Luhmann's Zettelkasten

Luhmann's Zettelkasten
emvi.com

They've been submitted several times on HN, though usually to little discussion: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

Among the more active mentions, a submission of mine a couple of months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21208196

I'd also recommend "How to organize personal knowledge", an "Ask HN" with 220 replies: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17892731

There are also index cards generally: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

And Pile of Index Cards (POIC): https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

And of course, the digital version, Hypercard: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

I've recently discovered Paul Otlet's work -- among his creations was the notion of "documentation", a term he invented ~1925. He'd also compiled a collection of over 15 million index cards, the Mundaenium. Recent submission of mine: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22043441

I'd count bullet journals as closely related:

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

See: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11856987 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18769286 especially.

I've been wrestling with how to make use of a research journal of sorts, adopting some of the concepts from a bullet journal, but also the flexibility of index cards, while leveraging the benefits and capabilities of a bound paper codex. I'm calling this a BOTI Journal, for "best of the interval" (week, month, year...). It's something of a collection of paper-based round-robin databases (a ring or circular buffer), where I note the most significant elements enountered in a period of time, and periodically roll these up to a longer-term aggregate. This gives time-ordering but also an aggregation function.

Things tracked include various documents (expansively defined as per Otlet as articles, books, Web pages, audio and video recordings, images, etc.), authors, concepts, journals, etc.

After a year, or several years, I should have a well curated set of most-useful / most insightful references over the period, a notion I've been frustrated in my inability to track over the past few years.

More generally, the notion of a rotating database file seems hugely useful, see the 43 folders "tickler file" method from Getting Things Done: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

(Searching "43 folders" itself tends to capture many distantly-related links to the website of the same name.) I've newly embarked on this, and am interested to see how it goes.

There are also other pages interspersed, concepts, ideas, themes, outlines of cataloguing systems (Dewey, LoCCS, Otlet's Decimal Notation, etc.)

I'm discovering that my recent thought that a circular file format ought to exist and be used by ToDo / scheduling systems ... has been proposed by others:

https://medium.com/@criticalmind/gtd-todo-tickler-proposal-f...

Does anyone have any good examples they've seen?

https://www.amazon.com/How-Take-Smart-Notes-Nonfiction/dp/15...