This has me re-thinking what Mike Caulfield was trying to achieve with Wikity. I am also left thinking about Ryan Holiday’s advice in regards to how to ‘read to lead’, as well as Julie Beck’s point to simply do something. Personally, I think that the biggest challenge is actually capturing the ideas when they arise.
For something a bit longer, find this guide from Thriving Henry, while Dave Winer demonstrates how to achieve the same outcome with Little Outliner.
The field of taking notes, Zettelkasten, personal knowledge management interests me immensely. Because it is such a large and extensive field, I don’t always know where to start and I just step into something in the middle. While reading I come across interesting videos and explanations, but often I still miss the head and the tail. Aaron Davis has bookmarked an interesting series of videos on Read Write Collect about making Permanent Notes, among other things. I watched the video below with interest and thought about how this would work for my situation.
I work less academically in my notes than Steve Brophy does above. What I find interesting is how he has “conversations” with the topics in his notes. So that what he calls a “Sonic Landscape of Conversations” is created. I am less concerned with such loose terms and how they can be related to each other. Still, the process is interesting, because Steve explains how he works interdisciplinary . Because notes and loose thoughts are linked together, a real web of ideas is created and you gain new insights through the sometimes unexpected relationships.
Aaron links in his blog post to more resources that I definitely want to explore further for my own Frankopedia.
Some useful looking links here. Thanks Aaron.
I’ve been digging deeper and deeper into some of the topics and sub-topics.
The biggest problem I’ve seen thus far is a lot of wanna-be experts and influencers (especially within the Roam Research space) touching on the very surface of problem. I’ve seen more interesting and serious people within the Obsidian community sharing their personal practices and finding pieces of that useful.
The second issue may be that different things work somewhat differently for different people, none of whom are using the same tools or even general systems. Not all of them have the same end goals either. Part of the key is finding something useful that works for you or modifying something slowly over time to get it to work for you.
At the end of the day your website holds the true answer: read, write, respond (along with the implied “repeat” at the end).
One of the best and most thorough prescriptions I’ve seen is Sönke Ahrens’ book which he’s written after several years of using and researching a few particular systems.
I’ve been finding some useful tidbits from my own experience and research into the history of note taking and commonplace book traditions. The memory portion intrigues me a lot as well as I’ve done quite a lot of research into historical methods of mnemonics and memory traditions. Naturally the ancient Greeks had most of this all down within the topic of rhetoric, but culturally we seem to have unbundled and lost a lot of our own traditions with changes in our educational system over time.
Also on:
Whoa! Too much work and not the way human beings typically read. I’m the sort of person for whom note taking etc. interferes with “remembering”.
When I take notes not only do I miss the big picture, but I think I am also letting my brain know it’s okay to forget. Taking notes does not improve my memory; it makes recall worse because my brain is forgetting as fast as I can write.
I think if the default view point is to create stuff that can easily processed by machines (ergo turning human into machine), then what Steve Brophy is doing makes sense.
Thank you for the comment Khurt. I kind of agree with you about the method and the outcome. A part of me wishes I was so methodical, but a part of me also likes how ad hoc connections occur. I think at the end of the day, maybe what is important is to keep going, rather than remembering everything. I fear that the demand to take note of everything adds something else to the to do list.