In July 2024 educational technologist Andy Matuschak published a long article outlining his observations on the debate over discovery learning versus instructional learning, and how it relates to the Holy Grail of educational technology: “a wildly powerful learning environment”.

Exorcising us of the Primer is a great article, but it’s just as interesting to see how this piece of writing came into existence in the first place.

Reverse-engineering a published article

Matuschak is known for having created an intriguing online instance of his notes, which he modestly calls ‘Andy’s working notes’. The article about learning is constructed from a sequence of these individual notes which he has been working on for several years.

His article evolved over time from his individual evergreen notes, which he eventually coalesced into an ‘outline note’ called Enabling Environments, games, and the Primer.

If you’re wondering how to create finished written work out of your individual notes, you’ll find it worthwhile to check out these different stages of Andy’s thinking and writing process. It’s worth exploring how he takes nearly 60 individual notes, combines them into the outline of a coherent argument, then takes that outline and re-writes it as a complete publishable essay.

You can see how the thinking process revolves around a few key ideas which themselves have been fleshed out with numerous notes. Key ideas here include:

These notes are similar to what Bob Doto’s book A System for Writing calls ‘high-level views’. Notice that the process of aggregation is modular, cumulative and iterative. The note ‘Taking knowledge work seriously’ is itself an outline note. And you can see there how Andy aggregates a series of individual notes to produce an outline for a presentation.

There are also sections in the outline which are underdeveloped, and flagged as such. For example, at one point there is the warning:

“==TODO this section quite under-defined in general; some important ideas aren’t yet captured here, but we also have big holes in our theories here==”

Elsewhere, he modestly comments:

“==I have to know more than this to publish, I think==”

On his Patreon page, Andy has reflected on his note-making experiences in a post for supporters only (there’s a short audio preview though). ‘Five years of evergreen notes’.

It’s a repeatable process

So we can see that before the article ever comes into existence there’s a whole set of notes that may or may not end up contributing to the finished piece.And then at some point an organising principle comes into view. In this case it was “Taking knowledge work seriously” and “Enacted experience” and “Enabling environments” and so on. Then these began to coalesce into a bigger, more focused idea, which was ‘Enabling environments, games, and the Primer’. Eventually, from all these atomic ideas, molecules formed, and they were refined until they became the final article, ‘Exorcising us of the Primer’.

That’s all very well, but how am I supposed to do this myself?

Make ‘buckets’ for your ideas

Well, you can take the bucket approach. Let’s say you have a vague idea for a piece of writing of some kind. It’s an idea that niggles at you, that begs to be explored, that you have a hunch might eventually become something you’d like to share with others.Now turn that idea into a bucket that you can gradually fill with content.

James Somers says:

“When I have a piece of writing in mind, what I have, in fact, is a mental bucket: an attractor for and generator of thought. It’s like a thematic gravity well, a magnet for what would otherwise be a mess of iron filings. I’ll read books differently and listen differently in conversations. In particular I’ll remember everything better; everything will mean more to me. That’s because everything I perceive will unconsciously engage on its way in with the substance of my preoccupation. A preoccupation, in that sense, is a hell of a useful thing for a mind.” More people should write

The problem with a bucket is that it really doesn’t care what you put in it. And this extreme flexibility might not always be so helpful.

a black cat sits in a red bucket

Dumping all your quotes and bookmarks into an app like Sublime or Arena or Evernote or OneNote is great and all, but when the time comes to write the article, all you’ll have to go on is a massive pile of other people’s words. You thought you were working but all you were really doing is saving the real work for later.

I used to do this as an undergraduate student. I’d spend ages marshalling all the ‘evidence’ (AKA quotes), thinking I was on the right track, then the evening before the deadline I’d be faced with the mammoth task of somehow turning all this raw material into an essay. It was painful. You can’t get away with just stitching together quotes from other people. And you can’t just mash together a set of notes and expect it to make an instant essay. You have to write it yourself.

There has to be a better way - and there is.

The great thing about the Zettelkasten approach is that it helps you write your own ideas as you go along. You don’t only copy-paste hot takes like I did just now with James Somers’s post about the mental buckets. Instead, you write your own stuff, one idea at a time, on separate notes that you can combine in multiple ways.

Notice that Andy Matuschak worked this way. If you read any one of the 60 or so notes that informed his final article you can see that each one stands up on its own as a solid nugget of original creative work. And because he put the effort in early in the process it must have taken less effort to finish the piece at the end. Of course it’s hardly no effort to write a solid article. But by doing it this way you can focus your late energy on quality writing rather than still having to grapple with a mass of quotes and snippets with no rhyme or reason, and no clear direction.

So the ‘bucket’ starts life as a single note with an idea on it. You gradually expand this idea, by adding new notes which link to it, or by linking to existing notes. and some of these notes might be structure notes - they might aggregate other combinations of notes, to give you a high-level view of where you’re going.

How I did it

If you squint, you can see that this very article was made by using the bucket metaphor.

  • First I made notes on Andy Matuschak’s process, without quite knowing what I’d use them for.
  • Then by writing these notes I realised I was interested in ‘how to write an article from your notes’.
  • This became a kind of bucket, even though I didn’t yet have the words to call it that.
  • And then, weeks later, when I read the stuff about the ‘bucket theory of creativity’, my latest reading was magnetically attracted to my pre-existing theme or preoccupation, and I added it to the draft of an article.
  • The draft still needed to be drafted. I didn’t just copy my notes one after another. But the process was made straightforward becasue I never had to wonder what would come next, or what the point was. These decisions were already formed.

The Zettelkasten approach doesn’t do the writing work for you, but it’s a helpful way of building up your ideas, note by note, until they become something you find worth sharing, like the post you’ve just finished reading, and which I hope you’ve found at least a little useful.

Read more:

A minimal approach to making notes

From fragments you can build a greater whole

How to decide what to include in your notes

Photo from Unsplash