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notetaking

I said “write.as is quite nice”, but that's only part of what happened here.

What made this instant publishing possible is that the source material for this post was already there as a note in my notes collection. I'm not comfortable with that type of coherent twitter thread that consists of one well worded full sentence per tweet. Which at the same time is the kind of tweetage that I find some of the most valuable.

I think to slowly, write even slower to respond in kind to this type of discussion. I don't want to “be on Twitter” while trying to think/write my perspective.

(Also, these used to be blog posts and I still think it's worth the effort to share this kind of thinking under your own URL instead of under the platform ones.)

What happened here is I already had some thoughts on this topic in a note. The initial tweet reminded me I had been thinking about that topic. I found that note, added and rewrote a bit and posted it to my blog. Even after posting I updated the post to add the two examples at the bottom.

I'm currently using Obsidian.md to do this soilwork of taking notes, writing down thoughts and linking them. Basic ingredients are local markdown text files. Write.as is a very light-weight publishing tool that also works well with markdown. Both Obsidian and Write.as follow the #hashtag convention for tagging things. The “share to twitter” feature in Write.as managed to send those along as part of the tweet I see. Nice.

This whole digital garden, second brain, personal knowledge management is a bit of a topic currently, but this post is meta enough as it is. A bit more on that is in personal knowledge management through the centuries

#notetaking #zettelkasten

I have always enjoyed categorizing and indexing things. Labels, groupings, sections, categories.

There's a lot to be found online on the principles, hows and whys of digital note taking and note keeping. Most of it is primarily concerned with text based content. Text is an accessible and portable medium of expression. Dimensions, length, amount of text per note is not a big concern for digital texts.

How much more complicated it becomes when the source material is physical and the content is of a pictorial nature. A meaningful sorting and grouping is harder to establish.

But. Worrying about an overarching structure is a form of procrastination. An imagined need to know the big picture beforehand keeps you from getting started.

Finding out about Luhmann's Zettelkasten was an a-ha moment and a big relief. The approach Luhmann took for connecting and ordering individual physical pieces of writing is infinitely flexible and expandable. No preconceived classification needed. An open ended numbering system allows you to simply start. Somewhere, anywhere.

This removes an important mental block. Any place is the right place to start because there is no wrong place to start. There's no special weight or importance to note number 1. Even a rhizome has to start somewhere.

#zettelkasten #rhizome #notetaking