My Second Brain – Zettelkasten

I’ve gone through phases of intense note taking and planning around organization.

At the end of the day, I find the overhead of highly structured notes gets in my way and distracts me from actually accomplishing anything using the notes. Obviously these systems work for some people! But I’ve found detailed engineering of knowledge doesn’t work for me...

What does work is a stripped down pair of tools: a) an inbox for capturing in-the-moment, which can be anything (a dedicated page in a notes app, my email inbox, a piece of paper); and b) a medium term “filing cabinet” for storing info for later (these days I use notion).

These let me not lose an idea, and reference it later. The key is having one default place to dump everything.

Yeah I'm kinda surprised. Most people in the hacker/maker community I know are pretty disorganised like myself.. I know for me this kind of thing will never fly, it requires too much dedication. In this sense I'm not surprised it came from Germany as they love formalising things. It's really in their nature and I imagine this is also why they're so good at technological things.

But for me it'll never work, I know I'll start on it and then I have a rush project where I don't have time to keep the docs up to date and then I'll abandon it altogether :) I'm the kind of guy who fills up their desktop with everything they're working on and when it ends up being full just moves it to a folder "Old Desktop" (which is in fact a chain of "Even Older Desktop" folders :) :) :) ). Somehow it seems to work for me though, it really surprises me how I can find stuff back from 10 years ago just by seeing the icons of stuff I worked on around the time. And it's really zero effort which I like.

And really, I like relying on my memory.. If I don't remember something maybe it wasn't worth remembering. And discovering it once more may lead to other interesting discoveries.

But I'm glad it helps others forward in their goals! I didn't expect it at all though.

I use a rough zettel method as well. I agree about the place to dump everything being the key. Too much structure gets in my way too, but the process of condensing and refining my notes into my zettel has been where some of my best ideas and insights have come when learning and/or creating and designing.

That’s an important point!

I mostly just dump in ‘facts’—my frequent flyer number, gift ideas, recipes. It’s just an external drive for my memory...

But the active process of reflection and editing and synthesis based on actual notes...I completely miss out on that. It’s not a piece of tech, so much as a process.

It reminds me of the Cornell notes system [1]: take raw notes in the moment, then condense and summarize them later. Reviewing and refining force you to internalize the content, not just record it.

[1] http://lsc.cornell.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/10/Cornell-No...

It's just sequences of notes and then inserting certain notes into other sequences. The "heavyweight" part of it disappears when you're using software which handles all this in the background.

The remaining parts of it is the unexpected results for someone who hasn't used this sort of note taking system. The book "How to Take Smart Notes" explains this. You use the notes as a starting point to come up with new ideas. It's useful if you do regular writing, especially as part of work rather than for personal private stuff.

For example, I use this method for jokes. Much of the value is simply having a list in one place. If I want to come up with a new joke, I look at all my material as a branching tree. I can extend a branch by going deeper. I can combine branches to come up with something completely different. I can start green branches. I can write new material all day long by doing this, rather than by waiting for inspiration to nail me.

I think people get too caught up in the technical parts. It's just a branching system of ideas.