3 Matching Annotations
  1. Last 7 days
    1. Confessions of an Office Supply Junky - Episode 5: The Hipster PDA - YouTube<br /> by [[Joe Van Cleave]] video circa 2016<br /> accessed on 2025-09-15T12:38:20

      Joe Van Cleave had a pencil box with index cards and a pen with which he used to keep a "Random Access Journaling System, using index cards and topical filing by subject" (dated March 2004). He was using 4 x 6" index cards.

      He had a 3 x 5" hipster PDA based on Merlin Mann's idea that had thin metal covers with index cards and a book ring to hold it all together. He used colored cards to create section dividers in his hipster PDA.

      He mentions the overlap of the hipster PDA with David Allen's Getting Things Done (GTD) movement.

      JVC started using a hipster PDA in February 2007

      He archived them in chronological order.

      Grass roots use of the hipster PDA nudged larger stationers like Oxford to make vertical lined index cards specifically for hipster PDAs.

      JVC also shows a storyboard done on index cards with two book rings as binding.

      Renaissance Art has a 3x5" index card holder made out of leather as a wallet.

      JVC was also using a bulldog clip to hold together his index cards.

  2. Nov 2024
    1. @chrisaldrich Do you have some results from your online sessions? New insights from reading Doto's book?

      Reply to @Edmund https://forum.zettelkasten.de/discussion/comment/21907/#Comment_21907

      Doto's book is the best and tightest yet for explaining both how to implement a Luhmann-artig zettelkasten as well as why along with the affordances certain elements provide. He does a particularly good job of providing clear and straightforward definitions which have a muddy nature in some of the online spaces, which tends to cause issues for people new to the practice. Sadly, for me, there isn't much new insight due to the amount of experience and research I bring to the enterprise.

      I do like that Doto puts at least some emphasis on why one might want to use alphanumerics even in digital spaces, an idea which has broadly been sidelined in most contexts for lack of experience or concrete affordances for why one might do it.

      The other area he addresses, which most elide and the balance gloss over at best, is that of the discussion of using the zettelkasten for output. Though he touches on some particular methods and scaffolding, most of it is limited to suggestions based on his own experience rather than a broader set of structures and practices. This is probably the biggest area for potential expansion and examples I'd like to see, especially as I'm reading through Eustace Miles' How to Prepare Essays, Lectures, Articles, Books, Speeches and Letters, with Hints on Writing for the Press (London: Rivingtons, 1905).

      I could have had some more material in chapter 3 which has some fascinating, but still evolving work. Ideas like interstitial journaling and some of the related productivity methods are interesting, but Doto only barely scratches the surface on some of these techniques and methods which go beyond the traditional "zettelkasten space", but which certainly fall in his broader framing of "system for writing" promise.

      Doto's "triangle of creativity", a discussion of proximal feedback, has close parallels of Adler and Hutchins' idea of "The Great Conversation" (1952), which many are likely to miss.

      For those who missed out, Dan Allosso has posted video from the sessions at https://lifelonglearn.substack.com/ Sadly missing, unless you're in the book club, are some generally lively side chat discussions as the primary video discussion was proceeding. The sessions had a breadth of experiences from the new to the old hands as well as from students to teachers and everywhere in between.

  3. Jul 2023
    1. "I keep a dated diary of sorts on index cards, though they rarely go past one card a day."This is something I haven't heard of before. So, you journal/diary on index cards, one per day?

      reply to u/taurusnoises (Bob Doto) at tk

      Yep, for almost a full year now on 4x6" index cards. (Receipts for the kids: https://boffosocko.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/07/wp-1688411021709-scaled.jpg)

      Previously I'd used a Hobonichi Cousin (page per day) journal for this. (Perhaps I should have stayed with the A6 size instead of the larger A5 for consistency?) Decades ago (around 1988ish?) I had started using a 2 page per day DayTimer pocket planners (essentially pre-printed/timed index cards spiral bound into monthly booklets which they actually shipped in index card-like plastic boxes for storage/archival purposes). Technically I've been doing a version of this for a really long time in one form or another.

      It generally includes a schedule, to do lists (bullet journal style), and various fleeting notes/journaling similar to the older Memindex format, just done on larger cards for extra space. I generally either fold them in half for pocket storage for the day or carry about in groups for the coming week(s) when I'm away from my desk for extended periods (also with custom blank index card notebooks/pads).

      I won't go into the fact that in the 90's I had a 5,000+ person rolodex... or an index card (in the entertainment they called them buck slips) with the phone numbers and names of \~100 people I dealt with regularly when early brick cell phones didn't have great (or any) storage/functionality.