Hi Tinderboxers,
to give you a heads-up: I (Sascha from zettelkasten.de) will attend the meeting this Sunday.
So, you can prepare specific questions regarding the Zettelkasten Method.
Regarding the three types of notes (fleeting, literature, permanent): I think it is a translation artifact which resulted in reification. In the German book, the labels for the type of notes are just used to label different steps in a process. But they are not treated as a proper classification of notes, as far as I understood the German book.
The result is that the collective thinking process (due to the popularity of the book by Ahrens) was pushed heavily in the direction of thinking about the workflow that transforms each note type to another.
I think this is a distraction from the real issues that are interesting when you ask yourself the Zettelkasten question: How can I create a system that is extends my ability to deal with ideas (and knowledge in general) in a way that it scales beyond one project.
The questions derived from this line of thinking are for example:
- How to write a note for longevity?
- How to access a very big and highly complex note collection (or the network if you connect the notes) to assist with the task at hand (thinking on an issue, writing a text etc.)?
- How to optimize the effect of creating one note?
- How to access note collections within a note collection? (Not just notes that share a property, but also note clusters that are more tightly connected to each other than to others)
There are also issues/opportunities that emerge from other lines of thinking. For example: My Zettelkasten is also a training tool for me. I have almost 13k notes at the moment. But yesterday I could demonstrate how to create connections between two notes that I took 8 years apart within 2 minutes. It is possible because of the way I work with my Zettelkasten and the depth of connection between the note content. The connected question is:
- How can you optimize the training effect on your brain using your note-taking system? (Instead of just letting your tool taking care of tasks, which could lead to atrophy of your specific skill in the worst case)
So, don’t get hung on note definitions if you want to understand the Zettelkasten Method. Instead, focus on the actual challenges you want to attack.
(To give you some starting points to think about the Zettelkasten Method in a way that allows a better exploitation of the Zettelkasten Method for Tinderbox)
Live long and prosper
Sascha