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It’s not that systems for getting things done are bad, exactly. It’s just that they’re not the main point. The main point – though it took me years to realise it – is to develop the willingness to just do something, here and now, as a one-off, regardless of whether it’s part of any system or habit or routine. If you don’t prioritise the skill of just doing something, you risk falling into an exceedingly sneaky trap, which is that you end up embarking instead on the unnecessary and, worse, counterproductive project of becoming the kind of person who does that sort of thing.
The shortest writing session that could possibly be useful
Here’s my perspective on ‘atomic notes’.
They’re atomic in time even before they’re atomic in any other dimension.
An atomic note, for me, is the shortest writing session that could possibly be useful.
I got this from computer game designers, who call the shortest viable unit of play an ‘atom’. A single life in Space Invaders (and yes, that shows my age). Just enough to make you desperate to keep going.
If you think about it, every note has to stop somewhere. So it’s not a big stretch to stop sooner rather than later, perhaps even before you’re really ready to stop… and to begin a new note.
But if your note-making practice is to write long notes making several points, then good luck to you, everyone finds their own working method.
You’ll still find several aspects of the Zettelkasten note-making approach useful.
For example:
- giving each note a clear title,
- linking your notes
- creating reference notes so you don’t lose track of bibliographic information,
- creating hub notes (or whatever you want to call them), to connect ideas together
- enjoying just enough productive and creative mess
When I started I couldn’t see the point of ‘atomicity of ideas’. It was only gradually that I realised my long notes would be more useful if I made them modular.
There might be an analogy with what computer programmers call ‘separation of concerns’. You can build really big systems from simple components. It’s much harder to merge even just two complex components.
For a good illustration of this, see Herbert Simon’s parable of the two watchmakers.
Two watchmakers, Tempus and Hora, each make a watch with 1,000 parts. Whenever Tempus is interrupted or drops anything he has to start all over again. But the other watchmaker does it differently. Hora makes watches from assemblies of ten parts only, then assembling ten of these, then ten of these. So when Hora is interrupted, only a small part of the work is ever lost.
Reference
Simon, H. A. (1962). The architecture of complexity. Proceedings of the American philosophical society, 106(6), 467-482. PDF. Cited in W. Brian Arthur (2009). The Nature of Technology. What it is and how it evolves. New York: Free Press.
Enhanced markdown apps you can use for free to make effective notes
I’ve lost track of the ridiculous number of ‘Zettelkasten apps’ now on the loose on the wild wild web. When I checked the ChatGPT marketplace, for example, I had to stop counting at 50. I was losing the will to go on looking at them.
Everyone makes the apps, it seems, but who’s left to use them?
If you’re one of those sensible people who just want to make useful notes, plain text files with Markdown are simple, elegant, versatile and durable.
It’s hardly magic.
You can create these notes with any basic text editor, but I’m keen on people creating a working environment that works for them. So if you’re looking for a few bells and whistles, here are four note-making apps that seem to offer just enough features and not too many. Oh, and they’re open source and free to use, so you know, use them. Go make your notes!
“Hey, check these out!"
Zettlr
“Zettlr offers first-class support for any style of curating your own Zettelkasten. Zettlr supports note IDs, internal Wiki-style links, related files, seamless navigation, and even a graph view.”
There’s a fairly good summary of how to use Zettlr for the Zettelkasten approach to making notes.
Who’s it for?
Academics and others who want to write and publish their research with Markdown and who aren’t totally scared of Pandoc and LaTeX but could do with a little support in that area.
Who’s it not for?
Anyone averse to Pandoc or LaTeX (although you can just ignore these and still use Zettlr).
NB
“a command line and local web note‑taking, bookmarking, archiving, and knowledge base application with plain text data storage, … Initializing a folder as an nb local notebook is a very easy way to add structured git versioning to any folder of documents and other files.”
There’s a very brief nb-for-Zettelkasten summary.
Who’s it for?
Anyone who prefers command line tools, likes the idea of syncing their notes using Git, and wants maximum format flexibility.
Who’s it not for?
Windows users who never worked out how to run Linux-native apps and who aren’t about to start now. Ditto for command-line refuseniks.
Foam
“a note-taking tool that lives within VS Code… Foam is open source, and allows you to create a local first, markdown based, personal knowledge base. You can also use it to publish your notes.”
Who’s it for?
Anyone who already uses VSCode (it’s Microsoft’s flagship code editor) but wants some note management goodness, and anyone who might otherwise use the paid notemaking app that Foam rhymes with.
Who’s it not for?
Timid souls who might be put off by apps that are ‘still in preview’.
LogSeq
“Logseq is a knowledge management and collaboration platform. It focuses on privacy, longevity, and user control. Logseq offers a range of powerful tools for knowledge management, collaboration, PDF annotation, and task management with support for multiple file formats”.
Who’s it for?
They say “Logseq is a networked outliner”, so if you love outliners it might well be for you.
Who’s it not for?
People who don’t love outliners, I suppose. Oh, and they’re planning to make LogSeq Pro a paid app, so it might not be for freeloaders (eventually).
Well, that’s the end of this little roundup. Please let me know what fantastic app you find most suits you - and why.
And for the record, I couldn’t find a note-making app I really liked so I made one myself (sort-of).
Image:
No it’s not a bunch of hyped-up influencers salivating over the latest batch of AI-enabled notemaking apps. It’s actually a Marshall University “arena registration” utilizing IBM punched cards, in 1968.
Source:
Dickinson, Jack L., and Arnold R. Miller. In the Beginning…A Legacy of Computing at Marshall University : A brief history of the early computing technology at Marshall University, Huntington, W.Va., in the forty years: 1959-1999. Huntington, Marshall University Libraries, 2018. PDF
Now read: A minimal approach to writing notes
Finished reading: A System for Writing by Bob Doto 📚. Ok, I finished it a while ago, and here’s my enthusiastic review
Finished reading: The Looking-Glass by Machado De Assis 📚 My favourite late 19th century Brazilian author. His novella ‘The Alienist’, included in this collection, is hilarious. The style and tone strongly reminds me of my favourite contemporary Argentinian author, César Aira.
How to get Strata for micro.blog up and running
I’ve decided to make use of the ‘notes’ feature in micro.blog.
This is like making private posts in a blog. But my main use case is brainstorming future blog posts. I want to take notes of half-formed ideas, which may or may not end up as blog posts. They’re not quite draft quality, but I have a hunch they’ll end up as public posts, not just remain as private notes.
The Notes feature is very easy to use. You make notes from the main page by clicking on the ‘Notes’ menu item.
And you can set up multiple ‘notebooks’, which you can rename at will.
But there’s also an iOS app called Strata to make the experience easy and fun. That’s what I wanted to try.
It was tricky to get started, though, because you have to sync up the encryption between micro.blog and the Strata app.
Manton, the creator of micro.blog, admits as much. In the original announcement he said:
“We’ve tried to keep it simple, but honestly it can be confusing, and we expect a few bumps along the road. We will continue to make it as seamless as possible. There are options to download a copy of the “secret key” used in Micro.blog, as well as saving a copy to iCloud. I recommend both.”
When I first opened the iPad Strata app, after installing it, it asked for a secret key, but I had no idea where to find this.
It turned out to be quite hidden - appropriate, I guess, for a secret key, but not very intuitive.
Here’s how I found the key I needed to get Strata up and running.
- First I logged into the webpage for micro.blog on my PC.
- I clicked on ‘Notes’, near the foot of the main menu to the left of the screen.
- Just to the right of the ‘New Note’ button, there is an ellipsis button (…) that presumably indicates more options. I clicked on that.
- The ellipsis button gave me three choices, import, export and settings. I clicked on ‘Settings’.
- Success! There’s a button that says, ‘Show Secret Key’. I clicked on it. This gave me a long string of letters and numbers that I didn’t feel like copying.
- Fortunately there was also a big QR code. “Scan the QR code for easy setup on iOS. Android coming soon.”
- I took a photo of that with my iPad, which immediately offered to open it with Strata.
- I allowed this and the key copied straight to the Strata app. I was in.
There was also an option to download the secret key instead, but I found I didn’t need this. Nor did I use the option to add the secret key to the iCloud. I think that means every time I log out and back in, I’ll have to reload the secret key - but I don’t expect to be doing this too often.
I also expect I’ll be sharing notes with others. I imagine this as an easy way of sharing private (but not secret) information among a few people. It might be a good way of sharing draft blog posts before they’re published. When you click ‘‘share" on a note, a private weblink is created, and anyone with the link will then be able to see the note. You can unshare notes too, of course.
This kind of functionality is already baked into many web apps and I’m happy it’s now included in micro.blog
There are a few interesting possibilities for the future here. One that excites me is to connect the notes feature with the fantastic bookshelf feature. Let’s say I’m currently reading a particular book which appears on my micro.blog bookshelf. I’d also like to take notes within micro.blog specifically associated with that book. Soon, I’m hoping, that might be possible.
📷 Kookaburra of the day
I know nothing about breakdancing 🤣 but back in October I attended the qualifying event for the Australian breakdancing Olympic team, where I saw Raygun win. So… AMA
Great evening light on the way home 📷
Feel the importance of every day, and every hour as it passes: Jane Austen's timely advice for writers and creators
Jane Austen died in the cathedral city of Winchester on July 18, 1817; she was 41 years old.
Towards the end of her too-short life, in a brief five-year period between 1811 and 1816, she published four great novels. Originally released anonymously to a just a handful of positive reviews and scant financial success, these works are now among the most celebrated in the English language.
Austen didn’t accomplish all she had hoped to. Besides her completed but unpublished novels Northanger Abbey and Persuasion, she left behind several further manuscripts1. These included Sanditon, the first 23,000 words of a new novel, which she started in early 1817 when she was already sick, but abandoned due to her declining health, just four months before her death.
Jane Austen’s immense posthumous success is a very far cry from her lived experience as a struggling writer. She died relatively young, of a debilitating illness, in a condition of financial insecurity, with no expectation that any of her life’s work would survive her, let alone enjoy any kind of acclaim. All her work was published anonymously. Her epitaph doesn’t even mention that she was a writer. And within only a few years of her untimely death, all her novels were out of print.
A struggle to publish
It’s hard to believe it now, but in her lifetime Austen struggled to publish any of her work. In 1803 her father had sold the copyright to Northanger Abbey (then called ‘Susan’) for 10 pounds, (this was today’s equivalent of just US$1,300), but the publisher did nothing with it. Having failed to retrieve the copyright in 1809, Austen couldn’t afford the fee until 1816, and though she did finally manage to pay, she didn’t live long enough to find another publisher. She never saw the book in print.
Publishing in the early Nineteenth Century was risky and expensive, so even when they were eventually published Austen’s novels sold for unavoidably high prices and in small print runs. From Sense and Sensibity, her first published novel, she only made 140 pounds (around US$18,000 in today’s money) and she made even less from Pride and Prejudice, her second.
Mansfield Park, Austen’s third published novel, sold quite well despite receiving no reviews at all. Emma was the last novel she saw published. What she made on Emma though, she immediately lost on the second editon of Mansfield Park, which underperformed its first edition.
Identity concealed
It was considered unacceptable for Austen, as a woman, to publish under her own name. This meant Sense and Sensibility was authored “by a lady”, and her subsequent novels “by the author of Sense and Sensibility”.
Because she died too soon, she didn’t live long enough to see her other complete novels Northanger Abbey and Persuasion in print, though she might have, had she lived just half a year longer. Her brother Henry managed to publish these two novels just six months after her death. It had taken fully fifteen years for Northanger Abbey to see the light of day, and still the title page didn’t mention her name. It was only in the book’s ‘biographical notice’ that her brother finally revealed the author’s identity.
And by the 1820s all six Austen novels were out of print. They were only revived in 1832 by means of a new, cheaper edition. Sanditon, the unfinished novel, remained unpublished for more than a century, right up until 1925.
Growing fame
The Austen flame flickered, but it didn’t quite go out. Her writing always found champions, and especially since the 1880s, the cult of Jane Austen has grown and grown. The critic Leslie Stephen called it ‘Austenolatry’, while author Henry James disapproved of the ‘beguiled infatuation’ Austen’s work seemed to inspire in its devotees. In 1894 the critic George Saintsbury coined the term ‘Janeite’ to refer approvingly to those readers who appreciated Austen. The author Rudyard Kipling was one of them. In Debits and Credits (1926) he wrote2:
Jane lies in Winchester-blessed be her shade! Praise the Lord for making her, and her for all she made! And while the stones of Winchester, or Milsom Street, remain, Glory, love, and honour unto England’s Jane!
After multiple movies, TV series and the establishment of a firm online ‘fandom’, Jane Austen has become a cultural icon. Having long been a touchstone of debates about feminism and the role of women, her work has also found relevance and controversy in the context of empire, slavery and post-colonialism.
Austen even features on the Bank of England ten pound note where, in a 2017 re-design, she replaced no less a figure than Charles Darwin3.
You can read on every note her ironic comment4:
“I declare after all there is no enjoyment like reading!”
The time is short
Jane Austen knew the time to create was short. She didn’t take her life for granted. We know this because she also left behind three prayers5. In the first prayer she says:
“May we now, and on each return of night, consider how the past day has been spent.”
And in her third prayer she says:
“Another day is now gone, and added to those, for which we were before accountable.”
She sees the falling of the evening as a “solemn truth”, that should lead us to “feel the importance of every day, and every hour as it passes”.
As a result, she says, we should “earnestly strive to make a better use of [future time] than we have done of the time past.”
While I think she did pretty well, it seems she thought she could have done better. In reviewing Jane Austen’s life I’m inspired to take my own creative capabilities more seriously. It feels important and meaningful to re-commit to my own writing, and to give an account of how I spend my own days and hours.
That’s because I don’t have much time either. None of us do. Ars longa, vita brevis. And whether we’re published or not, whether or not we find renown in our lifetimes, if ever, we owe it both to the muse and to ourselves to respect our own artistic vision by creating what we can while we can, until we no longer can.
Don’t wait
Nothing is certain. Few if any of us will attain Jane Austen’s fame. As I’ve learned, Jane Austen herself nearly didn’t. But all of us can take stock of the way we use our own precious time, like she did, and as she did, to feel the importance of every day. So:
If you want to write, do it.
If you’ve started but haven’t finished, finish it.
And if you’re stuck and need help, ask for it.
Who knows how much time you have left?
Don’t wait any longer.
See also:
Image source: Public domain/Wikipedia
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Austen also left behind nearly 18,000 words of The Watsons, an early draft of Emma, unpublished until 1871, and Lady Susan, which she had completed around 1805, but which was only published in 1871, some 54 years after her death. There was also the satirical ‘Plan of a Novel’, written in 1816 and finally published in 1926. ↩︎
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This verse begins Kipling’s short story about WW1 soldiers who form a secret society of Jane Austen fans. Milsom Street in Bath is mentioned in several of Austen’s works. ↩︎
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Jane Austen appears on the UK’s ten pound bank note. web.archive.org/web/20170… ↩︎
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It’s an ironic comment because Caroline Bingley, a character in Pride and Prejudice, only says it to impress Mr Darcy. ↩︎
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You can read Austin’s prayers in full at Wikisource ↩︎
My favourite tool is this notebook I made
I couldn’t find a note-making app that really suited me so I made one myself.
OK, that’s a bit of a stretch. It’s really just a heavily modified version of TiddlyWiki but it feels tailor-made. And working with it fits me like a glove. It’s a great example of making a creative working environment. That’s important. You have to make your own environment. Some people hate TiddlyWiki1. That’s fine too.
I wanted a notemaking environment that would let me:
- write atomic notes,
- write in Markdown syntax,
- link notes easily,
- re-combine notes by transclusion,
- easily search through all my notes without clutter; and
- export notes without stress.
Here’s how I made my personalised notemaking app.
- Base: TiddlyWiki. I can’t stand the look of the plain OG version but I love the notebook theme that can easily be added.
- Backlinks: To enable backlinks I have found a couple of basic plug-ins really useful and would strongly recommend:
- TWCrossLinks. This adds a footer to your notes to show backlinks and freelinks.
- Relink. This enables automatic renaming of titles and other items across links.
- To-Do: For a to-do list, I greatly admire Projectify, which I have used for work, but for personal use I like the super-simple but effective Chandler, written by the late Joe Armstrong (godfather of Haskell). He talks you through how he wrote it, which in itself is a mini-masterclass in how to customise TiddlyWiki.
- Help: Finally I’ll mention the active and very helpful TiddlyWiki user forum.
I see TiddlyWiki as a rhizomatic tool - one of several. A rhizomatic tool, the way I see it, is one that foregrounds the network and its many connections, while pushing to the background the hierarchy, whether it be temporal, semantic, thematic or any other structure. Such a tool helps users to create “mobile, stable and combinable inscriptions” that enable “action at a distance” (Latour, 1987).
Since about 2020 a fad has been growing online of note-making apps that include rhizomatic affordances. That’s a fancy way of saying lotsalinks. These internal-link-friendly apps include Roam Research, Obsidian, LogSeq, Workflowy, and more venerably, TiddlyWiki. Much discussion has flowed about the nature of the Zettelkasten as a means to construct a networked system of notes. Little of this discussion has referred directly to Rhizome theory, but there are clear affinities.
I wanted a rhizomatic tool for writing, and since I couldn’t find one I really liked, I adapted one for my own purposes. You might not need to invent your own tools, but each of us gathers uniquely the unique contents of our own toolbox.
This post is a contribution to the ongoing Indieweb Carnival, July 2024 edition. Why not check out the other posts, on tools, and contribute yourself to August’s theme, which is rituals.
Some links to relevant material:
Does the Zettelkasten have a top and a bottom?
A network of notes is a rhizome not a tree
Inspired destruction: How a Zettelkasten explodes thoughts so you can have newish ones
Zettelkasten, Rhizomes, and You
A great summary of TiddlyWiki
The rise of networked notetaking
Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari (2004/1980). Rhizome PDF. In A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi. New York: Continuum, pp. 3-28.
Latour, B. (1987), Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers through Society, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA.
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Me too! I hate the name TiddlyWiki, and I hate the word ‘tiddler’ and generally I hate the aesthetic. That’s why I’ve changed it. ↩︎
Notemaking helps you remember - and helps you forget
Do we really need to remember everything?
This is the question posed by Lewis Hyde’s memorable book, A Primer for Forgetting: Getting Past the Past 📚
He says:
“Every act of memory is an act of forgetting. The tree of memory set its roots in blood. To secure an ideal, surround it with a moat of forgetfulness. To study the self is to forget the self. In forgetting lies the liquefaction of time. The Furies bloat the present with the undigested past. “Memory and oblivion, we call that imagination.” We dream in order to forget.” ― Lewis Hyde, A Primer for Forgetting: Getting Past the Past
Forgetting is the essence of what makes us human
The subtitle of Joshua Foer’s book, Moonwalking with Einstein, promotes the art and science of ‘remembering everything’. Yet Foer accepts that forgetting is an essential aspect of memory. He quotes the Argentinian author Jorge Luis Borges:
“It is forgetting, not remembering, that is the essence of what makes us human. To make sense of the world, we must filter it. “To think,” Borges writes, “is to forget.” – Joshua Foer, Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything
Making notes will aid your short-term memory, even when you haven't got one
This week I was making notes about a presentation when my colleague looked over and offered to just give me the slides. I said thanks, of course. But really I was making my notes to help me remember the key information. If I just referred to the slides, I’d never assimilate the presentation - I’d just listen then forget. Conversely, while I might never look at the notes again, since it was me that made them, some of it has now sunk in.
Many people make notes to help them remember things, but how do you do it?
This question matters to Kat Moody. She writes about learning to live with a nonexistent working memory (Archived version).
Presumably she doesn’t really have absolutely no short-term memory, but she does have ADHD, or as she likes to call it, CRSS (Can’t Remember Sh*t Syndrome).
That really resonated with me. And the horrible feeling of forgetting everything might seem familiar to you as well, even if you’re not diagnosed with either of these.
Inspired by author Ryan Holiday’s notecard system Kat Moody uses an app, readwise.io to make notes while she reads.
Bob Doto, author of the excellent new note-making manual A System for Writing, also does this. He says:
“I tend to read articles on a tablet or phone, using a read-later app with note-taking capabilities to capture my thoughts. When I’m done, I bring these thought-captures into my writing platform, usually as main notes.” (Bob Doto, A System for Writing, p.50)
There’s an informative Hacker News discussion, which extends to memory hacks more generally. One commenter laments that school rewards memorization more than understanding. That can be hard for people whose memory isn’t their strong point.
Perhaps ironically, I see note making as a useful means of forgetting, not just remembering. I don’t want to forget everything, but then I certainly wouldn’t like to remember everything either.
It’s a double act. My brain, when combined with my notes, helps me find the right balance between remembering and forgetting.
I have more to say about this subject, so please stay tuned1. Update: Notemaking helps you remember - and forget.
Some other salient pieces about making notes:
On Keeping an Everyday Notebook (Instead of a Bullet Journal) archived version
Audio transcription workflow: How to Take Perfect Notes with Your Voice Using ChatGPT and Notion
Big, beautiful goals – but can’t be bothered? 11 great productivity tips for lazy people (includes tips such as ‘Write everything down’ and ‘Ditch the to-do list for a ‘first things’ list’.
How to actually use what you read with Readwise
Ryan Holiday’s notecard system
Image credit: Photo by Sean Benesh on Unsplash
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Does anyone ever say this any more!? I’m showing my age! ↩︎
Thanks to @guidostevens@kolektiva.social I found this great quote from Cal Newport, from his book Slow Productivity.
“You should give your efforts the breathing room and respect required to make them part of a life well lived, not an obstacle to it.” - Cal Newport
See also: writing slowly is back in fashion.
💬"The note you just took has yet to realize its potential." - Bob Doto, A System for Writing
A System for Writing by Bob Doto
“The note you just took has yet to realize its potential.” - Bob Doto
Another ‘Zettelkasten primer’ won’t be needed for some time, since this one is direct, concise, thorough and strongly practical.
📚A System for Writing by Bob Doto is out!
If you’ve become confused or cynical watching those endless videos in which an influencer who discovered the Zettelkasten five minutes ago is suddenly the expert; or if you’ve read Sönke Ahrens' book, How to Take Smart Notes and thought “now I know why I should make notes but I still don’t really know how”, well here’s the antidote: the only Zettelkasten book you’ll ever need.
My paperback copy of A System for Writing arrived just in time for weekend reading. It’s a deliberately useful book, with a clear three-part structure. It gets to the point quickly and stays there: how to write notes, how to connect them and how to use this system to produce finished written work.
Things I especially appreciate in A System for Writing:
- Plenty of clear and specific examples of notes of all sorts. People often ask ‘but what should a note look like?’ Here’s the answer, visually.
- Many helpful workflow diagrams. People also ask ‘how does the system operate as a whole?’ This book shows exactly how the Zettelkasten process works, and in what order.
- Clear references both to Niklas Luhmann’s process and to other relevant predecessors. If you want to refer back to the sources, there is a wealth of pointers here.
- At the end of each chapter, a checklist of specific activities to try, to implement the ideas just covered: what to do, what to remember and what to watch out for. If you’re wondering exactly what to do next with your notes, this book shows you (also, what not to do, especially in ch. 7).
- Helpful writing advice, which shows how to use your Zettelkasten to produce four different kinds of material: short-short items (i.e. social media posts), blog posts, articles and books.
- Overall, a clear, step-by-step, repeatable writing process to follow, from capturing your thoughts (ch. 1) right through to managing your writing workflow (ch. 9).
Will anyone be disappointed? Well, if you’re only looking for a manual on a particular piece of software, this book won’t satisfy you. It tells almost nothing about whatever the popular app-of-the-day is. You are not going to be told here whether Obsidian is better than Obshmidian. Software comes and goes, while the underlying principles of the Zettelkasten approach, as presented here, can be applied in many different contexts.
What about those who aren’t all that interested in actually publishing anything, who instead just want their notes to help them remember stuff, perhaps for tests? Well, although this book focuses without apology on writing, it will still be really useful for anyone making notes as a ‘second memory’ (Luhmann’s term) because by reading this (especially the first two parts) they’ll soon be making clearer, more concise and more accessible notes, whatever they intend to use them for.
And what of those who have absolutely no interest in obscure terms like ‘Zettelkasten’, who recoil from any kind of dubious productivity fetish, and just want to get things written? This is where the book excels and where it really comes good on the promise of its title. Yes, this is a system for writing. The author, who has himself written several books, shows from his direct experience how an effective note-making practice can lead to a more natural, unforced, effective and consistent writing practice. The Zettelkasten as presented here is an approach to note-making that will simply aid writing, without wasting time or effort.
This has certainly been my experience. Before I implemented my own Zettelkasten approach I was struggling both with organising my notes and with producing coherent writing. Since then, it’s been a different story. But until now there hasn’t been a Zettelkasten guidebook I’d wholeheartedly recommend to others. Now there certainly is.
So if you want to learn quickly how to capture your ideas effectively and write productively, stress-free, then get hold of A System for Writing right now.
More about Bob Doto.
Read about the illusion of integrated thought, which is cited in chapter 7 of the book.
My take on starting a Zettelkasten: How to make a Zettelkasten from your existing deep experience.
Here’s why Puss in Boots is my hero: he made something from nothing, and so can we.
This article was part of the June 2024 IndieWeb Carnival: DIY - Something from (almost) nothing, hosted by Andrei. There’s a great roundup of the submissions.
Why not take part in the Carnival? July’s theme is Tools
Something from nothing is no fairy tale
As an adult, one of my favourite fairy tales is Puss in Boots.
I have immense respect for this talking cat. He has nothing going for him - not even a decent pair of shoes. And to make matters worse he finds himself lumbered with a pretty mediocre human owner.
Folklore academics have a way of classifying the tales they study. It’s called the Aarne–Thompson–Uther Index (ATU). And in this index, Puss in Boots is Type 545: the cat as helper.
That’s completely wrong.
Read it for yourself. This story is not about the frankly lacklustre youngest son of the mill. No, it’s about the cat, a cat who has almost no help, who has to do practically everything himself, and who never gives up until finally he gets what he needs.
The great writer Angela Carter would have agreed with this. She observed the cat was “the servant so much the master already“. But this is hardly controversial. Perrault’s version of the story actually has the title “The Master Cat“.
So as you probably remember, the tale begins when the cat experiences an unexpected disaster. The old miller dies, leaving the mill to his eldest son.
But the mill’s cat he leaves to the youngest son.
Not only is the cat suddenly homeless, but to make things even worse his fate is now shackled to a penniless human without prospects.
So what’s a homeless cat to do?
Why not let your reading be a smorgasbord of serendipity?
Yes indeed, why not let your reading be a smorgasbord of serendipity?
Here’s Anna Funder, author of Wifedom: Mrs Orwell’s Invisible Life, on working at the University of Melbourne English Department library as a student:
“It sounds prehistoric now, but I sat at the front desk, typing out index cards for new acquisitions or requests from staff for books or journals — anything from the latest novel, to psychoanalysis, poetry or medieval studies. I read things that had nothing to do with my studies: a smorgasbord of serendipity. Despite my time there, I have never understood the Dewey decimal system: how can numbers tell you what a book is, to a decimal point?” - Every book you could want and many more
My take on this?
- What is the real work of serendipity?
- A library of good neighbours
- The Dewey Decimal System pigeonholes all knowledge, like cells in a prison
HEAJ:Mundaneum by Marc Wathieu is licensed under CC BY 2.0