Five months ago I wrote something on reading and note-taking and made mention of the Zettelkasten Method, Evergreen Notes, Digital Gardens, Smart Notes and Second Brains.
Let me try to provide some context and background to that:
The Zettelkasten Method is a method of making notes and thinking about things and committing these thoughts to writing using slips of paper or index cards (zettels) that are stored in boxes or cases (kastens). The word zettelkasten as a whole essentially means slipcase.
Something Bill Muehlenberg quoted on his site yesterday from CH Spurgeon has got me thinking.
Bill quotes Spurgeon as follows:
Master those books you have. Read them thoroughly. Bathe in them until they saturate you. Read and reread them, masticate and digest them. Let them go into your very self. Peruse a good book several times and make notes and analysis of it. A student will find that his mental constitution is more affected by one book thoroughly mastered than by twenty books he has merely skimmed. Little learning and much pride come of hasty reading. Some men are disabled from thinking by their putting meditation away for the sake of much reading. In reading let your motto be, ‘much not many’.
Last year I posted some brief ponderings about a few different wikis. At the time I was intent on getting to grips with TiddlyWiki. I began doing that and used it within my employment for around 5 or 6 weeks. During that time I migrated my previous notes into TiddlyWiki and began using it to take notes during meetings and to record a range of tasks and activities. Shortly after that, however, I came across what was, for me, was a major hurdle. That hurdle was accessing and updated my wiki whilst I was travelling. Each time I edited and saved the wiki it was another 1+mb of usage on my mobile plan. Even a one-letter change and save would mean the wiki in toto was being resaved to my cloud storage. As a result TiddlyWiki got shelved.
My search for productivity tools that suit my platforms (linux @ home, windows @ work) and work philosophy (KISS, plain text preferred for transportability, not being locked into a particular tool or suite) continues.
I’m now using TiddlyWiki for general notes - one wiki file for home stuff and another wiki file for work stuff. I use minimal formatting in the tiddlers, but try to make good use of tags so I can track/trace ideas. I was using TiddlyWiki through Firefox but apparently a future release of Firefox (due in a month or two) won’t allow TiddlyWikis to be easily saved. As a result I’m now using Pale Moon browser for my wikis and will probably migrate the majority of my web usage to/through it.
Over the years I’ve searched for, tried, stopped using, used again, reconsidered, stopped using, considered some more on note-taking/recording/filing systems.
Generally I’ve opted for computer-based systems but have also tried paper-based methods.
The list is probably not complete, and in no particular order:
- Treepad
- Zim
- GTD
- Bullet Journalling
- CherryTree
- DIY Planner
- Written to do lists
- Online to do lists
- Spreadsheets with to do lists
- Pocket notebooks - cheap ones from the supermarket that only collect info, not retain it.
- Larger notebooks such as Moleskine and Field Notes
- Plain text computer files
- My brain (limited, poor recall ability, prone to failure)
I would class Treepad, Zim and Cherrytree together in the same forest; to do lists and bullet journals in the same paddock; notebooks (including DIY Planner) as the medium rather than the method; and my brain as the fallback for all of the others.
A few months ago I read a brief article on a local news website about personal kanban and how it can help organise aspects of our lives.
I’d only ever heard of kanban within the context of manufacturing environments so was intrigued enough to read the article, buy the book and eventually read the book. As a result I have recently begun to implement personal kanban without my work context. The book, Personal Kanban, is by Jim Benson and Tonianne deMaria Barry and was interesting, engaging and funny.