are interested in looking into my brain while I work with my garage door open.
  • Not all of this will have a end result of a piece of writing shipped. Some of these will become an art piece, a habit, or a dish; generally anything that is a part of my life.
  • In a more generalized sense, the main outcome of my Zettelkasten will be actions. From notes I take while I absorb various information, I aim to extract actions that I can take so that my act of reading doesn't stop at just reading. Not all reading should end up in something actionable, but I will carefully and actively curate what I absorb so that at some point in my knowledge work, it leads to an action.
    • This action in turn, could end up becoming an art piece, a habit, or a piece of writing.
    • It is then crucial for me to adapt other action-oriented methods such as GTD or PARA along with Zettelkasten.
      • One could say Zettelkasten implicitly is couple with the act of writing. This seems true. I am aiming to generalize this to my other interests incrementally.

Fleeting notes and literature notes

  • I take notes in a lot of places: my phone (a quick message to myself), on a piece of paper, a pocket notebook, etc.
  • Once they serve their purpose, I delete them. I don't think it's worth storing them in a central place.