- May 2021
-
www.zylstra.org www.zylstra.org
-
Thanks for an awesome post. I think that I have quite similar ideas to how you think about notes and note-taking, although the terminology is different. But even so, you raised several points that were not only linked to my own thinking, but gave me new thoughts and ideas to work with. Cheers for that.
I was just about to ask you what your system looked like Michael, but then I realized that you've tucked many of them into Hypothes.is at https://via.hypothes.is/https://www.zylstra.org/blog/2020/11/100-days-in-obsidian-pt-4-writing-notes/
-
Ton delineates his ideas between notions, notes, ideas, and work notes. It's not too dissimilar to the ideas others like Maggie Appleton have written about various smaller pieces being built up from small "seedlings" into larger evergreen pieces within a digital gardens framing.
I do like the idea of emergent outlines he notes over Ahrens' speculative outlines.
-
- Dec 2020
-
www.zylstra.org www.zylstra.org
-
Scientific articles and other documents I keep in Zotero, and from my notes I reference the Zotero entry.
I use Zotero for all resources. It also forms the basis for my literature notes (excerpts and responses to the author) that will stay in Zotero but which will inform my permanent notes.
For example, all of these comments and highlights (created in Hypothes.is) will be saved in Zotero, along with this blog post. As I've been working through this post I've also been adding, editing, and deleting some of my permanent notes in response. I'll work through these comments again in Zotero, and do a deeper dive into my permanent notes.
-
I notice a rising need with myself for higher quality material as input.
Exactly. I've come to realise the same thing. My reasoning was that I'm becoming overwhelmed with the low-quality (some might even call it noise) sources that I have to spend time on before realising that it's not high-value.
-
Next to actual output, I pull together Notions, and sometimes Notes in what I call ’emergent outlines’ (Söhnke Ahrens in his book about Zettelkasten calls them speculative outlines, I like emergence better than speculation as a term).
Yes, emergent suits me better as well.
-
progressive summarising
Or, what might also be called elaboration.
-
I spin out notes and potential Notions from my project notes, as I encounter things in my work where some idea or thought jumps out. Those potential Notions I put in a folder called proto notions, inside my GotFP
I just include these initial thoughts / ideas in the same Obsidian vault as my permanent notes. I think of them as "permanent notes in training" or, as some people have started calling them, seedlings (in the language of the digital gardening crowd).
-
If you look at the same graph with distance 2, the layer of additionally visible nodes show how my new Notion might be connected to things like online identity, using the environment to store memory and layered access to information. This triggers additional thoughts during the writing process.
Lovely. This is such a great insight that I can already see is going to help me a lot.
-
Usually while writing a Notion, I show the graph of how it connects to other Notions/Notes alongside it. I set the graph to show not only the 1st level links, as that only shows the links already apparent from the text I have in front of me. I set it to show 3 steps out at the start, and reduce to two steps when there are more links.
This is a great idea that hasn't occurred to me before. When looking for non-obvious relationships between concepts (something that I think forms part of creativity), it makes sense to have the graph view open alongside the note you're working on.
-
The ideas-greenhouse holds ideas I have, ideas that seem like something that can be put to action more or less quickly. They may be connected to notes in the other two folders, or to notes in the project folders. An example would be, that I jotted down the idea of making a digital garden for my company two months ago, triggered by a posting on how a community should have its governance documented in combination with having reread the communication handbook of Basecamp while thinking about remote working. It has since morphed into building a collective memory, and turned into a budding internal website documenting the first few things.
This pretty much describes something similar for me:
- Capture an initial snippet of an idea, based on something I've read or heard somewhere.
- I might turn it over in my head a few times, re-read it, find a few links, do a bit more reading.
- Eventually I expand on it with my own thoughts, maybe breaking it up into separate (permanent) notes, with links to the original source.
-
Notions, Notes, Ideas and work notes
My equivalent, as best as I can tell, is:
- Permanent notes (atomic, linked concepts) = Notions
- Temporary notes (half-formed thoughts, links, snippets, etc.) = Notes
- Temporary notes initially, which later become permanent notes = Ideas (see later comment about why)
- Admin notes (projects, tasks, meetings, etc.) = Work notes
-
resources written down with the context added of how I found them and why I was interested
I might also use Zotero to capture the original resource, with a few notes alongside it to explain why I kept it.
-
As they are more conceptual than factual I started calling them Notions to distinguish them from the other more general resource Notes
I've started keeping these things (fact-type notes and conceptual-type notes) together, since I sometimes find it difficult to find the boundaries of when one becomes the other. For me, it makes sense to keep this all in the same place (in my case, a single vault in Obsidian).
-
They can be linked to Ideas, Notes or Notions, or may give rise to them, but they serve a purpose firmly rooted in ongoing work. They are always placed within the context, and folder, of a specific project
Similar to how I've come to think of my "admin" or "operational" notes. They're instrumental in that they serve a purpose that is usually about moving some project forward.
-
The system works for me because it combines those two things and has them interact: My internal dialogue is all about connected ideas and factoids, whereas doing activities and completing projects is more hierarchical in structure.
Part of me is interested to merge these two aspects; I tend to think of them as "knowledge" and "operations". Knowledge-type work is more networked and connected in nature, while operations-type activities are more structured. However, I don't use a note/folder hierarchy here either.
-