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#[Twitter thread] by Person/Conor White-Sullivan 𐃏🇺🇸: 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
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
"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.
Someone asked me today - "how can I remember more from books I read?"
Like a broken record - my answer: Write down ideas in your own words. If you don't understand it, you won't remember it -- if you can't say it in your own DIFFERENT words, you don't actually understand it.
Most of the problem with school is you are writing for a fake audience of one (the teacher) who already knows the material, and you may not even like or respect.
You’ll learn a lot more if you write for an audience you’re actually excited about (like your Twitter mutuals)
If you’re new to Twitter (or any social writing platform 😉) it can be overwhelming and paralyzing to try to write for “THE PUBLIC”
Pick a few people you respect who you want to attract as mutuals, and persist.
Within 2 years of this and @vgr and @visakanv both followed me back https://twitter.com/Conaw/status/1085332535184285696__