Podcast with Gordon Brander and the Sönke Ahrens of How To Take Smart Notes.
Ideas:
- When note-taking feels like a slog or is ineffective, it's often due to a broken Feedback Loops.
- What feedback loops do I need to implement in my process when taking notes so that they are integrated and discoverable?
- Institution-building is an important but lost skill.
- Zettelkasten has some important limitations that make the system actually work
- ideas are numbered
- the cards and writing by hand limits the
- the process of filing cards forces you to think about "region" or "area"
- What is lost when moving to digital from paper Zettelkasten?
- Spatiality matters, of course
- What about a digital always-on box?
- What about software that purely replicates the paper Zettelkasten, even though that's super ineffecient...
- Try to change as little as possible.
- Embrace the limitations as much as possible.
- Focus is lost
- What about a single-purpose device, like a reMarkable, that was just used for the Zettelkasten?
- Think of it like a one-way valve - it allows water (information) to pass through in one direction, but not the other.
- Another analogy - a one-way mirror
- Similarly, sync could work one-way, moving information off the Zettel device, but never allowing the Zettel device to get new information onto it.
- What about a single-purpose device, like a reMarkable, that was just used for the Zettelkasten?
- Spatiality matters, of course
- In order to cope with application churn, build the simplest system possible that would be portable to other applications.
"Thinking from the Bottom Up" Podcast Episode
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