What Does Your General Knowledge Management Look Like?

00:00:00.000 | [music]

00:00:04.720 | We got a question here from John.

00:00:08.080 | John asks, "What does your general knowledge management look like these days?"

00:00:15.160 | John, that's a good question because I've been thinking about this recently.

00:00:19.160 | So here's what happened.

00:00:21.640 | A listener mailed me a book, "How to Take Smart Notes."

00:00:28.320 | Now, this book is about four or five years old now, but it's already an

00:00:32.400 | underground classic because it really helped introduce to a broader and

00:00:36.640 | English-speaking audience this Zettelkasten note-taking system.

00:00:41.320 | Now, I knew a little bit about this.

00:00:43.080 | I've talked about it on the show.

00:00:44.400 | We've had some guests on the show, like Srini Rao, who swears by it and

00:00:48.200 | talked a little bit about it, but I wasn't really deep into the details.

00:00:51.400 | So I read this book recently.

00:00:53.480 | This is actually one of my five books for January that I'm reading.

00:00:58.880 | And it was interesting.

00:00:59.960 | It was interesting.

00:01:01.480 | So here's the foundational premise of this book, the narrative motivation

00:01:07.080 | for this book, is that there was a sociologist, he was German, his name

00:01:12.000 | was Luhmann, and he came to sociology late.

00:01:15.280 | And the idea was, it's too late for you to get a dissertation and become a

00:01:21.280 | sociologist, it's kind of late in life, I don't think it's going to work out.

00:01:24.160 | And he did, he got his dissertation like that and became incredibly

00:01:28.360 | productive as an author.

00:01:30.600 | All right.

00:01:31.880 | So then there was a team from some German university that studied this guy, Luhmann.

00:01:37.160 | How was he so productive?

00:01:38.320 | How did he get his dissertation so fast?

00:01:39.720 | But also, how did he publish all of these epic papers, this huge quantity

00:01:43.160 | of epic papers throughout his lifetime?

00:01:45.880 | This is the story that's told in this book.

00:01:48.440 | And what they discovered is he had a crazy note-taking system, the Zettelkasten

00:01:53.800 | system, and it was built around what's called a slip box.

00:01:56.360 | And I'm not going to get into all the details now, but it's a box in which

00:02:00.680 | you put these slips of paper on which you have notes.

00:02:04.640 | And the way it works is when you're taking notes on a particular topic,

00:02:09.080 | you put that, first of all, you take the notes kind of standalone, like you

00:02:13.400 | think about it before you take the notes.

00:02:14.680 | The thinking is happening when you take the notes, right?

00:02:16.400 | You're not transcribing, you're taking notes.

00:02:19.480 | You try to put it behind an existing relevant note in your box, in the slip

00:02:25.480 | box, or a box full of slips.

00:02:26.960 | And then you can also link.

00:02:28.760 | So these are numbered, and so you might then literally just write links on the

00:02:33.920 | paper, like this is also associated with this, this, and this.

00:02:36.360 | The idea is you give all these ideas you've thought about, and they all

00:02:40.080 | exist in this big linked system.

00:02:41.880 | And what Luhmann supposedly did, and this is the promise of what we could

00:02:46.760 | call pure or hard Zettelkasten, is that it made the actual process of writing

00:02:51.920 | papers easily because he would just discover, he would just discover by

00:02:56.800 | surfing these links and connections in his slip box, these interesting new

00:03:00.680 | ideas that would emerge, and these ideas would become papers.

00:03:03.560 | All the thinking was largely done.

00:03:05.800 | The ideas were done.

00:03:06.720 | It was all there in the slip box.

00:03:08.320 | That's how you could just write, write, write, write, write.

00:03:09.640 | And the author of this book, "How to Take Smart Notes," argues that, yeah,

00:03:14.440 | writing should not be hard, note-taking should be hard, but if you do this right,

00:03:17.720 | it should just be easy to write.

00:03:18.760 | Like the ideas are all there, and you'll just discover like, oh,

00:03:21.040 | here's an article, here's a paper.

00:03:22.320 | All right.

00:03:23.680 | Well, here's where I stand on this.

00:03:24.920 | First of all, that idea that writing can be made easy and all the hard

00:03:31.000 | works and the note-taking, and then you'll just discover articles.

00:03:33.320 | I don't buy it.

00:03:35.440 | I mean, I'm a professional academic, I'm a professional writer.

00:03:38.800 | It's just not the way it works.

00:03:40.480 | It's not the way it works.

00:03:41.880 | I mean, if you're writing a New Yorker piece, you're not just wandering

00:03:44.720 | through your slip box and have this interesting collection of things.

00:03:47.280 | You make some observations that just doesn't work that way.

00:03:50.160 | It's you're looking at what's going on in the world and what your specialty is,

00:03:56.880 | and just honed through your instincts of having read a thousand of these

00:04:00.720 | articles and written a hundred yourself.

00:04:02.320 | You come across an idea, like, I think there's something here.

00:04:05.560 | And then you kind of work backwards.

00:04:07.480 | What do I already know that could support this?

00:04:09.200 | And you have to go out and gather a lot of information on its own.

00:04:11.400 | That's really how articles come together.

00:04:13.000 | I don't buy this idea that they're going to emerge from the system, but I am

00:04:17.320 | taken by this idea that this is an interesting way to store notes, that

00:04:23.400 | it's not just a hierarchical system of directories and subdirectories

00:04:27.920 | and sub-subdirectories and so on.

00:04:30.000 | But that there's these connections back and forth.

00:04:34.200 | You have starting points.

00:04:35.240 | So in a Zettelkasten system, you have an index that goes to some

00:04:38.160 | starting points and then you can follow those starting points, have

00:04:41.360 | notes all connected to it, but then they jump over to other collections

00:04:44.720 | of notes and then from there you can jump over, I think that's actually

00:04:47.120 | not a bad way to organize ideas.

00:04:49.480 | And I do like the homogeneity of the note-taking process that like any

00:04:55.440 | thoughts that might be relevant, go into a certain format and go into a

00:04:59.880 | certain system, you put them in a certain place and you throw some

00:05:02.040 | links to them and it's all in there.

00:05:03.400 | All right.

00:05:04.320 | So all this background is to say that I am messing around with a more

00:05:08.840 | Zettelkasten style approach to organizing my notes.

00:05:13.440 | I'm using Rome Research's online tool right now, which I'm really

00:05:17.360 | enjoying, I think it's fantastic.

00:05:18.600 | And I'm trying to do more of this.

00:05:20.760 | Just get everything that's related, mainly right now for like my writing,

00:05:25.720 | my non-academic writing, my non-academic, so New Yorker articles, blog posts,

00:05:32.080 | my books, podcast or podcast related ideas, so things related to this or

00:05:37.320 | my newsletter, trying to actually file them away in a Zettelkasten style.

00:05:43.480 | I do not think that I will be able to do hard Zettelkasten and just have book

00:05:47.200 | ideas emerge from the system or blog posts ideas emerge from the system.

00:05:50.320 | But I think it will allow me to do more thinking upfront when I take notes.

00:05:54.040 | And to go back and rediscover more sources already when I'm working on

00:05:59.000 | something as opposed to having to find everything from scratch from working on.

00:06:01.880 | I think it is going to help.

00:06:03.000 | And I think it is going to feel like a closed system.

00:06:05.080 | Like all these different ideas and thoughts and things I've encountered

00:06:09.680 | are all in a system where they're accessible and in a way that is interesting.

00:06:12.840 | So I'm trying that.

00:06:14.400 | And I'll report back actually.

00:06:16.720 | I mean, John, who asked this, it's pretty new for me.

00:06:20.040 | I might even write a, like a New Yorker piece on this whole, the

00:06:24.080 | promise of the second brain, et cetera, et cetera, that it's

00:06:26.760 | something I pitched my editor.

00:06:27.800 | But anyways, that's where I am right now.

00:06:30.280 | I am messing around with the Piero Zello Cast and Style system.

00:06:33.200 | If you want to find out more, do the book, how to take smart notes.

00:06:36.920 | It's a cool, weird, interesting book.

00:06:38.840 | And again, I don't buy the theory that writing can be made easy, but I do buy

00:06:43.440 | the theory of having a consistent approach to taking and storing notes

00:06:47.680 | that can handle everything, something I think going on there.

00:06:51.520 | So we'll see how that goes.

00:06:53.160 | And I will report back.

00:06:55.480 | [MUSIC]

What Does Your General Knowledge Management Look Like?

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