I used to struggle with this too, until I started studying Stoicism. Here's a quote from Marcus Aurelius’ meditations 6.15 that I think about often:
“Ambition means tying your well being to what other people say or do. Self-indulgence means tying it to the things that happen to you. Sanity means tying it to your own actions."
If blogging is like a webpage, then a Zettelkasten is like a Wikipedia for your brains.
Inspired by a thread on HN ~2 years ago, I’ve now written 1,075 interconnected notes, and no longer feel that I forget 80% of any non-fiction book I read.
Linking is key; it allows you to connect any new insight to your existing externalized knowledge base, resulting in deeper understanding and retention.
It also creates the space to connect thoughts across disparate domains, which spawns novel ideas at an even greater rate. For example, I might link an idea about neuroscience to my chess writings that links to a note about workout methods which links to a piano technique note. Now I suddenly see a new connection about applying a piano practice technique to leveling up my chess score.
It has changed the way I read, or consume information generally.
A great book that got me started is Ahrens, S. (2017). How to Take Smart Notes
Yes indeed, anytime anything is worth remembering (or connecting with other notes) I write it down. It interrupts reading, so I don’t churn through as many books.
I used to set goals like x books per year, but now I realize it’s a vanity metric and instead read for insights.
I use Obsidian for note taking, which supports images too.
Pondering about trying out Zettelkasten, I'm thinking whether it would make sense to take notes in a sequential log ... like one file per day/week/month/year ... and then regularly, like daily or weekly sort things in to the zettelkasten structure.
Anybody tried that?
AFAIK, this is how many data(base)-systems do to make writing more efficient: Write down into a write-cache of some sort, and then do batch-wise indexing as a separate process.
Ray Dalio's Principles is becoming my favorite book of the year; despite it being ~500 pages, there's so much super relevant content to company building and generally very applicable principles that help with day to day conduct.
While most books I've read are tactical or strategic, this book talks about the philosophical -- especially recommended for founders beyond the scrappy MVP stage, perhaps a team > 10
Two minutes? If I'm in flow (a very rare occurrence these days, sadly), five seconds is on the cusp of too long. In my editor, spending time looking through the list of autocomplete suggestions is often enough to lose track of some of the things I had mentally stacked up to write. Switching to a browser to find docs risks the whole stack.
One way I've found to mitigate this is to not try to write things that that would definitely work on the first draft. Instead, whenever I need something I don't remember, I just write enough of it to note what I'm trying to do and keep going. The details of whether it would be more convenient to use slice or substring here aren't important when I'm trying to write things down before I forget them.
We tackle the NP-hard route optimization problem for delivery businesses. We cut their fuel consumption by 20%~40%, with a tremendous green impact for the planet. We saved the equivalent of planting 100,000 trees last year alone! We also cover relocation expenses and sponsor work permits :)
Headquartered in beautiful Vancouver BC, with sweeping views of the ocean and mountains. To learn more about who we are, our engineering culture, and whether this is the right place for you, read our Key Values profile: https://www.keyvalues.com/routific
Routific | Vancouver, BC | Full-Time, Onsite/Remote | https://routific.com We tackle the NP-hard route optimization problem for delivery businesses. We cut their fuel consumption by 20%~40%, with a tremendous green impact for the planet. We saved the equivalent of planting 100,000 trees last year alone!
We also cover relocation expenses and sponsor work permits :)
Headquartered in beautiful Vancouver BC, with sweeping views of the ocean and mountains. To learn more about who we are, our engineering culture, and whether this is the right place for you, read our Key Values profile: https://www.keyvalues.com/routific
Routific | Vancouver, BC | Full-Time, Onsite | https://routific.com
We tackle the NP-hard route optimization problem for delivery businesses. We cut their fuel consumption by 20%~40%, with a tremendous green impact for the planet. We saved the equivalent of planting 100,000 trees last year alone!
We also cover relocation expenses and sponsor work permits :)
Headquartered in beautiful Vancouver BC, with sweeping views of the ocean and mountains. To learn more about who we are, our engineering culture, and whether this is the right place for you, read our Key Values profile: https://www.keyvalues.com/routific
“Ambition means tying your well being to what other people say or do. Self-indulgence means tying it to the things that happen to you. Sanity means tying it to your own actions."