The process of picking a topic and finding supporting research is a trap. At the best you engage in a high degree of confirmation bias, seeing only the information that supports your premise. I remember in college many times writing a paper only to find near the end that the research was pointing in a…
Niklas Luhmann observes that in order to think in any constructive way he must write down his thoughts. This seems to be one of the main purposes of his Zettelkasten note-taking system – capturing thoughts and refine them by writing them down, reflecting on them, changing them. In addition to capturing thoughts in his notes,…
Niklas Luhmann, emphasizing his notion that the Zettelkasten is a communication partner, stressed that links between notes should point to something you might not have thought of on your own. He talks about drawing on the rich network of ideas in the Zettelkasten to accomplish this. He also usese terms like accidental and serendiptiy. The…
For some time now I’ve been trying to understand how architect Christopher Alexander’s idea of 15 structure preserving transformations might apply to systems outside of physical architecture. Alexander himself noted that his overarching theory about form and life would apply to all kinds of structures. You can strengthen the whole by systematically strengthening its component…
Niklas Luhmann talked about his box full of notes as if it was a flesh and blood research partner. He could question his notes and they would give him insightful, sometimes surprising answers. Not only did Luhmann talk about the notes as if they were a partner, sometimes he talked about them having a quality…
I wrote in my previous post that Tools for Thought Need a Purpose, otherwise you end up a slave to your note system, whether it’s a Zettelkasten or a collection of Evergreen Notes, creating an endless hoard of ideas because why else do you have a PKM system in the first place? Instead you need…
I’ve read a number of posts recently questioning the whole idea of Personal Knowledge Management. These folks have tried a number of different tools and approaches and always seem to arrive at the same result – it’s a ton of work with little or no ROI. Without exception the writers say “I did all this…
I’ve never been very disciplined about tagging notes or documents. But as I’m working on improving my zettelkasten knowledge base I decided to give tagging another go. So I quickly came up with a list of logical keywords and added an octothorp (#) to make them into hashtags because…why not? Every major social media platform…
