Zettelkasten on Janusworx

Note to Self, Cal Newport’s Minimal Notes System

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Sat, 02 Mar 2024 16:35:56 +0530

My old-style slow notetaking process.
Replaced now with Elipsa Annotations, which then move along with my thoughts into Org Roam Notes.
Click to see bigger

Cal Newport recently did a deep dive on his podcast, on a minimalist note taking system for various areas of your life.
Video’s on Youtube, if you want to watch. It’s called A Productivity System To Remember Everything You Learn.

It matches, what I’ve organically been doing all these years.
And I was really happy to see it structured and rendered so well.
So I wrote and paraphrased and jotted it all down below.
Note: These are my mangling of Cal’s words, not what he actually said. The audio/video above should give you exact specifics.

Why?
#

Minimal Friction
#

too much friction with other systems
friction in work that matters is ok, is good, is perfect. McPhee & Caro! But for most other things, not needed.
- Cal goes on to verbally list what McPhee does, but my notes are better.
- In a nutshell, friction slows him (McPhee) down in a way that’s beneficial, that lets him do his best work
Notetaking does not need such friction. When information is coming at you, your time to act + energy to think are limited
Friction stops you from taking action. That information could then be lost
- For e.g. a complicated note taking process when reading a book, might stop you from getting into the book or ever keep you from reading the book altogether.
Your system should therefore reduce friction, so that you can capture as much information as possible quickly, efficiently, painlessly

Outsource your brain? No!
#

When it comes to things that matter, stuff should live in your brain. So that stuff percolates into your value systems and mental models and you evolve!
Your brain needs to be part of this curation process. Your brain needs to build hooks. To remember the big things. For accuracy and precision, details can always be looked up.

The System
#

For Books (the Corner Marking Method)
#

If there’s somethng interesting on the page, mark the corner fo the page (dog ear with pen) and then …
- Mark up the thing that interest you! Simple marks in the margins. Put a box around text. Checkmarks next to a line. Curly braces next to a paragraph to remember
- Occasionally write a short note, to help you remember the context, or to tell yourself what it reminds you of, or is there any other place where you’d find this useful?
Barely slows you down. Does not get in your way. Does not prevent you from reading
Then when you go back to your book, and look at your dog marks and then look at stuff you marked on those pages? You will in a few minutes, reconstitute all the ideas from that book.
Bonus: One “shortcoming”? You need to remember! Oh that book? That was the one that had the interesting ideas about such and such
- That is not a problem. This is the one bit of friction that is useful. It allows you to use the gist of what you learned from the book in the schemas of knowledge that I am constructing and modifying and growing in my head. So that’s not really a bug, rather a feature. In English? It helps me build better Mental Models!
- You become a better reader

Projects (Professional and Personal)
#

Where do notes relevant to a project go?
Store notes relevant to a project in the location where you will one day work the project.
- I do this on a personal level too. Everything is where my mind says, I ought to look for them, not where they “ought to be.” Which is why my keys are next to my Minnie mouse plushie and my flash drives live in an old, soup bowl.
So when it comes time to do the work, everything that you’ve gather is all there for you to use.
Duplication is ok. (If there’s too much duplication, which happens rarely, I organically figure something out)
Bonus: Whenever you add something new to the pile, you always encounter your old stuff and it keeps refreshing a mental picture of the project in your mind and helps create new mental grooves

Ideas about Life? Your values, your inspiration, you want to do something with and in your life
#

Keep a fancy, awesome, cool, aspirational notebook!
A fancy pen you like
Basically whatever you used when you started your journey? You wrote notes, you made headlines, you had marginalia in your pages, you did everything by hand. Just use the classiest things you like and can afford, to give it heft and meaning.
Your life has few ideas, important as they are. Easy to keep track of them in a notebook
You want the form to matter.
Digital notebooks? They’re cool too, if you like them.
All you need is semi regular review and process
- A good lazy way to do it is when the notebook fills up
- Review and copy over the summaries of everything good and lasting and important
- See what sticks

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Emacs, Three and a Half Years On

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Sat, 30 Dec 2023 10:16:07 +0530

If someone had told me three and a half years ago, that I would:

Use Emacs as my primary editor nearly everywhere.
Not just as an editor. In fact, I would stop thinking of it as an editor and come to see it for what it really is. A whole computer with an editor bolted on.
Use Emacs not just for writing, but also have it serve as the cornerstone for two other extremely important activities in my life, organising my life (with Org Mode) and tending to my commonplace book (with Org Roam)
Come so far as to scrape a web page, set it up as a connected node in my Zettelkasten, strip close to fifty superfluous lines, edit the rest to my liking, change the title to title case, and then file it way within minutes, and learn do all this by osmosis and research over the years, just by using it daily and being curious¹
Have a kind community support all my crazy attempts to bend Emacs to my will

I would have told you, you were off your rocker.
But I do, do these things (which, I’m ridiculously pleased with) and have this wonderful community (which, I am earnestly grateful for).
Here’s to three and a half decades!

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and being a bit stubborn and refusing to accept the status quo ↩︎

Writing as Gardening

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Sat, 09 Jul 2022 11:32:28 +0530

GRRM in his latest not-a-blog-post, references this video on the two types of authors, he lumps writer-folk into.

Just like him, I try to structure and outline what I write, I really do, and just like him, I can do it fairly ok, and still never really enjoy the process.

I never quite understood why, until I realised I was a gardener.
This also helped me understand, why the recent move to the Zettelkasten process is helping me write without the stress that I previously used to encounter when I attempted writing something even a teensy bit long or complex.

Like he says, I know what I want to write about, a tiny bit of structure helps.
But the trick is in the syntopical thoughts, the seeds that germinate and the cross pollination of words and ideas and the thrilling uncertainty of waiting for my plants to take root and to see, in time, what comes of what I sow.

One of my favourite authors thinks and writes, just like I do.
The only thing that I need to become so good that I cannot be ignored is to show up and do the work and tend to my garden.

Today, reading GRRM reminded me of my Zettelkasten, which needs regular tending, which reminded me of Cal Newport’s ideas on slow productivity and showing up daily and whose book on being great was inspired by Steve Martin, all of which led me to writing this post.
This is where my garden path led me today!

Showing up daily to tend my garden!
This is liberating.
This is … freedom!

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P.P.P.S. And if you are a ASOIAF aficionado like me, definitely read the post to know what is happening in those lands.

Zettelkasten

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Tue, 28 Jun 2022 09:07:51 +0530

Just a little note to mark the beginning of my Zettelkasten journey.
While I’ve always had a commonplace book of sorts, all my life, and I’ve always taken tons of notes on books I pay attention to, I’ve never really been able to come up with a way of writing what I think syntopically.
Or I can, but its like pulling teeth.
Writing what I learnt in Antifragile, took months, and a lot of cursing through gritted teeth.
But I want to. I really do.
I so want to write about what I learn and read and then intermingle them all together and put my bundle of thoughts down.

And then this perfect storm of stuff happened recently.
I have a lot to learn this year.
I am taking a lot of notes, but just full text search, does not cut it for me.
So I’ve been casting about for a way to take notes and thoughts and relate all of this together.
And I ran across the Zettelkasten method across a lot of people I pay attention to.
Despite all the new fangled tags of “personal knowledge management” and “knowledge graph” and who knows what else, the Zettelkasten method’s old and it’s Lindy.
So definitely worth my time to learn and invest in, if it helps me write and share more.

At its heart, all it is, is a system to take and refer to your notes and your thoughts.
Folks have recommendations about how to take notes, the types of notes, the way to store the notes, and various ways and means to link and refer to them notes.¹
I found David Kadavy’s long post as well his book and Sascha Fast and Christian Tietze’s posts over at the zettelkasten.de website really helpful with me getting started.

I decide to use Org-roam as my tool of choice.
It’s very loosey-goosey² and flexible.
It’s Lindy.
It’s plain text.
And it is built on Org mode and Emacs.
Wouldn’t recommend you use this, unless you want to put in the time to learn about Emacs. There are plenty of user friendly options out there.

I spent about a week putting in lots of stray notes, I had.
And some time building up links between them.
And some more time, reading a couple of books and then taking notes and linking them as I went.

This is how my notes currently look.

And I realised two things, both good for me.

This is turning out to be a sustainable, lifelong habit. One that I enjoy
Building up links and doing highlights and jotting thoughts, all lead to me having a coherent view of what I just read and learnt as well as having something, a lot of raw yet fertile somethings, that I can use to build something derivative out of, create a larger work from, expand on much more easily.

I’ll revisit this in a year and tell you how it went :)

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It’s notes (and footnotes) all the way down! :) ↩︎
Yes, that is the exact, technical term to describe it. ↩︎

Zettelkasten on Janusworx

Note to Self, Cal Newport’s Minimal Notes System

Why? #

Minimal Friction #

Outsource your brain? No! #

The System #

For Books (the Corner Marking Method) #

Projects (Professional and Personal) #

Ideas about Life? Your values, your inspiration, you want to do something with and in your life #