• Overview of the AI Audio/Note-Taker Category

  • Tested a wide range of devices categorized as AI pins, note-takers, second brains, or lifelongers [00:00:06].
  • Distinct from previous failures like the Rabbit R1 or Humane AI Pin because they do not aim to replace smartphones [00:00:23].
  • Big tech is moving heavily into the space, with Amazon and Meta recently acquiring key startups in the audio sector [00:00:39].
  • Devices share the same core workflow: record audio, transfer it to a phone, transcribe it via a mobile app, and process it with an AI model for summaries and action items [00:01:14].

• Two Key Product Dimensions

  • Trigger Recording vs. Always Listening: Devices either record only when manually prompted or constantly listen to collect continuous ambient context [00:01:41].
  • Summarization vs. Proactive Interpretation: Products focus strictly on summarizing audio or aim to actively interpret and guide the user [00:01:41].

• Triggered Recording Tools (The Currently Practical Category)

  • Evaluation Criteria: Transcripts and speaker detection are very similar across brands because they outsource to the same providers [00:02:42]. Differentiation comes from:
    • File Transfer: Speed and reliability of moving audio files to a phone [00:03:02].
    • App Quality & Ecosystem: Stability of the mobile app and existence of a desktop app [00:03:13].
    • Trust & Longevity: Manufacturer data privacy practices and financial stability to avoid hardware bricking [00:03:19].
    • Data Lock-in: The ease of exporting notes to external personal knowledge management systems [00:03:30].
    • Cost Structure: Upfront hardware price combined with ongoing subscription costs for server-side AI processing [00:03:35].
  • Top Recommendation — Plaud: The clear winner for file transfer speed/reliability, background Bluetooth/Wi-Fi syncing, cloud upload capabilities, and a functional template ecosystem [00:03:58]. Offers a robust desktop companion app that records virtual meetings via system audio without utilizing an intrusive bot [00:04:59]. It maintains SOC 2 and HIPAA compliance for data privacy [00:05:42]. Data lock-in is mitigated via Zapier integrations, automatic email delivery, and a developer community [00:07:01].
  • Cost-Saving Alternative: The open-source "AudioBridge" project allows users to bypass expensive Plaud subscription costs by utilizing their own direct AI API keys [00:08:41].
  • Other Notable Contenders:
    • Soundcore: Excellent hardware with a built-in magnetic charging case, but restricted by a basic headphone app that lacks AI search or customization [00:08:58].
    • Pocket: Refined premium metal hardware and strong export features (MCP server), but held back by inconsistent phone transfer reliability and sudden changes to their subscription plans [00:09:37].
    • Haidoc P1 / P1 Mini: Connects directly via Bluetooth headphones to a computer or phone to save files locally on internal memory without requiring software installations—ideal for highly locked-down enterprise computers [00:10:36].

• Always-Listening Devices (The "Second Brain" Category)

  • Focused on building an all-knowing memory backup with perfect recall, daily recaps, and automated task generation [00:11:29].
  • Tested Options:
    • Friend & Lookie: Non-recommended. Friend is invasive/sassy; Lookie includes a camera but looks like a conspicuous police body camera and performs poorly [00:11:41].
    • Limitless Pendant: Off the market following Meta's acquisition of the company [00:12:06].
    • OMI: Open-source and ambitious (working on screen recording and AI glasses), but currently buggy and lacks product focus [00:12:44].
    • B: Highly polished initially, but customer support and software stability degraded heavily after Amazon's acquisition [00:13:29].
    • Fieldly: The best of the group due to its focused approach, clean transcriptions, reliable hardware, multi-day battery life, and strong desktop app integration [00:14:13].
  • Fatal Flaws ("Context Rot"): Current models fail at accurate diarization (figuring out who said what), often attributing dialogue heard from nearby strangers or media to the user [00:15:05]. The user faces a heavy administrative burden to clean up flawed AI data, making the absolute "always-on second brain" promise currently non-viable [00:15:34].

• Legal, Ethical, and Social Boundaries

  • Roughly 40% of the US population lives in two-party consent states, creating legal friction for recording private interactions [00:16:33].
  • Socially, requesting recording consent in private contexts remains awkward, frequently altering normal human behavior [00:16:48].

• Future Market Trends

  • Form Factors: Sharp rise in ring-based options (Sandbar, Pebble, Fable) and a shift toward self-improvement pendants focused on emotion-tracking and self-awareness (Nerva, Nuna) [00:17:24].
  • Glasses & Visuals: Shift toward smart glasses (Meta Ray-Ban integrations, Pickle, Rokid) and pendant cameras [00:18:01].
  • Industry Heavyweights: Big tech is aggressively entering the market; OpenAI is working on an audio device, and Apple recently acquired QAI for $1.5B to decipher silent speech via jaw/facial micro-movements [00:18:29].
  • Mainstream Adoption Outlook: Unlike the failure of Google Glass, modern audio-only devices feature virtually invisible microphones, bypassing public visibility backlash [00:19:28]. Adoption may mirror a competitive sports dynamic (like the NBA three-point revolution): if the tools offer an undeniable cognitive or professional advantage, adoption will become mandatory to avoid falling behind [00:19:40].

To guard against an accidental upset of the drawer and its entire contents which in the absence of a rod

Card indexes and filing cabinets should have tray stops to help prevent pulling drawers out too quickly and losing all the file organization by dropping the drawer out on the floor.

card systems are highly adaptable

the fact that one's notes can grow in any individual location by placing a new card between any two others is a supremely valuable affordance

reply to u/Beloved-21 at https://old.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/1u2bw2s/index_cards_vs_digital_note_app/

There are a handful of affordances you get with paper over digital.

• Most in the space of embodied cognition would indicate that you will have better retention by writing things down physically versus typing them out.
• studies indicate that the presence of screens/phones reduces the level and quality of the conversation in the room, even when the device is sitting on the table nearby
• people react more at ease with paper note taking, especially in interviews where they tend to be more guarded if you're recording everything
• The act of filing your notes forces you to engage with them multiple times. It's not just re-reading the current note to decide where to place it, but re-reading older notes to decide where the current one fits in. This gives you the benefits of spaced repetition as well as encountering the value of serendipity, synergy, and syzygy
• you're forced to be more concise and selective about what you capture versus digital where it's easier to be a hoarder of material you don't "own" or even understand.
• index cards are just as easy to carry in your pockets as any other device
• physical cards are easier to layout, arrange, and re-arrange in various orders than any of the clunky methods for doing this in the digital space where solid user interface for this sort of affordance is almost entirely lacking.
• paper forces you to slow down and engage with notes in ways that digital notes typically don't
• physical cards actually "get in your way" in a sense while digital cards are always "hidden"

I'm sure you'll find various others hiding in a digital version of my notes: https://hypothes.is/users/chrisaldrich?q=tag%3A%22note+taking+affordances%22

The real question at the end of the day is what works best for you?!? Try them both out for a few weeks or a month or more and chose the version that works best for your modes of thinking. Experimenting is the only way to answer this question for yourself. You may find other affordances that don't apply to others' work.

via u/Low_Mushroom_810 at https://old.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/1svb99e/bye_bye_physical_zettelkasten/

这句结语既是对当前AI能力的谨慎描述，也是对未来可能性的暗示。'For now'一词表明这只是一个暂时状态，暗示AI独立决策影响人类生计的时代可能即将到来，这是一个既令人兴奋又令人不安的前瞻性观点。

That is a large percentage of the grade but it sounds like we will have a lot of help and resources available to us.

This is my note

reply to zk developer at https://reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/1qiwfp0/im_researching_why_zettelkasten_fails_for_a_lot/

Before you do this sort of user research, have you done the research on the dozens and dozens of apps that are already out there (prior art)? What do you think is good about them? Bad? Why are some doing well and others not?

You realize that at once a week since 2019, at least one app a week pops up in the zettelkasten, note taking, productivity/GTD space? Very, very few pass the 6 week mark, let alone the 6 month mark. Why do you want to reinvent the wheel? What are you hoping to get out of it?

Are you self-dogfooding/eating your own cooking? If you're not using and enjoying your own app, why would others?

Simply reading through this sub will give you most of the research and friction points you could want to know about without impinging on our time for something that I'd be willing to bet won't even reach alpha.

Kuehn, Manfred. 2014. “Some Idiosyncratic Reflections on Note-Taking in General and ConnectedText in Particular.” ConnectedText - The Personal Wiki System. https://web.archive.org/web/20140215043743/http://www.connectedtext.com/manfred.php (January 3, 2026).

Wanting to come up with and use knowledge hierarchies seems almost endemic to the beginning note taker. Kuehn's observation here closely matches my experience in watching newcomers to the note taking/zettelkasten space on Reddit.com and other fora over the past 8 years or so.

I love Kuehn's reading/understanding of Webb's work here:

"Relationships and classification can come in at any time, but it is not of prime importance that we observe them in note-taking, at least at first."

Manfred Kuehn used Ecco Pro to index his notebooks in a hybrid analog/digital system.

Some observations on digital note taking with an app from someone who'd previously spent time using card indexes.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecco_Pro<br /> Ecco Pro

https://github.com/lumen-notes/lumen

The court file number is used to identify a document and goes back to the file regulations (AktO) of November 28, 1934 and its predecessors.

The German "file number" (aktenzeichen) is a unique identification of a file, commonly used in their court system and predecessors as well as file numbers in public administration since at least 1934.

Niklas Luhmann studied law at the University of Freiburg from 1946 to 1949, when he obtained a law degree, before beginning a career in Lüneburg's public administration where he stayed in civil service until 1962. Given this fact, it's very likely that Luhmann had in-depth experience with these sorts of file numbers as location identifiers for files and documents.

We know these numbering methods in public administration date back to as early as Vienna, Austria in the 1770s.

The missing piece now is who/where did Luhmann learn his note taking and excerpting practice from? Alberto Cevolini argues that Niklas Luhmann was unaware of the prior tradition of excerpting, though note taking on index cards or slips had been commonplace in academic circles for quite some time and would have been reasonably commonplace during his student years.

Are there handbooks, guides, or manuals in the early 1900's that detail these sorts of note taking practices?

Perhaps something along the lines of Antonin Sertillanges’ book The Intellectual Life (1921) or Paul Chavigny's Organisation du travail intellectuel: recettes pratiques à l’usage des étudiants de toutes les facultés et de tous les travailleurs (in French) (Delagrave, 1918)?

Further recall that Bruno Winck has linked some of the note taking using index cards to legal studies to Roland Claude's 1961 text:

I checked Chavigny’s book on the BNF site. He insists on the use of index cards (‘fiches’), how to index them, one idea per card but not how to connect between the cards and allow navigation between them.

Mind that it’s written in 1919, in Strasbourg (my hometown) just one year after it returned to France. So between students who used this book and Luhmann in Freiburg it’s not far away. My mother taught me how to use cards for my studies back in 1977, I still have the book where she learn the method, as Law student in Strasbourg “Comment se documenter”, by Roland Claude, 1961. Page 25 describes a way to build secondary index to receive all cards relatives to a topic by their number. Still Luhmann system seems easier to maintain but very near.

<small><cite class='h-cite via'>ᔥ <span class='p-author h-card'> Scott P. Scheper </span> in Scott P. Scheper on Twitter: "The origins of the Zettelkasten's numeric-alpha card addresses seem to derive from Niklas Luhmann's early work as a legal clerk. The filing scheme used is called "Aktenzeichen" - See https://t.co/4mQklgSG5u. cc @ChrisAldrich" / Twitter (<time class='dt-published'>06/28/2022 11:29:18</time>)</cite></small>

Link to: - https://hypothes.is/a/Jlnn3IfSEey_-3uboxHsOA - https://hypothes.is/a/4jtT0FqsEeyXFzP-AuDIAA

Make Pocketmods (little Booklets) With MS Word : 3 Steps<br /> by [[Instructables]]<br /> accessed on 2025-10-22T10:24:10

Reply to u/EnvronmentalAngle at https://reddit.com/r/NoteTaking/comments/1o4zfjk/i_never_learned_how_to_take_notes_on_books_does/

I never learned how to take notes on books. Does anyone know of any good guides? Most I find are geared towards college students.

Given the things you're reading and what your ultimate goals on remembering and thinking may be, I'll make a few recommendations I think will be highly useful:

Start with Adler's short article on How to Mark a Book: - Adler, Mortimer J. 1940. “How to Mark a Book.” Saturday Review of Literature 6: 250–52. https://www.unz.com/print/SaturdayRev-1940jul06-00011/ (January 11, 2023). (Alternate .pdf copy: https://docdrop.org/download_annotation_doc/Adler---1940---How-to-Mark-a-Book-fehef.pdf)

Then move on to his more thorough work with Van Doren about how to read. It's relatively short and easy to read, particularly the beginning which might seem almost too easy and straightforward. Don't be lulled into a false sense of security though, as the final sections have some incredibly interesting and subtle ideas that many people, including the college educated broadly ignore. - Adler, Mortimer J., and Charles Van Doren. 2011. How to Read a Book: The Classical Guide to Intelligent Reading. Revised and Updated edition. Touchstone.

While you're reading it, you might appreciate a television version they made to support their ideas in the mid-1970s. In it they talk about some of the very books you're trying to tackle and how you might get more out of them. (The titles on the YouTube page are in Portuguese, but the show itself is in the original English.) - How to Read a Book. 1975. Los Angeles: KCET Los Angeles. https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLPajsb520dyzNw9mHsZnrzi5w9N_amS7E (September 30, 2023).

While you're doing this, perhaps take a brief glimpse at how Adler (and many of his friends and colleagues) were taking notes on index cards to tear apart great books to better understand what was in them. https://forum.zettelkasten.de/discussion/2623/mortimer-j-adlers-syntopicon-a-topically-arranged-collaborative-slipbox

Whether you take your notes in your books (as Adler did) or write them on index cards or in a notebook or commonplace book as others have, you'll be well on your way to both better understanding and longer term remembering.

Good luck in your reading!'

edit: replaced dead link to .pdf

.purpose - keep track of web snarfing

// Use singleFile extension to save/archive webpages in a form that takes the result of running javascript to render the page

so that it can be rendered ready for annutatons

https://www.reddit.com/r/PKMS/comments/1nst6fc/found_a_pkms_method_from_1916_that_im_shocked_i/

Office Appliances, August 1916 p115.

for - adjacency - promissory note - Andy 100 years for materialism - definition - promissory materialism

What comes after Roam's renaissance? — LessWrong<br /> by [[Itay Dreyfus]]<br /> accessed on 2025-08-30T23:55:03

came to via: https://writingslowly.com/2025/08/24/use-case-for-the-zettelkasten.html

oops, Allen accidentally spills this note twice!

https://fieldnotesbrand.com/from-seed

Some interesting history of notebooks in America.

https://www.soenkeahrens.de/en/courses

🌲When Themed Logs are More Useful than Daily Notes by [[Eleanor Konik]]

Konik seems to have realized that filing things topically can be a valuable practice as if this wasn't the mode of the day for centuries now. How did the daily note become such a thing that this was lost? Is it the focus on notebook-based bullet journals? Programmers creating daily notes?

That's even too much for me.

via Fritz Saxl, The History of Warburg’s Library (1943/1944), p. 329.

Where does the work reside? Goes to the idea of zettelkasten coherence.

See: https://boffosocko.com/2024/01/11/on-cohesion-and-coherence-of-the-zettelkasten-where-does-the-work-reside/

Aby Warburg used three primary tools for his research: his library, a card index, and panels.

His panels would be versions of pinboards, chalk boards, dry erase boards, or online versions of things like Canvas in Obsidian. It amounts to the ability to take notes or images on cards and shuffle them around on a table (or affixed to a wall).

EACH NOTE CARD SHOULD BE AS PURE AND SINGULAR AN IDEA AS POSSIBLE, BECAUSE I WANT TO BE ABLE TO MOVE ALL THE PIECES AROUND

This quote speaks to the general idea of "atomic notes" or note size and why they should be small.

It also osculates David Lynch's idea of holding onto the essence of an idea within a story. It's almost as if the adage "take care of the pennies and the pounds will take care of themselves" were applied to the fiction writing process. If you're careful with the small pieces, the bigger piece has a stronger chance of having more authenticity.

The containing block of absolute element must be nonstatic, which is the use of position:relative

test page note

Making Custom Typewriter Line Spacings by [[Joe Van Cleave]]

I suspected JVC would have a custom cut platen gear, but he's using a premarked backing sheet to adjust each line to do one and a half line spacing.

Joe mentions that the manual adjustments on each line is a net positive in that it gives him some time to pause and collect his thoughts before continuing writing on each line.

Interesting that he reduces hundreds of thousands of hours of work to "grown godlike out of the head of Mortimer Adler..."

"How To" Directory by [[Anna Havron]]

Mid-November Update by [[Dan Allosso]]

actual posted reply to https://old.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/1gpx62s/is_a_zettelkasten_a_largely_unknown_form_of/

Taking too narrow a definition of zettelkasten is antithetical to the combinatorial creativity inherent in one of the zettelkasten's most important affordances.

OP was right on track, perhaps without knowing why... I appreciate that you scratch some of the historical surface, but an apple/tomato analogy is flimsy and the family tree is a lot closer. Too often we're ignoring the history of ars excerpendi, commonplacing, waste books, summas, early encyclopedias, etc. from the broad swath of intellectual history. What we now call a zettelkasten evolved very closely out of all these traditions. It's definitely not something that Luhmann suddenly invented one morning while lounging in the bath.

Stroll back a bit into the history to see what folks like Pliny the Elder, Konrad Gessner, Theodor Zwinger, Laurentius Beyerlink, or even the Brothers Grimm were doing centuries back and you'll realize it's all closer to a wide variety of heirloom apples and a modern Gala or Fuji. They were all broadly using zettelkasten methods in their work. Encyclopedias and dictionaries are more like sons and daughters, or viewed in other ways, maybe even parents to the zettelkasten. Almost everyone using them has different means and methods because their needs and goals are all different.

If you dig a bit you'll find fascinating tidbits like Samuel Hartlib describing early versions of "cut and paste" in 1641: “Zwinger made his excerpta by being using [sic] of old books and tearing whole leaves out of them, otherwise it had beene impossible to have written so much if every thing should have beene written or copied out.” (Talk about the collector's fallacy turned on its head!) As nice as Obsidian's new Web Clipper is this month, it's just another tool in a long line of tools that all do the same thing for much the same reasons.

Ignoring these contributions and their closeness means that you won't be able to take advantage of the various affordances all these methods in your own slip box, whichever form it takes. How will you ever evolve it into the paper machine that students a century hence are copying and mimicking and pontificating about in their generation's version of Reddit? Why couldn't a person's slip box have some flavor of an evolving encyclopedia? Maybe it's closer to Adler's Syntopicon? Maybe something different altogether for their particular use?

Those interested in expanding their practice might try some of the following for more details:

• Blair, Ann M. Too Much to Know: Managing Scholarly Information before the Modern Age. Yale University Press, 2010. https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300165395/too-much-know.
• Krajewski, Markus. Paper Machines: About Cards & Catalogs, 1548-1929. Translated by Peter Krapp. History and Foundations of Information Science. MIT Press, 2011. https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/paper-machines.
• Wright, Alex. Cataloging the World: Paul Otlet and the Birth of the Information Age. 1st ed. Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 2014.

For deeper dives on methods, try: https://www.zotero.org/groups/4676190/tools_for_thought/tags/note%20taking%20manuals/items/F8WSEABT/item-list

cc: u/JasperMcGee u/dasduvish u/Quack_quack_22

https://www.zotero.org/groups/4676190/tools_for_thought/tags/note%20taking%20manuals/items/F8WSEABT/item-list

https://old.reddit.com/r/PKMS/comments/1gkdw4m/hidden_flaws_i_found_with_the_zettelkasten_system/

Peerdraft

Collaboration for Obsidian – Sync, Share, and Edit anywhere

https://obsidian.md/clipper

My notes may give some indication about what I find useful about a thing, but certainly not exactly or even all of what I find useful.

How to Spot Emerging Note Clusters Without Alphanumeric Note Numbering? by [[Ton Zijlstra]] in Interdependent Thoughts

I recall Bob Doto had a video at some point in which he used the local graph to show relationships to find bunches of notes for potentially writing pieces or articles as indicated in Tons' article.

One of the biggest issues with digital note taking tools is that they don't make it easy to see and identify chains of notes which might make for articles, chapters, or books.

Surely there must be some way to calculate neighborhoods of notes from a topological perspective? Perhaps if one imposed a measure on the space to create relative distances of notes?

https://www.getoutline.com/

Mentioned by PK

https://omnivore.app

https://tana.inc/docs/supertags

Meet Capacities, the do-it-all productivity app taking on Notion by [[JR Raphael]]

Reporter John Dickerson talking about his notebook.

While he doesn't mention it, he's capturing the spirit of the commonplace book and the zettelkasten.

[...] I see my job as basically helping people see and to grab ahold of what's going on.

You can decide to do that the minute you sit down to start writing or you can just do it all the time. And by the time you get to writing you have a notebook full of stuff that can be used.

And it's not just about the thing you're writing about at that moment or the question you're going to ask that has to do with that week's event on Face the Nation on Sunday.

If you've been collecting all week long and wondering why a thing happens or making an observation about something and using that as a piece of color to explain the political process to somebody, then you've been doing your work before you ever sat down to do your work.

Field Notes: Reporter's Notebook from Coudal Partners on Vimeo.

Doto, Bob. A System for Writing: How an Unconventional Approach to Note-Making Can Help You Capture Ideas, Think Wildly, and Write Constantly - A Zettelkasten Primer. 1st ed. New Old Traditions, 2024. https://amzn.to/3ztjrfb.

Annotation url: urn:x-pdf:231323658d79d9bdf946e1cfbe01e500

Alternate annotation view

We are not sure in what cases already inserted images are affected.

What work exactly does Miles include in his description of preparation of a 30,000 word book in two hours?

He specifically excludes dictation. He does include selection of ideas and arrangement. He also says it includes "collection", but I'm supposing that he's taking a larger tranche of cards from a possibly massive collection and collecting only those he needs right now? Certainly the reading, thinking, and collecting work can't be included in this two hours of work.

Does he have a better definition of what he means by collection?

Miles doesn't go very deep into the idea of how big a note ought to be, only that the system "encourage[s] a business-like brevity."

Unsurprising given that card systems were used for accounting in the early 1900s, but not many manuals cover the use of a card index for addresses (aka Rolodex) of for bills or memoranda.

Miles breaks the writing process down into three broad categories of work, each of which can be done separately to make it easier: - collection of ideas; <br /> - arrangement of ideas; and <br /> - expression of ideas.

Using a card-system over writing on a single sheet of paper or in a notebook allows one to separate the thinking work. Instead of both capturing the idea and arranging them simultaneously, one is splitting these tasks into smaller parts for simpler handling.

Miles goes against the grain of using "cards of equal size", but does so to emphasize the affordance of using them for "Arrangement and Clearness".

One of the major affordances of using a zettelkasten or card index for writing is that it forces the writer to break things down into their constituent parts, thereby making the entire process of writing far easier and less complex. One can separately focus their attention on the smaller steps of collecting, selecting, and arranging the material before beginning to actually write.

Miles, Eustace Hamilton. How to Prepare Essays, Lectures, Articles, Books, Speeches and Letters, with Hints on Writing for the Press. London: Rivingtons, 1905. http://archive.org/details/howtoprepareessa00mileuoft.

Asking my own zettelkasten this question: (responses in no particular order as individual affordances are sure to vary in usefulness by user; some framed as problems while others are framed as affordances, the difference should hopefully be clear to most):

• information overload
• mitigating time loss and context collapse in regularly interrupted work
  • Acts as a ratchet and pawl for thinking work
• tool for thought, and a particularly inexpensive one
• a catalytic surface for thought - see creativity
• removal of cognitive bias by allowing direct juxtaposition of ideas
• "a plan for life and not just a book"
• creativity acceleration
• artificial memory storage/improved memory
  • spaced repetition tool
• improved search by indexing ideas over time
• Clarity/specificity: it's a reminder to be specific about what you're thinking
• a system for marshalling resources (collecting)
• new context creation through context shifting and/or erasure
• "slow burn" productivity
• focusing attention
• fun
• serendipity generation
• attempting to look cool by doing what the cool kids are doing (this usually results in failure modes however)
  • related: fear of missing out (FOMO)

Julius Reizen in reviewing over Umberto Eco's index card system in How to Write a Thesis, defines his own "insurance card" as one which contains "hard-to-classify thoughts, questions, and areas for further inquiry". These he would keep together so that they don't otherwise get lost in the variety of other locations one might keep them

These might be akin to Ahrens' "fleeting notes" but are ones which may not easily or even immediately be converted in to "permanent notes" for one's zettelkasten. However, given their mission critical importance, they may be some of the most important cards in one's repository.

link this to - idea of centralizing one's note taking practice to a single location

Is this idea in Eco's book and Reizen is the one that gives it a name since some of the other categories have names? (examples: bibliographic index cards, reading index cards (aka literature notes), cards for themes, author index cards, quote index cards, idea index cards, connection cards). Were these "officially" named and categorized by Eco?

May be worthwhile to create a grid of these naming systems and uses amongst some of the broader note taking methods. Where are they similar, where do they differ?

Multi-search tools that have full access to multiple trusted data stores (ostensibly personal ones across notebooks, hard drives, social media services, etc.) could potentially solve the problem of needing to remember where you noted something.

Currently, in the social media space especially, this is not a realized service.

noting another thing that does not make sense at first.. will circle back.

https://x.com/david_perell/status/1838425252772077636 via David Perell's podcast.

Sam Altman's note taking process. Pocket notebook, spiral bound so he can tear out pages. No real mention of what he does with them after though a suggestion of typing them out somewhere.

Bu alan için cssleri kaydet.

Why note-taking apps don't make us smarter by [[Casey Newton]]

Newton takes a thin view of the eternal question of information overload and whether or not AI might improve the situation. No serious results...

for - AI - note - personal knowledge - mem.ai - killer feature - first AI app to train directly on your own personal knowledge

for - Indyweb dev - Mem.ai has many features we are designing for in Indyweb but it uses AI and that needs to be researched for privacy issues - AI - mem.AI - first AI note app that trains directly on your own personal knowledge notes

“Real business is done on paper. Okay? Write that down.” —Michael Scott<br /> (class full of students types the quote into their computer keyboards)

The Office S3 E16 "Business School"<br /> Episode aired Feb 15, 2007<br /> https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0964922/ <br /> See also clip at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ol-wwJBVncQ

via Season 2 Episode 8: “Performance Review” - The Office<br /> https://genius.com/The-office-usa-season-2-episode-8-performance-review-annotated

Here we see in Michael Scott's incompetence the potential value of writing down our ideas as we go. Had he written down his ideas, his upcoming meeting with his boss would have gone better.

Isn't it telling that he hits on the idea of leveraging a commonly used communal zettelkasten structure (the suggestion box) to dig himself out?

The atomic nature of notes within a zettelkasten provides a thinking advantage in that it: - systematically remembers the ideas you've had before so that you can free up cognitive space for the future, never worrying about that great idea you "once had" but now can't get back - encourages you to get down enough context that your future self will understand what you were writing and what you meant and not much more - it encourages the "just good enough" which helps suppress the need to get something perfect. For those who are perfectionists, it helps them lock in something and then move onto the next thing more efficiently without getting bogged down into the mud. - give you something as a future base from which to add additional material and ideas or alternately a base from which you can edit, rewrite, or hone the idea further

OTR: suggested by mrtnj at https://discord.com/channels/992400632390615070/992400632776507447/1274393371984662691

Doto wastes no time getting into the most important aspects of note taking. Even before the book has begun, the copyright page in the front matter is getting you ready for what is about to come:

Please cite the author and book when quoting.

https://thesiswhisperer.com/podcasts/<br /> On The Reg (OTR) is a podcast about Work, with an academic slant.

https://www.edvo.com/

Beta app for note taking/productivity.

https://www.linkedin.com/in/kazukinakayashiki/

9/8g The card index technique is based on the experience that one cannot think without writing – at least not in demanding, selectively accessing memory-based contexts.

This also means that one cannot think without making allowances for differences.

I like this slightly more differentiated instantiation for thinking better than Ahren's assertion that one can't think without writing. Luhmann qualifies it over and above Ahrens who elides meaning if this was the source he may have been tangentially referencing. (Was it an explicit reference? check...)

makes me think of tools that extend parts of ourselves. terms like "second brain" or "pkms"

Theatres of Memory (1994) sounds like it's taking lots of examples from a zettelkasten and tying them together.

It's also interesting to note that he published several books posthumously. Was this accomplished in part due to his zettelkasten notes the way others like Ludwig Wittgenstein?

"History Workshop movement" here (https://hypothes.is/a/pzSbkDSWEe-GVmsfDdhvrg) is another good example of the serendipity of autocomplete functionality in Hypothes.is helping to link together disparate examples of ideas which I'd long since forgotten. In this case to a tangential idea I'd read about a year prior (https://hypothes.is/a/bxMX5MKJEe2Wkq_zinG3iw) and been interested in, but completely forgotten about.

Now I've got a link from that to the founder of the movement in 1967.

brief outline of Raphael Samuel's note taking tools and some scant description of the method.

I love the phrase "scholarly prestiditation" to describe the "magic of note taking" along with the idea of combinatorial creativity.

Presumably the quote comes from the Samuel piece quoted in the article.

This is the concept of growth mindset; and we need to teach that to our children in any way possible. It has been shown in studies that growth mindset has a positive causal influence on academic and financial success (I cannot state sources, but I know I've come across this)

Note to self: Research this later.

This is because of the fact that one needs to think (process) before writing. One can't possibly write everything verbatim. Deep processing. Relational thinking.

https://www.instagram.com/onetypedquote/

An Instagram account that aggregates photos of typed quotes, usually including a part of the typewriter it was written on. It amounts to a group manufactured commonplace book.

Found via https://onetypedpage.com/otq/

Dr. Oliver Smithies – Research Archive

ᔥ[[New-Investigator-623]] in Oliver Smithies’ notebooks : r/Zettelkasten

The 1975's Matty Healy uses his phone to take notes. They're more important to him privacy-wise than all the text messages he's ever sent.

He also uses an A5 sized notebook as one of his 10 most important things. He's placed reward notices in his notebooks ranging from $500 to $5000.

How to Write Mini Essays (in Obsidian) by [[Nick Milo]]

meh... a nearly complete retread of [[Odysseas]]' Mini Essays: The Ultimate Learning Tool

Mini Essays: The Ultimate Learning Tool by [[Odysseas]]

Reasonable advice to beginners in the note taking/creation space. Very old hat for me; nothing new. Watched at 2x.

reply to u/judugrovee at https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/1cb1s8j/so_how_do_you_actually_transfer_a_book_with_a/

Others here have written some good advice about the note taking portions, but perhaps some of your issue is with your reading method. To reframe this, I recommend you take a look at How to Read a Book: The Classical Guide to Intelligent Reading (Touchstone, 2011) by Mortimer J. Adler and Charles Van Doren and Adler's earlier article “How to Mark a Book" (Saturday Review of Literature, July 6, 1940. https://www.unz.com/print/SaturdayRev-1940jul06-00011/)

The careful reader will notice that they recommend a lot of the same sorts of note making and annotation practices as Ahrens does (and by extension Luhmann), though their notes are being written in the margins and in the front and back pages of the book. On the reading front, you may be conflating some of the reading/understanding/learning work with the note taking and sense making portions. If instead, you do a quick inspectional read followed by a read through prior to doing a more analytical read you'll find that you have a stronger understanding of the material conceptually. Some of the material you took expansive notes on before will likely seem basic and not require the sorts of permanent notes you've been making. Your cognitive load will have been lessened and you'll instead spend more productive time making fewer, but more useful permanent notes in the end.

On the first reads through, reframe your work as coming to a general understanding of what is going on while you're creating a quick-and-dirty personal index of what is interesting in the work. On subsequent focus, you can hone in on the most important pieces of what the author is saying with respect to your own interests and work. It's here that the dovetailing of good reading method and good note making method will shine for you, and importantly help cut down on what may seem like busywork.

It's not often discussed in some of the ZK space, but reading method can be even more important than note taking method. And at the end of the day, your particular needs and regular practice (practice, and more practice) will eventually help hone your work into something more valuable to you over time. Eventually you'll more quickly rise to the level of what C. Wright Mills called "intellectual craftsmanship" (1952).

Why not this?: Idea -> Note-taking -> (Filter) -> Anki

How to optimise for: * Time * Memory

And what are the opportunity costs?

The same happens when you make atomic notes in Roam or Obsidian, where you can link things. Non-linear note-taking

in ¶90-96 he provides some advice about selection and discrimination of reading sources and materials for indexing as a means of cutting down on the information overload problem

Some of his factors include: - relying on experience in a field/area to narrow down - limiting one's scope of activity - staying away from reference books (dictionaries, encyclopedias - discriminate in favor of the specific versus the general - don't admit duplicative literature (unless one is working syntopically—though he doesn't admit this caveat), and prefer the most authoritative sources - prefer authoritative authors, when given, but make space for new writers who may be more careful in their writing and argumentation - discriminate by style and composition and in particular stay away from pernicious advertising-related material (today he might advocate away from listicles, content farms, etc.)

While Kaiser's definition of literature presumes letters and writing, his use of it doesn't narrow it down to require literacy, it speaks only of observations and language.

Similarly his use of "records" doesn't need to only to require writing.

As such, the description here of recording information, while applicable to literate cultures, leaves plenty of room for oral cultures who use similar systems to do the same thing.

Songlines and related mnemonics are certainly means of indexing information.

Here Kaiser touches on the broader themes inherent in the concepts of atomic notes, which might be used to build up new and interesting structures. He doesn't specify the "size of a note" nor does he say that one will "know it when they see it", but he's suggesting something very close to it.

Rather than define the appropriate size, a feat which is difficult to do at best, he's providing a very narrow set of benefits for encouraging one to cut things down to size as they index them: small pieces are easier to use to build new things.

Kaiser's idea of classification work bears close similarity to Mortimer Adler/Charles Van Doren's concept of coming to terms. There are subtle shades between ideas which must be differentiated so as to better situate them with respect to others.

Kaiser's argument for why building a personal index of notes is more valuable than relying on the indexes of others.

Note that this is answer still stands firmly even after the advent of both the Mundaneum, Google, and other digital search methods (not to mention his statement about ignoring advertising, which obviously had irksome aspects even in 1911.) Our needs and desires are idiosyncratic, so our personal indexes are going to be imminently more valuable to us over time because of these idiosyncrasies. Sure, you could just Google it, but Google answers stand alone and don't build you toward insight without the added work of creating your own index.

Some of this is bound up in the idea that your own personal notes are far more valuable than the notes someone else may have taken and passed along to you.

Only personal experience in your note taking practice will guide you on what is most valuable for excerpting. After time you will come to know and understand what is worth spending your time on and what isn't. You will not learn this from others experience, only your own, and this is why we call it practice.

When were bookmark-like "flags" introduced in America? (Certainly prior to 1908, based on this reference.)

anecdotal evidence from Ironmonger (1908) that this is the first card index book and prior versions are only of shorter booklet-like forms.

(Naturally, I don't trust this in the fullest sense.)

Kaiser, J. Systematic Indexing. The Card System Series 2. London: Sir Isaac Pitman & Sons, Ltd., 1911. http://archive.org/details/systematicindexi00kaisuoft.

Annotation URL: urn:x-pdf:2acc267d4cbe455af640e4a707a84692

Alternate: https://jonudell.info/h/facet/?user=chrisaldrich&max=100&exactTagSearch=true&expanded=true&url=urn%3Ax-pdf%3A2acc267d4cbe455af640e4a707a84692

See alternate version at: # or https://www.google.com/books/edition/Systematic_Indexing/iwFDAAAAIAAJ?hl=en Google-Books-ID: iwFDAAAAIAAJ

(Switched for better OCR)

Example of someone using hair ties and smaller internal boxes to prevent zettelkasten cards from being dumped out due to child mischief.

via: https://www.reddit.com/r/antinet/comments/1bv6sxy/moving_again_and_a_tip_on_transporting/

read Tupac's Revolutionary Notes by [[Jillian Hess]]

Brief overview of some of Shakur's notebooks and lyrics with a mini-biography.

https://fromm-online.org/mediathek-und-download/exzerpte-sammlung-erich-fromms/<br /> Exzerpte Sammlung Erich Fromms

Excerpts as .pdf: https://fromm-online.org/wp-content/uploads/lists/4.04%20Excerpts%20collection%20of%20Erich%20Fromm.pdf

While Kaiser recommends against the need to re-arrange physical cards from one drawer to another, which creates the need to refamiliarize oneself with their new locations, the same idea applies to switching from one digital note taking application to another as a similar switch of user interface functionality may cause additional overhead and stress thereby preventing quick use of the system itself.

Placing call numbers or location numbers on items to be filed allows them to be separated from other items while placing cross-references or links allows them to be brought back together again. These two affordances allow for divergence as well as convergence of items or ideas.

Kaiser might be surprised at the overuse and confusing nature of terminology in the modern note taking space now. Somehow the terminology still suffers from lack of consistent and fixed terminology.

Devising Card Systems

Many modern-day note takers and knowledge workers might take solace in the broad advice provided by J. Kaiser in 1908. In describing some of the broad categories of uses of card index filing systems for business use he says that each entity "has its individual character and individual requirements, and its individual character" (ie, everyone is different and has different needs), therefore everyone "must devise [their] system in accordance with [their] own requirements" and should "be the best judge as to what these requirements are." He continues on in the rest of the book to outline a variety of suggestions and methods which one might use or adopt, but he doesn't dictate specific methods and leaves those decisions up to the end user.

When devising their own systems, one certainly ought to heed this advice when looking at a variety of alternative methods like Forte's P.A.R.A., Milo's LYT, or even in mimicking Luhmann's idiosyncratic Zettelkasten set up. Are these methods best for your particular use cases? Are they simple enough for what you want to do, or are they overly structured and complicated? The key is to be able to classify and file things quickly so that they can be easily accessed in the future, all the rest becomes additional details and overhead to support on an ongoing basis.

(¶76)

02:18Timothée Chalamet read and annotated Dune heavily before first interview with Denis Villeneuve

reply to u/oursong at https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/1bideq7/literature_notes_question/

My bibliographic/literature notes are my personal (brief) index of what I found interesting in the book. I can always revisit most of what the book contained by reviewing over it. When done I excerpt the most important and actionable items on their own cards with a reference back to the book and page/loc number. Depending on my needs I may revisit at later dates and excerpt other pieces from my indexed items if it turns out I need them.

From an efficiency perspective, I find that it seems like a waste of time to split out hundreds of lower-level ideas when I may only need the best for my work.