The Zettelkasten. "It's like the GTD for intellectual progress" What it is, and why you want one. (thread)

First -- Why GTD doesn't work for intellectual work

GTD is all about **stress free productivity**, it works by creating a system you can trust with commitments and deadlines, so you can let things fall out of working memory without getting dropped

You can't put a deadline on insight though. Making real progress on an intellectual problem requires drawing connections between things you hadn't connected before.

Can't predict when you'll get the idea that ties everything together or realize you were asking the wrong question

If you start your search for truth with the conclusion in mind, (the way they teach you to write essays -- starting with your thesis), you won't actually discover anything new

You'll filter out the evidence that contradict you, points of confusion where real discovery comes from

The Zettelkasten solves this -- it creates a writing habit, and a system to organize your thoughts -- that reliably will produce good new ideas, and make your final deliverables (essays, blog posts, articles, videos, presentations) painless to produce.

Originally comes from the the sociologist Niklas Luhmann -- an absolute juggernaut, who

finished his phd in a year
wrote 70 books and ~400 articles in his career
totally shaped systems thinking in german speaking world

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Niklas_Luhmann

There are people who spend their whole career now studying Luhmann, but he had no research team, no assistants, and famously said

"I never force myself to do anything I don’t feel like. Whenever I am stuck, I do something else"

This is what we want!

Stress free productivity!

Original Zettelkasten (German for slip box) was a file cabinet full of index cards.

When Luhmann had an idea (from a book, or life) he wrote it on a card, gave it a number, and linked it to other related cards

Which is to say - he was threading tweets before it was cool

Point of the Zettelkasten is that you turn your notes into a research partner

"if one has to write anyway, it is useful to take advantage of this activity in order to create in the system of notes a competent partner of communication."

http://luhmann.surge.sh/communicating-with-slip-boxes

"One of the most basic presuppositions of communication is that the partners can mutually surprise each other. Only in the way can information be produced in the respective other"

Ur Notes don't surprise you, you aren't reading your old writing and having new ideas? Smthngs wrng

So, how do you make a system like this work today?

Step 1: Write down ideas in your own words

When you read something interesting, it is easy to think you understand it. Even easier to trick yourself when you re-read it

Writing it in your own words strips you of this delusion

Step 2: Place your notes somewhere where you can easily link them together, reorganize them into new contexts, and build out chains of thought.

Evernote is terrible for this. (see related thread)

Twitter is surprisingly good. https://twitter.com/Conaw/status/1099181050045952006

For more info -- highly recommend this book
https://www.amazon.com/How-Take-Smart-Notes-Nonfiction-ebook/dp/B06WVYW33Y

Or talk https://vimeo.com/275530205 

Both by @soenke_ahrens

Some thoughts on how to use Twitter as a Zettlekasten https://twitter.com/Conaw/status/1129806786477772801?s=19

Currently my model is that making this process easier to adopt is the best way we can accelerate intellectual progress for our civilization -- but there weren't note taking tools effectively built for it -- so @hashbrown490 and I built one

Invites open https://twitter.com/Conaw/status/1156668520542826496?s=19

A demo video of Roam, showing how I paste in web pages with ideas I find important and then incorporate quotes and images from them into my own public Zettelkasten

Last few minutes are most interesting https://twitter.com/Conaw/status/1159257125131997185?s=20