How do you get your brain to be consistent with your slipbox? I’m thinking it would be an excellent thing to do/have, but I also know that if I was filing thoughts under a tab where I thought it should go, there’s a good chance that when I look for it later, a different tab is where I’m going to think it should be.
The short answer is: I don’t get them consistent; I don’t actually want them to be consistent. That’s not what the slipbox is for.
And then a two-part longer answer:
First: It is vastly better than my brain at keeping track of things. For example, if I have a name, I can find entry points into the slipbox by using the index of people. That’s at “4c1”. “4” is the common place book. “4c” is slipbox indices. “4c1” is for people. It’s a visually easy to spot section of the cards though. I use 3×5 tabbed dividers to find the main letters. Grabbing a random card— “4c1lo” (that’s four-C-one-L-O) has people whose last name starts with “L” then first vowel of “O”. The card has “London, John”, “London, Jack”, “Lombardi, Vince”, “Loomis, Carol”. In this case names that actually start “LO…” but that is not usually the situation. Next to “Low, Steven” is a reference “3/211027a” … and I know what the “3” section of the slipbox is: recorded conversations. So that’s a conversation I had with the person on 21-10-07. To summarize: Given any name, I can find them in the slipbox; or I can tell they’re not in the slipbox. In other situations, I can go into the box: “what were my notes on that book?” I can find books (digital, physical, essays and papers too) are in the “2” section of the slipbox.
Second: The slipbox is not meant ONLY to be a card catalog system. It’s not ONLY a giant index of things. It’s primary goal is to have a conversation with the entire collection [whatever I’ve put in the slipbox so far] of my thinking. It’s not a database of bits of information (“Harrisburd is the capital of Pennsylvania”) but rather a database of thoughts about things.
I admit it’s all very obtuse. After a year of fiddling with it, I’m convinced that it’s adding value to my life, but I still find it very hard to explain. One parting thought from a book about note taking is that one needs a context and system within which to think. Not a strict plan for how to think. The context and the system need to be as UNstructured as possible to enable the flexible thinking.
Finally, there’s a tag for all the slipbox posts, that might yield additional breadcrumbs if you flip through them, https://constantine.name/tag/slipbox/
…when the goal isn’t to end up with a pile of notes?
There are many scenarios where, over time, I do want to end up with a collection of notes. This is straight forward; start taking notes, and keep them somewhere. Bonus points if you review them, or use them as reference, or do anything with them.
But what if I have a scenario where I want to “do a better job” but I don’t care at all about the notes themselves. Suppose you have a regularly scheduled recurring meeting, but you don’t need a historical collection of notes. In fact, suppose you don’t actually need notes, but you think: It would be nice to know what we did last time, so we can follow-up next time.
And so I’m thinking this would be easy. I’ll just have a pile of notes (physical, digital, whatever) and I’ll go through them and … wait, what, actually? Recopy them? gag, that’s tedious. How many do I keep? How long do I keep the old ones? Here’s what I came up with…
I’m working in a single digital document. I have a heading, “Ongoing,” at the top that has the big things we currently have on our radar. The list has some dates with notes; “Oct 2020 — started that big project” and similar things.
Next I have a heading, “Jan 5, 2022” with the date of our next scheduled meeting. When that meeting arrives, I start by doing something very weird: I add “9876543210” on the line below the heading. Then I take simple bullet-point notes under that heading. “We discussed the foo bazzle widget needs defranishizing,” and similar items. Before our meeting ends, I add a heading for the date of the NEXT meeting, ABOVE this meeting’s heading. This pushes the heading and notes down the page a bit.
Then I continue reading. The heading just below this meeting’s, is the date of our last meeting. Just below the heading is “9876543210”, which I put there when we had that meeting. I delete the “9” from the front. I read my notes from the meeting. I may even edit them. Sometimes things that were obvious then, don’t seem so obvious a week later.
Then I continue reading. The next heading is the one from two meetings ago. Just below it is “876543210” — think about that, if it’s not obvious that last week, I read this part and already removed the “9”. So this week, I remove the “8.” Read the notes.
I work my way down each of the historical dates. Snipping a lead number, off the front of the line after each heading. 7. 6. 5. etc.
At the very end of the document, I find a heading that is from 11 meetings ago. Below the heading is “0” — because I’ve looked at these notes 9, 8, 7, 6, etc deleting a digit each time. These notes are now quite old. In fact, they should be irrelevant after 11 meetings. If they are not, I figure out what I have to add to “Ongoing” (the very topmost heading)… or perhaps I put a note under the coming meetings heading (just below “Ongoing”.)
It sounds wonky, but it’s magic. One digital document, you can skim the entire thing right in any of the meetings. You can search in the document. I can be sure I’m not forgetting things, but I can be sure I’m not making a huge collection of crap I’m never going to look at again.
Care to guess where that delete-a-digit each time comes from? It’s an idea from book printing. When they used to set type (physical lead type in trays) they would put “1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10” (or other orderings of the numbers) in the cover plate. Then print the book. What printing? This one is “1” Next printing? …they’d just chip off the “1” and print “2 3 4 5…” in the book… second printing. They still print those weird sequences of digits in digitally printed books. I believe this one is a second edition, 3rd printing…
It’s been one year since I started collecting my thinking in a slipbox. In the photo, the box on the left is full of materials—blank slips, dividers, etc. The box on the right is the older portion of my collection of quotes; It’s the portion of the quotes which has been released as daily podcasts for the Little Box of Quotes. The center box is the meat of the slipbox and contains over 1,000 new slips, with about 250 of those being new quotes. But, enough with the statistics.
What can I do with it? A startling amount of interesting things come out. I’m not going to write up an article right here to prove it. But suffice to say I’ve recently been dipping into the slipbox to augment something I was writing. I’m trying to remember, any time I’m writing anything, anywhere to pause and ask the slipbox about it. When I do that, I almost always find something to add.
One really big question I had when I started the slipbox was whether I wanted it to be physical or digital. I’m happy to report that I made the right decision. So much of my life and things that I do are digital. I’m so tired of digital stuff. Any time I can be doing something in the physical world, that’s a plus. Never once have I regretted not being able to free-text search the slipbox. Instead, it remains a pleasantly tactile experience to search, retrieve, and create.
Digital gardening is the work we do to make an organic mess less messy and more useful. It’s certainly not a new idea but I think it’s something that is becoming a major problem for may digital spelunkers. We’ve never had a greater variety of information inboxes and it has never been easier to capture new information into these boxes. The problem now is with recalling the information and making connections between it all.
Weatherhead goes on to list several specific problems, but not much in the way of solutions. And that’s perfectly fine; Having a clearly defined problem, (or two, or three,) demonstrates a lot of thinking and a lot of hard work has been done in search of a solution. We even have an adage for that: A problem well-defined is half-solved. He mentions in passing that a lot of his bookmarking, (saving, marking for later reading, staring, adding to lists, etc.,) is done as an aspiration. Becoming aware of this was a key turning point for me.
At some point, someone will carry the last of my worldly possessions… and deposit them in a dumpster. At some point, all of my digital files will be given a shrug and summarily deleted. I currently aspire to stop collecting things “for later” and instead use, read, compose, share, create and inspire now.
We once spent 7 years remodeling our house while living in it. *shudder* Note to self: Don’t ever do that again. In such a journey, you must learn to navigate a precarious balance between perfection, and omgbecky just get it done! Reflooring the entire house? …maybe lean toward the former. Gutting the only bathroom to subfloor and bare stud walls? …maybe lean toward the later. (Ask me in person and I’ll tell you some stories.) But there is a huge swath of work that falls in the middle area.
“When in doubt, rip it out,” became my matra in those years. Yes, we could fix, cover, repair, patch, shift, or ignore whatever-it-was. And we’d then forever live with the fixed, covered, repaired, patched, shifted, or… well, you can’t ignore it forever. So any time there was doubt, we ripped it out. Dug it up. Tore it down. And then—as time, energy, and money—were available we did it the right way. Or at least, the way we wanted it.
This principle works spendidly too for things other than one’s physical domicile. “What would be the right way, or at least the way I’d want it to be?” will lead you on a journey of exploration.
What’s the right way to repair the crown wash atop our chimney?
How should I convey all these features, benefits and doo-dads to new community members?
How should I organize this book I’m writing?
What would whatever-this-is be like if I did it the Right Way(tm)? …why is that the Right Way(tm) and what if I did it differently?
…but this is actually a post about my slipbox. I’ve not posted recently about it, and it continues to grow. Mostly I continue collecting quotes. But the main part of the slipbox is growing slowly as well. The topmost-level numbers are major divisions, conceptually. “4” is a hierarchy of analects. (I’ll pause while you search.) And “2” is for books.
Any time I want to refer to a book, I add a reference like, “(2b2)” on a card. I had setup the 2nd-level-letters to be MDS leading digits. So that’s a reference to the 2nd book in the 2b section. The point isn’t to understand the structure, when I see a reference… I can just go find the slip. I’m simpy explaining how it was setup. When I set it up, I thought a structural organization would be the way I’d like it.
I was thinking I’d put notes about the books elsewhere in the slipbox. Turns out I’d rather keep a few notes directly “under” the slip for the book itself. But that means I can’t easily find Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow—great book by the way. I have to go find its MDS number and then go into that slipbox section. So yesterday I pulled all the slips out of the “2” section and redesigned the entire thing.
“When in doubt, rip it out.”
The section is now simply organized by title. That book is now under “2to1″ —”to” from the title, first book under “to”. But the first rule of a slipbox is that you cannot change the address of a card. Other cards likely refer to it. And my blog posts have slip addresses on them. And I have digital documents with slip addresses in the names.
So I spent hours hunting and searching through everything, updating blog posts, updating filenames of digital files, updating notations on slips, … hunting down the physical books and updating the notes I keep in the books. It was a big undertaking.
If you’ve been following along with my slipbox journey, you’ve seen me write about how the slipbox enables having a conversation… with the ideas in the slipbox. It sounds wacky, I know. But my experience yesterday showed me it’s true. Every idea, every slip, were mine originally—I put them all in there. But I had an entire day’s worth of new ideas, connections, rereading parts of books, making new notes, … it was totally worth every minute, (yesterday and to date creating the slipbox.)
I’m a process person. Recently, I was asked if I thought some course-material would be better if it included more process instruction; more step-by-step processes on how to do things. I pointed out that I’ve never been very successful simply handing people a process. I think it’s easier to teach people how to think about processes as a way to solve problems once. When the problem appears again, the earlier thinking—in the form of creating and refining a process—pays off.
Anyway. Today I’m going to do the exact opposite and try to hand you a process. :)
You have “sensitive” papers— things you need to keep around for a while, but probably not, you know, forever.
You have a good shredder— omg if you don’t own a good shredder, stop here and buy a good cross-shredder.
And therefore you have tension between wanting to remember to safely destroy “sensitive” papers— and not wanting to destroy them before you are sure you’re done with them.
Create a set of “destroy later” file-folders. Find a place to keep them where they won’t be randomly disturbed. (On a shelf out of the way, in your safe, whatever.)
Grab some file folders. If you want to keep things for 3 months, you need four, file folders. If you want to keep things for 6 months, you need 7 folders.
Every time you have a “sensitive” paper, place it into the topmost/frontmost folder.
Each month, take the topmost/frontmost folder full of “sensitive” stuff and move it to the back/bottom.
Destroy the contents of the folder which is the new topmost/frontmost.
Revel in that tension evaporating, knowing all things will be appropriately destroyed later.
ɕ
Postscript: This is a “tickler file” system. But instead of the usual reminders in a tickler system, we’re reminder ourselves to shred the contents of the tickler system.
Having a clear structure to work in is completely different from making plans about something. If you make a plan, you impose a structure on yourself; it makes you inflexible. To keep going according to plan, you have to push yourself and employ willpower. This is not only demotivating, but also unsuitable for an open-ended process like research, thinking or studying in general, where we have to adjust our next steps with every new insight, understanding or achievement—which we ideally have on a regular basis and not just as an exception.
~ Sönke Ahrens from, How to Take Smart Notes (2017)
I know I’m reading the right thing when—POW—I feel like a whole bunch of loose threads in my mind suddenly make sense. I’m a master at plans and organizing. (Outlines, processes, Allen’s GTD system, etc..) But my current quest for a knowledge system began in earnest when I could no longer ignore the aching feeling that there was something I’m missing; there’s something I’m not doing correctly. Ahren’s point about “imposing structure” on oneself is the insight. There’s a time for that. (And again, I’ve got that sorted.) I’m gleefully skipping off into experimenting with a new structure to work in. This isn’t all clear to me yet, so these blog posts aren’t going to be perfectly clear either. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
The things that worked out weren’t _supposed_ to work, so I realized on my birthday: I had no plan for after 40. As often happens at forks in the path—college graduation, quarter-life crisis, midlife crisis, kids leaving home, retirement—questions started to bubble to the surface.
If you’ve not heard of this book, my pull-quote is from Tim’s Introduction… eight lines into the book. The book is 597 pages, and the pages of the book—not including the hard covers, just the pages—are 1-and-three-quarters inches thick. It’s can serve as a functional foot-rest in a pinch. (But interestingly, not as a doorstop since it’s mysteriously light for its size. I keep wondering if the back half of the book is hollowed out, as in a prison escape movie, hiding a whoopie-cushion full of Helium.)
Anyway, if you’ve not heard of this book, find a copy and start reading the Introduction.
This book arrived in our house November, 2018. I started into it and it is, as one would hope, chock full of stupidly interesting ideas from so many different people. I got through 64 pages before, for some reason which I only just today realized, I put it down one evening. And then I didn’t pick it back up for, well, two years. I mean I moved it around a lot, but whatever it was that made me _want_ to read the book, there was something else that made me _not_ want the book.
You ever have sand slipping through your fingers? I didn’t realize it, (until today,) but that’s what made me walk away from the book. Yes there’s some malarky and woo-wu in the book; But there’s so much that I want to dig further into. Back in 2018, what was I going to do with that? …blog about every other page? Instinctively I knew that wouldn’t do _me_ much good.
But today? Today I’m comfortable knowing that I can bump into ideas, mull them over, and produce a contextualized, reduced to something I’m interested, idea… and drop that into the Slipbox.
I think there are some specific reasons why Zettelkasten has worked so well for me. I’ll try to make those clear, to help readers decide whether it would work for them. However, I honestly didn’t think Zettelkasten sounded like a good idea before I tried it. It only took me about 30 minutes of working with the cards to decide that it was really good. So, if you’re like me, this is a cheap experiment. I think a lot of people should actually try it to see how they like it, even if it sounds terrible.
If you’ve been following along with my personal knowledge system, Zettelkastën and Slipbox journey of discovery you might be interested in this deep, DEEP dive someone else wrote. This is one of the many things I read all over the place before beginning my experiments. I don’t agree with his “30 minutes … to decide”; It’s taken me a little bit /sarcasm longer than that. But I do agree with his assessment. And everything else in that link.
Only recently did I become aware of the key point of a Slipbox: It can capture your thinking and enables you to have a discussion with your own thinking. I’m aware of this key point, but I’m not entirely certain it will work. I am convinced that the only way to find out is for me to try the experience.
There are many ways to do capture, and those ways are useful for various things. For example, capturing information with the context necessary to use, or do, the thing captured:
GTD is based on storing, tracking, and retrieving the information related to the things that need to get done. Mental blocks we encounter are caused by insufficient ‘front-end’ planning. This means thinking in advance, generating a series of actions which can later be undertaken without further planning. The mind’s “reminder system” is inefficient and seldom reminds us of what we need to do at the time and place when we can do it. Consequently, the “next actions” stored by context in the “trusted system” act as an external support which ensures that we are presented with the right reminders at the right time.
Other examples are: A collection of books (at personal or institutional scale); personal journals; note-taking (think school studying); at-scale capture of information (Evernote, and ad hoc ways of doing that oneself). There are many more: Personal or team Wikis; Online collaboration systems (Miro, Emvi, et al).
I’ve tried all of the above. Some I’m still using—big time using! Collections of books, notes, journals, Wiki’s, and others.
And yet, something was still missing. The first problem was that I could only sometimes sense there was something missing. The best I can describe it: It’s like hearing a sound and not being sure you heard it. Later, in a very different location, you think you heard the sound. Eventually, you know the sound, without being able to describe it. It’s a sort of pattern in my mind, into which something should fit.
So the current experiment with a Slipbox is my attempt to place a ‘something’ into this pattern— this concept-shaped hole. I will continue to write about this as I go along. Today I wanted to try to take a snapshot of the hole.
Today, a deep dive into how slips get added to the Slipbox. I’ve been working on the Slipbox the last few days—I cannot wait to look back on these posts and the Slipbox in another decade. :) But mostly it’s been meta work: Deciding on format for the slips, and beginning to sketch out the conceptual superstructure of the Slipbox, … tedious and boring and the sort of process and organization work which I flippin’ love. *ahem* What follows here is a story, with photos. I’m going to go through adding three new slips to the Slipbox.
First slip
I was reading this book (image below) and I came to the section in the lower right. I thought that was interesting. The underlined bit in particular is a really great sentence about Stoicism. (I’ll get to the actual sentence in a moment.)
You might be wondering how I manage to make books lie open so neatly. There’s a clever hack (image below) for that. See also, Book holder for paperbacks. I’ve graduated from using a pencil, as I describe in the Life Hack linked, to using these gorgeous steel rods I found. Furthermore, because I’m insane, I used heat-shrink tubing in a lovely shade of blue to cover the ends so they don’t mark up tables and such.
Back to that sentence which caught my eye as I was reading.
I grabbed a blank 3×5 card—what I’m using for the “slips” in my Slipbox—and I copied the bit I want from the book. (image below) I did not write that “5a1” at the top initially; After I did a lot more of what I describe in this post, it occurred to me to write this post, and I didn’t feel like rewriting this slip to take a photo without the “5a1”.
This slip has the bit I wanted to capture, then the page number, and the “(2a1)” is a slip reference; it’s the address of this particular book’s slip in the Slipbox. These things don’t have to be in any particular layout. They are all obvious in the context. What page number could I possibly mean, other than page 33 in the book itself? What could possibly be a (2a1) in the Slipbox—a book, but I could also just go look at (2a1).
All our books have a note in the front (image below) which say “LT” and which has the major Dewey Decimal System number. I’ll let it settle in, the level of commitment it takes to have done this for every book in the house. But it’s easy to maintain, just do it for each new book as they arrive. The “LT” is a reference to Library Thing, which is a magical web site that tracks library contents. In LT I know every book I’ve ever owned, which are currently in the house, I have a wishlist, etc..—going to a bookstore is magical when armed with that knowledge.
I may as well mention that the Dewey number is on the spine too. (image below) Yes, on every book. Yes, the books in the house are also shelved by Dewey Decimal. I learned a lot about what librarians actually do when I tried to find the Dewey Decimal number for a book—hint, it’s an art, not a science.
So it’s easy to figure out that the book I’m quoting from on this new slip is in the Slipbox at (2a1) because it’s on the postit in the book. I jot that on the slip, “this is where I got this from: Page 33 from the book at slip 2a1.”
Ok, I’ve capture that little quote. Where do I put this new slip in the Slipbox? Well, I think it’s a great idea about Stoicism, and Stoicism is in the Slipbox already. Below is a photo of the slip whose address is (5)—that’s the “5” at the top left. This is an “early days” slip so it has a silly-short address. This slip is just a list of topics I have under “Philosophy,” today just the “a” section for Stoicism. There is a boring “5a” too (not shown.) This seems silly, until I get to “g” under Philosophy, and that slip is 200 slips farther along in the box. Then I’ll be flipping through looking for that “silly” (5g) slip.
So (5a) already exists, and it is the home of “Stoicism” in my Slipbox. So where do I put my newest slip with this little quote from book (2a1)? I flip to (5a) and realize there’s nothing after it. So this new slip becomes (5a1). I wrote that (5a1) on there dead-last. And then I tossed it into the Slipbox behind (5a).
Second slip
I did all that stuff to make that new (5a1) slip, and then I went back to reading the book. A few pages later I find this…
I scribble on the margin (above) since this is interesting. There’s a tiny “16” there. I look at this book’s notes—the book I’m reading in the photo—and it’s a reference to a book I actually have. (There’s also a tiny “17,” but it’s not a book I have.) I grab the referenced book and find the referenced page, starts lower-left (image below)… (I’d love to say the Dewey shelving was handy, but I am also reading this book! So it was sitting close at hand already.)
I had started reading this book before I had a Slipbox. When I looked at it today though, I realized that I’d have captured this exact bit… if I’d had a Slipbox.
Not shown: I made a (2a2) in for this book. Looks much like the (2a1) image above. I added (2a2) to the note in the front of the book.
Then I made a new slip (image below) for this bit about Stoicism… (I also added “pg 20” after taking this photo.) The note in the front of the book says “LT 171 (2a2)”—but I just made (2a2) anyway.
The cool part about this is the slip can lay around if I feel like having it close by. It’s a thought, and I know where I got the thought. When (if!) I want to put it into the Slipbox…
I flip to (5a) for Stoicism… there’s a (5a1) already, so this slip becomes (5a2). I add “5a2” to the top of the slip, I date the slip (the dates are “when it was added” to the Slipbox, not “when I wrote it”,) and toss it in the Slipbox.
Third slip
A Guide to the Good Life by WB Irvine is the first book, way above. That’s the one I was reading this morning that started all of this. The next image is (2a1), the slip I created for this book.
Don’t panic. I’m not adding a slip for every book. This isn’t a card catalog for the entire library. This slip got added to create a home for the next card…
I have a feeling that this book is going to be referred to often. (Often enough to warrant adding it to the Slipbox.) Now, as I find (2a1)—aka references in the Slipbox to this book—when I flip to (2a1), I immediately see (2a1a) which tells me what the book is about. Or least what Irvine hopes the book is about. :)
Continuing my thinking about personal knowledge management systems, it’s time to set down my method for pointing to the things on the Internet from a paper system.
The obvious way to do this is to simply write the URL. This is also horrible. URLs are long, and worse they are often, (but not always,) case-sensitive. I’m never going to write a URL in cursive, so I’m left with printing it, and my preference is an all-caps block style, which doesn’t render lowercase characters. The solution of course is what’s called a URL shortener. Hold that thought.
But there is a bigger problem: URLs change. Or more correctly, the resource goes away or is moved. This is referred to as “link rot.” I want to create links in the context of a Slipbox, which I’m expecting to use for a few decades. All the URLs will surely rot. So I’d love to find a way to make links to URLs a little more like a reference to a book, journal, or other physical object.
First, it’s important to remember that such a link would be in the context of a slip in my Slipbox. So the “why is this interesting” will be on the slip. If, (when!) that link rots, I’ve obviously not lost what I captured on the card. What I want, in my solution for linking from paper to the Internet, is some way to capture a little bit of the actual resource—the thing the URL refers to.
Hey! I have that already, it’s my blog. I frequently quote a little and then describe what I’m linking to, and then perhaps riff off that, go deeper, or make some connection.
Recall that every slip in a Slipbox has an address. It’s a baklava-layering of letters and numbers and they are easy to read/write. So I could create redirections on my blog, (this is easy to do.) I could make “a42o17x3”, (some card’s address on which I want to link to a URL) would lead to the blog post with the actual full URL. On the card, I just leave an indication that there’s a URL—maybe that’s a litlte ↬ or something easy to write. Then, when creating the slip to capture the link (and its context/why) I go to the blog and create that redirection (and the actual blog post of course.)
I suspect you’re boggled, but to me that’s easy. But I can make it easier: Just put the slip’s address somewhere in the blog post. Now I’ve eliminated the entire redirection / URL-shortening system. (Which is digital, and therefore will eventually break or become overloaded and crash etc.) I’m already working hard to backup and protect the contents of my blog, so just add a tiny little string in the blog post; I could simply type slip:a42o17x3 and I’m done.
There’s another thing that clicks into place: All the URLs I’ve already captured on my blog might be things I want to import into the Slipbox. How on Earth would I do that? Turns out it’s easy. I already have a website serialize tool that knows how to “show me one year ago today” as a link to my own site. (and any other year-back, so each day I glance at a few previous year’s today’s posts.) This ensures I’ll soon glance at all the URLs I’ve already captured giving me the opportunity to create slips in the Slipbox.
I feel like some things are starting to come together here. ymmv. :)
Weeks ago, I wrote a number of posts about my quest for a personal knowledge system. (See my tag, Knowledge systems.) I’ve continued to think about this, and I’ve conducted a few more experiments. Today I want to unpack my thoughts about using a physical system.
I started into this quest with an open mind. Any physical system—slips of paper, note cards, etc.—will not have the features of a digital system. When thinking about “features” I’m imagining what that feature enables, if anything. So both types (physical/digital) capture data, but the digital system is easily searched, and so on. My thinking was that the digital system (there are actually several) had all of the features of the physical system, and I’d steered towards digital.
One misconception about digital is that it is more durable. I contend that physical slips, (3×5 cards, etc.,) are more durable. Nothing short of theft or a catastrophic fire endangers them. Digital, on the other hand I don’t trust at all—I know enough about how things really work, and I’ve seen enough problems in my 25+ years in tech. But I’d thought, “the digital system is the enemy I know,” and I thought I’d be willing to invest the extra effort needed to maintain the digital system. (Yes, I believe the digital system is more effort to protect and maintain.)
But I think the deal breaker on the digital side is a missing feature of the physical system: The ability to hold many notes in view at once. In a digital system, I’m limited by my display space. In a physical system, I can cover my desk, a table, the entire floor even, (I’ve done it,) with notes and sweep over it quickly. Short of a touch screen the size of my desktop, (have you seen the touch-wall in Minority Report? …jealous,) any digital system will fall short on this feature.
I’m left with one feature missing in a physical system: How to capture URLs. How do I capture links to resources on the Internet? I have an idea about that…
Continuing my deep dive—hopefully it doesn’t become a drowning—into Knowledge Systems: Yesterday I spent a little time tinkering with Discourse to see what I could do with it. There is a mind-numbing array of tools that could be used, but I keep coming back to the point that I don’t actually understand what I’m trying to build.
I’ve spent significant time thinking about that, and reading about that, but it’s still not clear. It’s like standing in an aisle of tools each shiny and powerful; I know people who have piles of tools. Fortunately, the best way to understand is to build. And so building I am. (Out of sight privately, sorry.)
I seem to recall hearing a metaphor about house building: Start with a sofa in the lawn, add features as needed. Be prepared to knock it down and start again.
Zettelkasten is usually mentioned as a note-taking method. However, the end goal of Zettelkasten is not gathering and collecting notes, but rather creating a competent and knowledgeable communication partner. The main interaction with the slip-box is not when we are writing and adding new notes, because the slip-box is not there to be an archive of our memory and knowledge. Slip-box is there to be an apparatus with which we think. Therefore, the main interaction is when we communicate with the slip-box by confronting ourselves and our thinking with our prior knowledge.
This appears to be part four of a series: On knowledge systems, Push and pull, and Commonplace notebooks. Depending where you are on your personal journey you may have been sitting back, chuckling, waiting for me to “discover” zettelkasten. …to which I reply, “y u no email me about zettelkasten?!”
Now this idea I definitely have seen before. I can recall stumbling on the idea very early in my personal productivity and self-awareness journey. Without looking, I’ll bet I found it first on 43 Folders. I had the distinct pleasure of following along through Merlin Mann’s journey—trying to keep up, but not succeeding at the time. (Posts on that site run from 2004, through 2011.) If you just went, “43 Folders? …what’s that?” You need to go look at 43 Folders.
…oh sorry, I was off on a tangent there. I just realized Mann has a podcast that’s on episode #503. Shit. Another thing I probably need to listen too. I’ll just say: My web site serialize tool can drip podcast show notes pages at me too, so I’ll drip all those so I can skim the show notes, and I’ll just listen to the few that are “must listen” [in my opinion of course.]
*shudder* I’m all over the map today. Zettelkasten, right.
When I first encountered it, I got stuck on the idea that it’s “notes” in “boxes.” Why would anyone want to do that, now that we have (back then) web sites where you can tag stuff, search, edit, etc.? Now I see this part—trimming my lead quote down—is the neat part:
The end goal of Zettelkasten is creating a competent and knowledgeable communication partner. The slip-box is there to be an apparatus with which we think. Therefore, the main interaction is when we communicate with the slip-box by confronting ourselves and our thinking with our prior knowledge.
Do you see it now? The slip-box system can be slips of paper, digital notes/files, or many other implementations. The original slip-boxes (physical things, pre-Internet… actually, pre-electricity,) were used by one person. Using modern technology we can implement one that allows people to collaborate too. (If we wanted. Not saying I necessarily want that.)
Oh, and guess what I built four years ago. A very complicated, (that’s not a compliment,) system for weaving together references, summaries, and articles on a site called Hilbert’s Library. It was literally my first attempt to build a knowledge management system. I’m now thinking it’s over-designed—I mean yes, sure… I over-think and over-design everything. But I mean that now I see why the design I built into it actually gets in the way of it being maximally useful as a knowledge management system.
What? Oh, yes, people have built lots of ways to implement slip-boxes. Notably, Emvi does that (among other things, because zettelkasten can be confusing so they pitch it in various use cases.)
Continuing my train of thought from On knowledge systems and Push and pull, today I want to dive into something called a commonplace book. (For the third time: no denouement today.) In line with more modern language usage, I’m going to prefer commonplace notebook; books are today commonplace, and we use the word “notebook” for the ones we create privately.
Settle in, this is about to get tangential.
I first encountered this idea at 8am, November 13th, 2020. Literally. I’ve never heard of the idea of a “commonplace book” previously. And here I am in the midst of finally pulling on a thread which I’ve been calling a quest for a knowledge system… trying to solve a problem which is as yet ill formed. I’ve been reading through the entire https://fs.blog web site; it’s like 5,000 non-trivial web pages skimming a few every day for well over a year. This November 13th a little before 8am I happen to reach, John Locke’s Method of Organizing Common Place Books. Which, probably is not worth clicking through. First off, “common” modifies “place” so we can drop “common” without fundamentally changing the meaning—so sayeth grammar. Therefore Locke’s method is for organizing books about places. I very nearly didn’t even skim it. But I did. And realized it’s his method for organizing commonplace books. Oh my god Becky, that’s completely different. Wait, what’s a commonplace book? (There’s a link in that post about Locke’s method.) POW!
Commonplace books are personal knowledge libraries; notebooks full of collected ideas and bits of wisdom all mixed up together. Here, we take a look at their history and benefits.
Am I on Candid Camera? This is so apropos of my recent thinking, it’s H.P. Lovecraft level eery.
Zooming out…
The knowledge system I’m seeking is not simply a repository into which I want to toss everything. For example, Evernote is not a solution that will work. It’s too easy to put things in. (Likewise for any home-grown version I might cook up with documents or cloud storage.) Sure, Evernote and other solutions are eminently searchable—that’s a good thing. But I continue to avoid such tools because… well, because I don’t want simply a giant collection of everything. I don’t want to simply amass everything I’ve ever been exposed to. (We already have an Internet. We don’t need Craig’s Internet assembled within the other.) But, I’ll call these desirables the “power” features.
I’m intrigued by the commonplace notebook solution as it requires a good bit of effort to add things. Effort is required to evaluate each new idea to be added. Effort is required to see how it “hangs together with” the rest of what I know, at the time when I encounter the new thing. This suggests individual, manual and mental labor, [meaning I have to do everything, possibly even including manually writing things down on paper] is also a desirable feature.
Some combination of those “power” and “manual” features feels like a sweet spot.
Aside: Like yesterday, there’s no conclusion here today.
A large part of books’ allure is that they never interrupt. They sit inert, exactly where you leave them, (physically or digitally,) and respond the instant you decide you want to engage. You are in total control. Eons ago, I saw the difference between books and the Internet described, overly simplistically, as “pull” versus “push” modes of information flow. That’s true for a book; a book is completely pull oriented. However, the Internet can be used in either mode. It can both “push” information at you and enable you to “pull” information towards yourself.
I became convinced that I needed to pull information towards me and ruthlessly prevent any pushing. This was a simple continuation of my love of books and reading. Reading exposed me to so many new ideas, so I expanded the trawling into the Internet, and to make room for the new things I was finding I squelched things that were being pushed at me. Over many years I began to read trade publications slowly learning which ones were just advertising vehicles and which ones contained real ideas. I joined professional organizations and read their publications. I found web sites that were things I wanted to read and dutifully kept up with them, (either by visiting regularly or by following their RSS feeds.)
I was eventually in complete control of what information I was exposed to. Nothing was being pushed at me against my will, but this became far too much to keep up with. And once the pulling becomes a habit, it’s effectively pushing. I burnt out and crashed hard. I rage-quit a number of things I had been keeping up with, and stopped visiting a swath of great web sites. I began reading physical books more, but this it was only a sort of reset. It left me back at the beginning; I’d learned a lot about how to manage my exposure to information but I was once again starved for new information. These days, I’ve renewed interested in some sort of “knowledge system” and in addition to points I made yesterday it’s also a way to manage this pull-versus-push problem.
More than half a century before blogging, Instagramming, tweeting, and the rest of today’s ever-lowering barriers of entry for publishing content, Bush laments the unmanageable scale of the recorded human experience.
After a bit of cool perspective from history, it gets around to talking about the importance of not just categorizing and compressing information for storage—think “library” or “internet”—but the ultimate importance of being able to use the information. Spot on this topic I’ve been slowly trying to unpack.
So, thinking about a knowledge system in the context of pulling information: I currently have a lot of fresh information that I pull; I could say I’m regularly exposed to many new ends of thread. However, I also want to be able to pick a thread, (or two or three,) and to be able to continuously pull on it. My knowledge system should enable that.
Caution: This post is long-ish but does not have a denouement. ;)
As I commonly do, I went to the mental well this morning to see what I’d find to add to the ‘ol blog. I hauled the bucket, and found two ideas which have been sitting there for months. Every time I go to the well, these two come up on top. Time to try to do something with them.
I’ve been actively thinking for years about getting a handle on learning. There’s a huge amount of things I’m delighted to simply learn from by osmosis. I read something, or experience something, and it affects me to some degree. I’ve had countless experiences where long after, I can clearly see the influence has percolated. I know this type of learning works well, and it’s effortless; I’ve mastered this type of learning and in so far as I can relax about trusting the process, it just works.
But there’s a type of learning which I haven’t been doing at all for years: Organized learning directed at a particular goal. I’ve not even been attempting to make any progress on that. Here’s an example of a specific thing I’d like to learn about:
Psychoactivity is a particular kind of relationship between a person, their body, what they perceive and the context of that perception. Psychoactivity occurs when a person’s thoughts, emotions and body sensations take on symbolic significance in response to what they are perceiving.
…
Space becomes psychoactive once a person’s mind-body starts to react symbolically to their physical surroundings and/or to their imaginative mind-space. David Grove coined the term ‘psychoactive space’ because it seems as if our perceptions are causing us to react and that we have little choice in the matter — which is true to some extent. When our perception of a space and the spatial relations contained therein have an independence from us, we are effectively living in the symbolism of the space moment by moment. Although I am referring to the space as psychoactive, I want to emphasise that psychoactivity is a relationship between the perceiver and the perceived (and/or the perceiver and the context).
I stumbled over that article a while back, skimmed it, read it, read it carefully, … and realized I need to spend a lot more time on the topic of psychoactive space. That site itself is large and I’ve not stuffed it through my usual website serialize tools because it deserves more than to be simply “read through.” Also, it is clearly going to point me off to other books, journals, and articles. I feel like I’m standing on a hilltop looking at a vast landscape thinking, “I need to make a map, or something, while I have this perspective because once I descend from this hill it’s going to be rabbit holes all the way across this landscape.”
So that leaves me with my original, (at the top of this post,) general quest for a knowledge system, and this intriguing, specific example in need of a knowledge system. It’s time to start thinking about knowledge systems. (Which, one might realize, unfortunately presents me with the need for some sort of knowledge system to learn enough about knowledge systems to decide which . . . )
When it doubt, I deploy the familiar tools which are at hand. One of my favorite tools is to ask the right questions, in particular these three questions:
Is this a problem I really need/want to solve? Srsly bro’? Yes. Next question please.
Is the scale of the problem sane/do I have sufficient resources? I’m not asking for a knowledge system (time for an acronym! “KS”) to track all human knowledge. I don’t even need it to be collaborative. It doesn’t have to be complete—in the sense that if I’m using this KS to learn “psychoactive space,” it doesn’t have to also store all my knowledge about “architecture” and “bio-mechanics.” I want a KS that’s a power tool—better than a manual screwdriver. I’m not wanting a KS that outsources the driving of screws. I want a KS that one person (me!) can build and use. Glancing out at the universe I can see lots of things which could be a solution. (Things like “Evernote” spring to mind in case you’re eyes are popping out of your head from all this stratospheric cogitation and you just want me to shut up and get to the punchline but sorry this post doesn’t end with me telling you what KS I’m now using.)
So far, so good. Final question:
What would a solution look like? The KS would be easy to get started. I don’t want to spend months figuring it out. I want to start building the house by tossing a sofa in the bare lot and calling it a first approximation. I’ll erect a tarp when the weather threatens, walls in the fall, etc. It’s not important that it be easy to add to—no, some effort should be required to sift and summarize or filter or whatever as the knowledge is built. Stateful: meaning every time I climb back to that metaphorical hilltop to survey the landscape, I don’t want to have to redo any of my thinking from the last time I was there; duck up to the hilltop, achieve instant perspective and return to the landscape. online is also not a requisite: Sure a lot of the material I’d be learning from would be online, but some won’t be… and importantly, I’m a human not a computer so while I use online tools… well, paper and all works fine too. Plus anything online has maintenance. …but it does need to acknowledge and deal with stuff that’s online.
I have ideas. But as I cautioned at the top, this post is just a place where I wanted to think through all of the above.
