This article reminds me of posts about "bullet journalling" on sites like Pinterest: the optimization of the productivity process or tool (or in the case of "bullet journal" posts, the beauty of the tool) is the end itself, not a means to an end. The posts are about/by "productivity" or "journalling" enthusiasts and don't map well to people who are simply seeking a bit of an organization or productivity boost, not an extremely time-consuming new hobby.
The thing in this article that most reminded me about beauty-journalling posts was the todo list. In vanity journalling circles, the todo lists are full of meta-tasks "post to instagram; new journal layout; blog post about journalling" as well as pure vanity items like "yoga!; Breakfast: saffron avocado toast (yum!!)" Likewise, in this post his todo list includes items about writing about productivity, using other productivity tools, and other such "meta-productivity" items.
There's nothing wrong with this but it reveals that the "productivity" itself is the hobby, not just a means to an end.
I think you can go too deep into it as a form of procrastination, but I think this post is sincere. Spaced repetition is backed by science as an effective way to acquire knowledge (e.g., https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3782739/).
I'm personally more skeptical of the Zettelkasten/Roam/PKB craze as being effective, but that's only because I feel like I've had yet to find a problem where it would have been the solution. I'm constantly left feeling like it may be the solution to many problems I have related to memory and remembering thoughts, but without personal experience in it, I can't say what it's worth.
I don't think it's even possible to evaluate a productivity system without using it for a long amount of time and conducting periodic reviews on it regularly to see if it's helping with anything. I don't know what the metrics to measure are, and I don't know what a review like this would look like.
On the paper journaling thing, though, I think the answer is much more clear cut: it's more about the artistic nature of it than anything else. A paper journal is almost always impossible to search, easily damaged, easily lost, and easily customized with stickers, different pens and pencils, and other decor. It's easy to find a notebook you like with a paper you like and then justify writing in it. However, I don't think there are many practical benefits that can't be applied to an electronic system that's functionally similar, save for the effect of slowing down entry so you remember it more.
A few years ago I was looking through my last.fm scrobbles. Scrobbling is passive and it's widely supported, so I did it pretty regularly. The process of reviewing them was like tapping an area of my memory I didn't know existed. I saw the songs my daughter liked to listen to when she was three and remembered trips we took while listening to those songs, and I mean vivid memories of the drive, including the wrong turn we made that made us go through that album twice. Things no photo could ever recall for me. It was a wonderful experience that I may never have had if I wasn't keeping that record.
Going back through old notes I've made on books I've read or movies I've watched gives a similar experience, taking me back to how I thought at the time and a window into how I've changed.
I certainly don't want to study everything to death, but I wholly see the appeal of a system to contain things I've known and done.
Yes I have same experience. Been using Last.fm for 14 years and that history can sometimes reveal things I didn't have any other chance to recall. My long youtube music favorites playlist is also interesting, because I usually add only things I really loved, and keep listening to it for a while, so there is just these time fragments, when I was kind of addicted to some of the songs, but against last.fm it just cannot compete at all.
> On the paper journaling thing, though, I think the answer is much more clear cut: it's more about the artistic nature of it than anything else
A counterexample as food for thought: I do all of my task tracking in a paper notebook. It looks boring -- there's no design and I only use one black and one red pen.
What I've found in over 5 years I've used more than a dozen task trackers for various organizations across different projects and teams. Each time, I have to learn the system and adapt my process to it. Every six months the productivity community goes nuts over some new app.
On the other hand, my notebook process is just the same. Paper has been around for over a thousand years and will be around a lot longer than that. I never have to keep up with the new hot productivity system or worry about the company that makes my favorite app going out of business. Paper will never release an update that makes me redo my whole process.
Paper let's me find a system that works and stick with it. Paper gets out of the way. I can focus on being productive instead of productivity.
Totally agree. Before starting with a paper journal about 4 years ago, I was using todo.txt for tasks with some org-mode to supplement. I stuck with it for a good while (2012-2016) but needed more flexibility.
I did go through an experimentation phase trying to do what the "official" bullet journal people and the bujo "influencers" suggested. Instead of having to restart and adapt to a new app, I could try a little bit and discard what didn't work or I didn't like.
To the point that grandparent made about:
> A paper journal is almost always impossible to search, easily damaged, easily lost, and easily customized with stickers, different pens and pencils, and other decor.
I can't run a grep on a notebook, no, but I often know about when I took a note on something to find it quickly. I usually run through a single notebook for a bullet journal per year. I started with fountain pens the same time I shifted back to analog. I have a little fun with colored ink, changing colors at most once a week. I tend towards waterproof/water-resistant inks that can weather some random wetness and still be fine. Some of them are even UV-resistant/forgery proof. I'm not taking hours upon hours to create the perfect spread.
I'm not writing outside in the rain. I've misplaced my phone more than my notebook. With the way that many are paper phobic these days, I'm not in real fear that my book would grow legs and walk off.
My BS detector went off immediately when I read the link about Zettelkastens, and then I googled "Zettelkasten", and I skimmed through five different articles that were each pages long and talked over and over about how wonderful Zettelkastens are but didn't give any information about how they work or how to implement them practically. That's a pretty reliable indication that the service is the end, not a means to the end.
For the uninformed, a Zettelkasten is a searchable, unordered, labeled database. That's it.
I think your BS detector has a bug that may cause you to miss out on some good stuff! ;-) Sometimes there are ideas which are really good and very simple, but hard to explain because understanding them requires a shift of perspective which comes more easily from hands-on experience than from verbal explanations.
"Zettelkasten" is more of an attitude toward note-taking than a specific technique... it can be implemented in many seeingly almost unrelated ways, from Luhman's index-card box to personal wikis, etc. The defining characteristic is more in the way you integrate note-taking and note-review into your daily workflow and thinking process.
The best description I've found of it is this article: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/NfdHG6oHBJ8Qxc26s/the-zettel.... Slightly long, but it completely describes how they work and how to implement them practically (on notecards). On the other hand, the articles on https://zettelkasten.de are pretty difficult to understand for the uninitiated.
> For the uninformed, a Zettelkasten is a searchable, unordered, labeled database. That's it.
I could spin up ElasticSearch or something similar and have it crawl all the files on my computer and get an 80% solution. Kinda like Apple's "Finder" functionality.
Almost, but not quite. Zettlekastenicians (Zettlekasatengineers?) try to only put succinct thoughts into their systems that they can tend and grow into larger productions of thinking or learning--there are some more specialized amounts of explicit metadata (your thoughts, ideas, inspirations, questions) that cannot be crawled and indexed by machine which will only see the implicit metadata.
If you index everything together you get something that it is merely a pile of searchable things. You do not experience the "conversation" with the slip-box as Niklas Luhmann described it. Software like http://zettelkasten.danielluedecke.de/ that implements the "digital version" of the system suffers from what I like to describe as the "Hudsucker Proxy" problem: A young idealist visionary comes out and holds a big plastic loop and mutters "You know... for kids!" and nobody has a clue what that is supposed to mean. It isn't until someone shows how to use the "big plastic loop" before anyone understands what's happening. And that's really hard to do with something as abstract as a Zettlekasten despite it just "being little notes gathered together with lots of numbers and letters pointing at the other notes" or an "unordered database".
Kind of, yes, but from my understanding of the original system as devised/practised by Luhmann was that the real value of it laid in the connections between the individual notes and the work of actually filing things away in that web of knowledge.
It's trivial to just write everything interesting down in whatever format, but the idea behind Zettelkasten is that by examining each piece of information before slotting it into its proper place in the grand scheme of things made you re-evaluate old notes and consider how things fit together as a whole. This aided memory and improved understanding of the topics.
My gut feeling says the concept is sound. You're not just archiving information, you're piecing together a complex web of knowledge and relating new information to what you already know, which in turn might spur original thought. That might happen with a wiki, but it's not a given.
Well, the original one isn't unordered, and isn't meant fundamentally to be "searchable" (its original "implementation" being index cards).
Here's my attempt at conciseness:
A zettelkasten is like a bunch of files in a single folder with
1. a naming schema that kinda indicates what follows what (an ordering scheme, but persnickety and optional, see https://zettelkasten.de/posts/luhmann-folgezettel-truth/), and
2. links in between the files, originally just by writing the names to be manually looked for.
Some people use 2 to be able to get rid of 1, as with an indication of PREVIOUS (link) and NEXT (link)
The point is that you have one thing on each card / file that you might want to go back to on its own.
It makes a lot of sense in academia where you want to be able to trace ideas in a referenceable way, identify your own takes on bits of other people's work, and connect different sources together when you see similarities.
My very elementary (just skimmed some blog posts about it for a few hours this morning [1]) understanding of why Zettelkasten is a game-changer is that: its a system of organizing notes in a bottom-up, atomic fashion, instead of the usual top-down categorization where the notes don't lend itself well to reviewing or linking with concepts you've previously learned. Basically, a graph (where links are bidirectional) instead of a tree. The power of such a system is that it maps closer to how knowledge is stored in our brains, and that the more you use the system, the better benefit from "network effects".
In traditional note-taking systems, the category is the most obvious first-class citizen. In ZK, the little ideas take precedence, because some little idea that belongs to category A can easily end up belonging to other categories B, C, D, ... as time goes on and you study more subjects/discipline.
I'm sure the idea I'm describing is nothing new, groundbreaking, or unique to ZK - but this is the impression that I got, and I've had the pain of having very poorly managed knowledge via Evernote/OneNote/Notion/etc. before. I also dabbled with Anki and mindmapping. I believe the optimal solution is to combine all 3, since mindmaps have the "graph" structure part down; Anki only focuses on recall, but not conceptual understanding/linkage; and traditional notes, while obviously storing more information, are usually organized in hierarchical top-down structures that don't lend themselves well to reviewing or building a deliberate map of knowledge.
Another alternative to mindmaps is something like Jerry's Brain [2], where irrelevant nodes are collapsed until you explore them. Jerry has given extremely compelling presentations because he's used it for something like 20 years.
I am aware of a bias as I write this: I simply might not have had enough discipline when using traditional note-taking systems before, and am going through a bit of a (pre) honeymoon phase with this new ZK stuff. Just my 2 grains of salt.
They are also usually todo lists of a size that... are small. I don't need to manage a todo list of 10 items. That's not the problem. How to manage 100+ items with due dates is a much more interesting question, and productivity porn is not the place to find answers to that.
(I still read it. I love that people obsess so much about it. It's like going into an office supply store, and just lovingly gaze at organizers :)
Well, that bring memories. In my other life I had o office job with generic title & over the time I became the one of the oldest employee (first joiners, oldest not by age). So I found myself managing timesheets, monies, appointments, cars, vacations of 100+ people. I started a journal & also came across Bullet Journal. Internet was like decorate, spend time on it; but mine was purely functional.
Simple basic page with To Do Title. New Day starts after a blank line. Each task is a blank square box, task text. When done, a tick in the box & done-date in right margin.
At end of the month, all pending tasks get reviewed; no-longer-needed gets a cross X in box; needed ones get moved to Big To Do page, original entry gets a arrow in the box. Once all tasks sorted, done, cancelled, moved, the big box in front of title gets ticked with today's date.
Big To Do page has a box, task original date in dd/mm format, then task.
Some specific pages like Financial, 6-Monthly, Logs etc with templated tasks prefilled with current months data, kind of checklists. 6 Month page gets tasks required not in immediate future, but sometimes in ^ months. If available, deadline date gets mentioned in task.
All pages numbered at lower right corner, in continuous series.
An Index page with Page Title and page numbers.
I was using a A5 ring binder with two holes.
It was not pretty to see. It was readable, not chicken scratches. Occasionally some tasks get red marks, or green. All completed pages gets scanned as pdf.
It was amazingly working. 4 years 9f my daily office work, keeping up with everybody's every type of requests. I miss that now, that now I am in a job where we can't take our bags/books to desk.
People have different needs and motivations. A friend was a fancy journal keeper, and the “ceremony” around planning and executing the fancy journal stuff was part of the review process of upcoming and past tasks.
The thing in this article that most reminded me about beauty-journalling posts was the todo list. In vanity journalling circles, the todo lists are full of meta-tasks "post to instagram; new journal layout; blog post about journalling" as well as pure vanity items like "yoga!; Breakfast: saffron avocado toast (yum!!)" Likewise, in this post his todo list includes items about writing about productivity, using other productivity tools, and other such "meta-productivity" items.
There's nothing wrong with this but it reveals that the "productivity" itself is the hobby, not just a means to an end.