Books are about large blocks of uninterrupted time...

( ~13:00)

Perhaps. I don't think so. With a Zettelkasten I believe you can write without 4-hour deep work blocks... However, maybe he is right... I haven't really written yet so I can't be certain.

Ryan Holiday says that our society struggles with accepting that we owe things to other people...

This reminds me of Simone Weil's notion of "no rights, only responsibilities"... A right by itself has no power, only obligation has. A right is an obligation toward us fulfilled. Only other people have rights, and we have obligations.

Getting into this frame of mind allows one to live a far more righteous and fulfilled as well as calm life. Once you acknowledge that you have no rights, you can not cling to them, and thus you don't view things as unfair to you.

"You get surprised even by your own notes."

Yes, that's exactly what Niklas Luhmann mentioned as the prerequisite for effective communication (with a Zettelkasten).

"You can see I have quite a lot notes I have to make."

This is a difference in mentality between Ryan Holiday and me (as well as Muhammed Ali Kilic)

@M.AKilic50

Our mentality (inspired by GTD and other standard productivity stuff, mostly Flow) is to avoid creating homework.

You don't HAVE to make notes on something. You select what you deem valuable and are interested in working with at the moment.

Because of the marginal gains effect I wrote about earlier, it doesn't matter if you don't make a lot of notes. Besides, you can always return later--especially with a proper bib card and potentially a custom index/ToC for a book.

A Zettelkasten is the lazy man's path to excellence.

(this is an ironic statement of mine because a Zettelkasten asks a lot of work over time. However, it doesn't have to be on a day to day basis. Plus you work only on what you want, hence it doesn't require that much discipline.)

"If you do one or two positive contributions a day, it adds up." - Ryan Holiday

Perhaps this is the essence of both Zettelkasten and Commonplace books; Marginal Gains.

Exponentional Increase over time. Upon first glance, it seems linear (1+1 = 2)... However, the formula is different because, at least in Zettelkasten, a new note means N new possible connections as this new note can virtually be connected to all other notes. In a Zettelkasten this is explicit, in a commonplace book connections are implicit.

Perhaps I need to argue more with the authors and the content, as Adler & van Doren also recommend.

This might be a limitation in (the way I do) Zettelkasten. Because I am not writing in the margins and not engage in "tearing up" the book, I am less inclined to argue against/with the work.

Maybe I need to do this more using bib-card. Further thought on implementation necessary...

Perhaps a different reason is that I like to get through most books quickly rather than slowly. Sometimes I do the arguing afterward, within my ZK.

I need to reflect on this at some point (in the near future) and optimize my processes.

Watching this now, I am reminded that I really want to read more. To become erudite.

1:00 Gladiator (2000) happens during the Macromannic wars (one of the campaigns of Marcus Aurelius)

08:00 Ryan Holiday built in a bunch of structure — as he progressed more in his career, he transitioned to flexibility.

• See ZK on balancing Confucius and Lao Tzu

We have now reached peak zettelkasten-I-just-don't-know-what-the-definition-even-is-anymore. And this is a Substack focused on productivity.

The definition of zettelkasten here is the lowest possible version.

It's (falsely, I think) described as "popularized by Ryan Holiday" who has a form of practice, but doesn't describe it as zettelkasten. (Has he ever used the word on his blog? There's one throw away mention to it and Luhmann #, Google doesn't find any others.)

Then as a cherry on top, he presents a mélange of methods as a Hybrid PKM system.

09:00 discipline as sensing, is this good/bad

Also see this as idea of 6th sense. Sensing when something is working, isn’t working, is flowing and also not)

reply to u/glugolly at https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/16njtfx/comment/k1l8lyk/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=web2x&context=3

How is it that you're defining knowledge management or knowledge management system?

I would argue that any zettelkasten of any stripe is taking knowledge/ideas from either content or one's own brain and transferring them into some sort of media by which they are managed or structured in some way for later linking, combination, or other reuse. By base definition this is clearly knowledge management. I don't know how one defines it otherwise except by pure denial.

Your view of zettelkasten seems remarkably narrow. As a small sample the original Maschinen der Phantasie Marbach exhibition in 2013, which broadly prefigured the popularization of zettelkasten (and in particular the launch of zettelkasten.de) which we see today featured six zettelkasten of which Luhmann's was the only one with reference numbers or what we might now consider explicit HTML-like links. Most of the others contained either explicit groupings or implied links, but that doesn't diminish the value they held for their creators for creating a conversation of ideas for them. Incidentally most of the zettelkasten featured there prefigured Luhmann's and only two were roughly contemporaneous with his.

If you look more closely at Adler, et al. you'll notice that the entire purpose of their enterprise was to create and nurture a conversation between themselves and their readers with texts and authors spanning over 2,500 years, a point which is underlined by the introductory volume which preceded the two volumes of the Syntopicon. Not coincidentally, that first volume of the 54 book series was entitled "The Great Conversation."

Specifically from Adler's "How to Read a Book", the first edition of which predated the Great Books of the Western World:

Reading a book should be a conversation between you and the author.

This is a process which is effectuated by

Marking a book is literally an expression of your differences or your agreements with the author. It is the highest respect you can pay him.

and later,

That is to make notes about the shape of the discussion-the discussion that is engaged in by all of the authors, even if unbeknownst to them. For reasons that will become clear in Part Four, we prefer to call such notes dialectical.

(As an aside, why aren't more people talking about the nature of dialectical notes, which seem far more important and useful than either fleeting notes and permanent notes?)

In your link to Holiday, he doesn't say his system isn't a zettelkasten, a word which an English speaker was highly unlikely to have used in 2013 in any case, even when referencing Manfred Kuehn from 2007. It simply indicates that "[Luhmann's] discipline seems to exceed mine because I am a lot less ordered".

The Goitein source (which I wrote) may use commonplace book as a descriptor but that doesn't mitigate the fact that the entirety of the zettelkasten tradition arises from it (the primary difference being things written (usually) on bound pages versus slips of paper). Before these there was the closely related idea of florilegia stemming from the earlier locus communis (Latin) and tópos koinós (Greek).

https://thoughtcatalog.com/ryan-holiday/2013/12/the-notecard-system-the-key-for-remembering-organizing-and-using-everything-you-read/

This was the original post which Holiday copied to his own site at: https://ryanholiday.net/the-notecard-system-the-key-for-remembering-organizing-and-using-everything-you-read/

Cross reference notes there.

Ryan Holiday's system puts some of the work farther from the note taking origin compared with Nicholas Luhmann's system which places more of it up front.

How, if at all, do the payoffs from doing each of these vary for the end user of the system?

https://geniuslink.com/

First saw via Ryan Holiday.

Also saw a live example on 2023-06-16 at https://personalknowledgegraphs.com/#/page/pkg for an affiliate link for a book.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dU7efgGEOgk

I wish he'd gotten into more of the detail of the research and index card making here as that's where most of the work lies. He does show some of his process of laying out and organizing the cards into some sort of sections using 1/3 cut tabbed cards. This is where his system diverges wildly from Luhmann's. He's now got to go through all the cards and do some additional re-reading and organizational work to put them into some sort of order. Luhmann did this as he went linking ideas and organizing them up front. This upfront work makes the back side of laying things out and writing/editing so much easier. It likely also makes one more creative as one is regularly revisiting ideas, juxtaposing them, and potentially generating new ones along the way rather than waiting until the organization stage to have some of this new material "fall out".

Ryan Holiday o prowadzeniu commonplace book, choć tak naprawdę nie o tym, bo też o karteczkowej metodzie. Właściwie to niewiele wyjaśnie jak to działa i czym należy się kierować. Wg mnie to mało użyteczny zbiór cytatów i obserwacji, jednak dobry tekst do zainspirowania się, aby gromadzić informację i rozbudowywać swój zbiór wiedzy.

Because reading, annotating/note taking, and occasional outlining and writing can be broken down into small, concrete building blocks, each part of the process can be done separately and discretely with relatively easy ability to shift from one part of the process to another.

Importantly, one can be working on multiple different high level projects (content production: writing, audio, video, etc.) simultaneously in a way which doesn't break the flow of one's immediate reading. While a particular note within a piece may not come to fruition within a current imagined project, it may spark an idea for a future as yet unimagined project.

Aside: It would seem that Ryan Holiday's descriptions of his process are discrete with respect to each individual project. He's never mentioned using or reusing notes from past projects for current or future projects. He's even gone to the level that he creates custom note cards for his current project which have a title pre-printed on them.

Does this pre-titling help to provide him with more singular focus for his specific workflow? Some who may be prone to being side-tracked or with specific ADHD issues may need or be helped by these visual and workflow cues to stay on task, and as a result be helped by them. For others it may hinder their workflows and creativity.

This process may be different for beginning students or single project writers versus career writers (academics, journalists, fiction and non-fiction writers).

As a concrete example of the above, I personally made a note here about Darwin and Lamarck for a separate interest in evolution which falls outside of my immediate area of interest with respect to note taking and writing output.

Despite doing the lion's share of the work of linking cards along the way, Scheper shows that there's still some work of laying out an outline and moving cards around to achieve a final written result.

compare this with Victor Margolin's process: https://hypothes.is/a/oQFqvm3IEe2_Fivwvx596w

also compare with the similar processes of Ryan Holiday and Robert Greene

https://edward-slingerland.medium.com/there-is-only-one-way-to-write-a-book-637535ef5bde

Example of someone's research, note taking, and writing process using index cards.

Broadly, this is very similar to the process used by Ryan Holiday, Robert Green, and Victor Margolin.

While he can't recall the name of the teacher, he credits his 7th grade English teacher (1980-1981) for teaching him the method.

Edward Slingerland is represented by Brockman Inc.

3/ Champion your competition’s work<br><br>With his reading list email, on podcasts, in his bookstore, Ryan promotes other books more than his own.<br><br>When asked, he’ll say:<br><br>“Authors think they’re competing with other authors. They’re not. They’re competing with people not reading.”

— Billy Oppenheimer (@bpoppenheimer) August 24, 2022

Oppenheimer, Billy. “The Notecard System: Capture, Organize, and Use Everything You Read, Watch, and Listen To.” Billy Oppenheimer (blog), August 26, 2022. https://billyoppenheimer.com/notecard-system/.

Note that he explicitly calls out that his is an adapted version of a preexisting thing--namely a system that was taught to Ryan Holiday who was taught by Robert Greene.

Presumably there is both some economic and street cred value for the author/influencer in claiming his precedents.

It's worth noting that he mentions other famous users, though only the smallest fraction of them with emphasis up front on his teachers whose audience he shares financially.

https://www.instagram.com/p/CeWV6xBuZUN/?hl=en

Ryan Holiday in the past has made custom 4 x 6" index cards for taking notes for his individual projects.

Pictured: A custom slip with 11 light gray lines, small margins all around, and at the top the printed words: "Courage. Temperance. Justice. Wisdom."

<small><cite class='h-cite via'>ᔥ <span class='p-author h-card'>Billy Oppenheimer, research assistant to Ryan Holiday</span> in The Notecard System: Capture, Organize, and Use Everything You Read, Watch, and Listen To - Billy Oppenheimer (<time class='dt-published'>11/03/2022 16:53:44</time>)</cite></small>

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A post shared by Ryan Holiday (@ryanholiday)

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I used to do this sort of practice before, but I used buckslips instead.

His collection is incredibly important to him. He states this in a way that's highly reminiscent of Jean Paul.

"In the event of a fire, the black-bound excerpts are to be saved first." —instructions from Jean Paul to his wife before setting off on a trip in 1812 #

machine translation (Google)

Quite a few boxes have been created for just one book, Siegfried Kracauer's collections for his monograph on Jacques Offenbach, for example, the photo archive of the historian Reinhart Koselleck with sections of thousands of photos of equestrian monuments, for example, or the box by the Romanist Hans Robert Jauß, in which he wrote for his Habilitation dissertation bogged down medieval animal names and characteristics.

A zettelkasten need not be a lifetime practice and historically many were created for supporting a specific project or ultimate work. Examples can be seen in the work of both Robert Green and his former assistant Ryan Holiday who kept separate collections for each of their books, as well as those displayed at the German Literature Archive in Marbach (2013) including Siegfried Kracauer (for a monograph on Jacques Offenbach), Reinhart Koselleck (equestrian related photos), Hans Robert Jauß (a dissertation on medieval animal names and characteristics).

Film making is like note taking

Incidentally, one should note that the video is made up of snippets over time and then edited together at some later date. Specifically, these snippets are much like regularly taken notes which can then be later used (and even re-used--some could easily appear in other videos) to put together some larger project, namely this compilation video of his process. Pointing out this parallel between note taking and movie/videomaking, makes the note taking process much more easily seen, specifically for students. Note taking is usually a quite and solo endeavor done alone, which makes it much harder to show and demonstrate. And when it is demonstrated or modeled, it's usually dreadfully boring and uninteresting to watch compared to seeing it put together and edited as a finished piece. Edits in a film are visually obvious while the edits in written text, even when done poorly, are invisible.

https://lifehacker.com/the-pile-of-index-cards-system-efficiently-organizes-ta-1599093089

LifeHacker covers the Hawk Sugano's Pile of Index Cards method, which assuredly helped promote it to the GTD and productivity crowd.

One commenter notices the similarities to Ryan Holiday's system and ostensibly links to https://thoughtcatalog.com/ryan-holiday/2013/08/how-and-why-to-keep-a-commonplace-book/

Two others snarkily reference using such a system to "keep track of books in the library [,,,] Sort them out using decimal numbers on index cards in drawers or something..." and "I need to tell my friend Dewey about this! He would run with it." Obviously they see the intellectual precursors and cousins of the method, though they haven't looked at the specifics very carefully.

One should note that this may have been one of the first systems to mix information management/personal knowledge management with an explicit Getting Things Done set up. Surely there are hints of this in the commonplace book tradition, but are there any examples that go this far?

Index cards for commonplacing?

I know that Robert Greene and Ryan Holiday have talked about their commonplace methods using index cards before, and Mortimer J. Adler et al. used index cards with commonplacing methods in their Great Books/Syntopicon project, but is anyone else using this method? Where or from whom did you learn/hear about using index cards? What benefits do you feel you're getting over a journal or notebook-based method? Mortimer J. Adler smoking a pipe amidst a sea of index cards in boxes with 102 topic labels (examples: Law, World, Love, Life, Being, Sin, Art, Citizen, Change, etc.)

https://archive.org/details/MyInnerWorkingsTheCommonplaceBookOrKnowledgeBoxNoteCardSystem

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gT1EExZkzMM

Quick outline of how Holiday reads, annotates, and then processes the ideas from books into his index card-based commonplace book.

https://thoughtcatalog.com/ryan-holiday/2013/08/how-and-why-to-keep-a-commonplace-book/

An early essay from Ryan Holiday about commonplace books including how, why, and their general value.

Notice that the essay almost reads as if he's copying out cards from his own system. This is highlighted by the fact that he adds dashes in front 23 of his paragraphs/points.

In August 2013 Ryan Holiday said that he'd been commonplacing for "6 or 7 years".

Ryan Holiday's experience and advice indicates that he does little organization and doesn't put emphasis on categories for organization. He advises "Focus on finding good stuff and the themes will reveal themselves."

This puts him on a very particular part of the spectrum in terms of his practice.

By at least 2013 Ryan Holiday was aware of Ronald Reagan's note card system from a 2011 USA Today article and related book.

Ryan Holiday keeps a commonplace book on 4x6 inch ruled index cards with a theme or category written in the top right corner. He learned his system from Robert Greene.

Of crucial importance to him was the ability to shuffle the cards and move them around.

https://thoughtcatalog.com/ryan-holiday/2013/08/how-and-why-to-keep-a-commonplace-book/

Holiday followed this article up two days later with https://thoughtcatalog.com/ryan-holiday/2013/08/everyone-should-keep-a-commonplace-book-great-tips-from-people-who-do/

This article predated a somewhat related LifeHacker piece: https://lifehacker.com/im-ryan-holiday-and-this-is-how-i-work-1485776137

https://lifehacker.com/im-ryan-holiday-and-this-is-how-i-work-1485776137

An influential productivity article from 2013-12-18 that is seen quoted over the blogosphere for the following years that broadened the idea of the commonplace book and the later popularity of the zettelkasten.

Note that zettelkasten.de was just starting up at about this time period, though it follows the work of Manfred Kuehn's note taking blog.

Ryan Holiday's note taking practice extends to using the same 4x6 inch index cards for his to do lists.

Evidence that Ryan Holiday doesn't have any memory practice.

Surprising?...

Holiday prefers physical index cards over digital systems like Evernote because he wants to have the ability to "move the stuff around."

Ryan Holiday learned his index card-based commonplace book system from writer Robert Greene for whom he worked as an assistant.

As a strong indicator of how important his commonplace book is, Ryan Holiday not only indicates that it's the tool he can't live without but he says it "is the first thing I'm taking out of my house in a fire."

Link to: - https://hypothes.is/a/KCnrXMdHEeyxz3sZy3Uo5g

Cross reference with his fears of robbery as well: - https://hypothes.is/a/BLL9TvZ9EeuSIrsiWKCB9w

Thanks! Robert Greene's method has also been heavily written about by Ryan Holiday who worked for him, used it subsequently, and has delineated the process in reasonable detail in several posts on his own blog and in Lifehacker in 2013/2014: - https://lifehacker.com/im-ryan-holiday-and-this-is-how-i-work-1485776137 - https://ryanholiday.net/how-and-why-to-keep-a-commonplace-book/ - https://ryanholiday.net/the-notecard-system-the-key-for-remembering-organizing-and-using-everything-you-read/

Commonplacing goes back over two millenia and was very popular in the 1500-1800s. I'm specifically more interested in examples of refined heavily linked zk techniques as one "comes down the stretch". Thus far there are incredibly few public examples in the space...

https://medium.com/thrive-global/the-notecard-system-the-key-for-remembering-organizing-and-using-everything-you-read-4f48a82371b1

The original copy of this is on Holiday's own website:

https://ryanholiday.net/the-notecard-system-the-key-for-remembering-organizing-and-using-everything-you-read/

Realizing that my prior separate advice wasn't as actionable or specific, I thought I'd take another crack at your question.

Some seem to miss the older techniques and names for this sort of practice and get too wound up in words like categories, tags, #hashtags, [[wikilinks]], or other related taxonomies and ontologies. Some become confounded about how to implement these into digital systems. Simplify things and index your ideas/notes the way one would have indexed books in a library card catalog, generally using subject, author and title.

Since you're using an approach more grounded in the commonplace book tradition rather than a zettelkasten one, put an easy identifier on your note (this can be a unique title or number) and then cross reference it with any related subject headings or topical category words you find useful.

Here's a concrete example, hopefully in reasonable detail that one can easily follow. Let's say you have a quote you want to save:

No piece of information is superior to any other. Power lies in having them all on file and then finding the connections. There are always connections; you have only to want to find them.—Umberto Eco, Foucault's Pendulum

In a paper system you might give this card the identification number #237. (This is analogous to the Dewey Decimal number that might be put on a book to find it on the shelves.) You want to be able to find this quote in the future using the topical words "power", "information", "connections", and "quotes" for example. (Which topical headings you choose and why can be up to you, the goal is to make it easier to dig up for potential reuse in future contexts). So create a separate paper index with alphabetical headings (A-Z) and then write cards for your topical headings. Your card with "power" at the top will have the number #237 on it to indicate that that card is related to the word power. You'll ultimately have other cards that relate and can easily find everything related to "power" within your system by using this subject index.

You might also want to file that quote under two other "topics" which will make it easy to find: primarily the author of the quote "Umberto Eco" and the title of the source Foucault's Pendulum. You can add these to your index the same way you did "power", "information", etc., but it may be easier or more logical to keep a bibliographic index separately for footnoting your material, so you might want a separate bibliographic index for authors and sources. If you do this, then create a card with Umberto Eco at the top and then put the number #237 on it. Later you'll add other numbers for other related ideas to Eco. You can then keep your card "Eco, Umberto" alphabetized with all the other authors you cite. You'll effect a similar process with the title.

With this done, you now have a system in which you don't have to categorize a single idea in a single place. Regardless of what project or thing you're working on, you can find lots of related notes. If you're juggling multiple projects you can have an index file or document outline for these as well. So your book project on the History of Information could have a rough outline of the book on which you've got the number #237 in the chapter or place where you might use the quote.

Hopefully this will be even more flexible than Holiday's system because that was broadly project based. In practice, if you're keeping notes over a lifetime, you're unlikely to be interested in dramatically different areas the way Ryan Holiday or Robert Greene were for disparate book projects, but will find more overlapping areas. Having a more flexible system that will allow you to reuse your notes for multiple settings or projects will be highly valuable.

For those who are using digital systems, ask yourself: "what functions and features allow you to do these analog patterns most easily?" If you're using something like Obsidian which has #tagging functionality that automatically creates an index of all your tags, then leverage that and remove some of the manual process. The goal is to make sure the digital system is creating the structure to allow you to easily find and use your notes when you need them. If your note taking system doesn't have custom functionalities for any of these things, then you'll need to do more portions of them manually.

https://danallosso.substack.com/p/note-cards?s=r

Outline of one of Dan's experiments writing a handbook about reading, thinking, and writing. He's taking a zettelkasten-like approach, but doing it as a stand-alone project with little indexing and crosslinking of ideas or creating card addresses.

This sounds more akin to the processes of Vladimir Nabokov and Ryan Holiday/Robert Greene.

Ryan Holiday's system is a more traditional commonplace book approach with broad headings which can feel project-based or bucket-based and thus not as flexible or useful to some users.

https://ryanholiday.net/the-notecard-system-the-key-for-remembering-organizing-and-using-everything-you-read/

Ryan Holiday notes the similarity of his method to that of the Dewey Decimal system and library card catalogs.

Ryan Holiday on 2014-04-01 mentioning Niklas Luhmann and his Zettelkasten and linking to another article.

Note he doesn't use the phrase commonplace book here, though the comments includes it.