Pkm - BlogFlock

Post on Writing Slowly - Writing Slowly

2025-04-02T01:23:12.000Z

Some say that due to AI, “the vast majority of human beauty that will exist has already been created”. I’m pointing out the opposite:

It’s a great time to be writing the future.

Why? Well, by nature humans innovate. Humans equipped with AI?

They just innovate harder.

Post on Writing Slowly - Writing Slowly

2025-04-02T01:10:00.000Z

Legendary computer game Myst started life as an interconnected network of cards in the equally legendary app HyperCard. To be precise, 1,355 cards in 6 HyperCard stacks.

Now, through graph analysis the last secrets of that network are finally being ‘deMystified’.

Post on Writing Slowly - Writing Slowly

2025-04-01T06:38:30.000Z

So many, many books I really want to read. Here are just a couple on this towering tsundoku pile:

The Book: A Cover-to-Cover Exploration of the Most Powerful Object of Our Time by Keith Houston 📚

The Best of all Possible Worlds by Michael Kempe

Post on Writing Slowly - Writing Slowly

2025-04-01T01:00:27.000Z

An interesting Zettelkasten discussion.

malikalimoekhamedov.substack.com/p/bob-dot…

It's a great time to be writing the future - Writing Slowly

2025-03-31T20:57:37.000Z

Writers are worrying about AI taking their livelihoods. But unless you were already writing like a robot, that’s not how it works.

Now is a truly fantastic time to be writing. The future is absolutely wide open for the first time in a more than a century. That’s because the idiom of the whole culture is transforming and it’s up to us to change it.

Just as no one these days writes like Jane Austen, or Thomas Hardy or Louisa May Alcott, in ten years time, no one will be writing the way we do now. Large language models (LLMs) have taken our entire idiom and trashed it. And that’s a good thing. Our prose, and therefore the prose of AI, sounds like it’s still living in the Twentieth Century. But it’s well past time for radically new ways of speaking, writing and therefore being.

The key driver is simply fashion. What seems amazingly cutting-edge today will rapidly go stale. AI prose (which imitates our older siblings) is about to taste like last week’s dinner.

But we’re not just dreaming of what comes after content - it’s also time to seize the means of containment.

Since AI is now providing all the ‘content’ the container industry can ever handle (i.e. all the content platforms without exception), we’re now free to make new human-shaped places beyond its reach.

We’re inventing both what AI can’t say, and where it can’t say it, so let’s go!

Five solutions to link rot in my personal note collection - Writing Slowly

2025-03-30T12:10:20.000Z

Have you noticed that the problem of link rot on the Web is very real? Just writing a link to a separate page, without comment or annotation, assumes permanence and depends on that link persisting through time. But links don’t really work that way. They become obsolete far faster than feels comfortable. Because I didn’t like to acknowledge this, I now have a whole heap of old notes consisting of little more than broken links. Here are five possible solutions to this problem. Which ones make sense to you?

1. Write notes in your own words

It would have been better if my notes said what the link is about, and what interests me about it. Since realising the extent of this problem, and recognising that link rot is so prevalent, I try these days to be more careful in describing for myself the content or salient aspects of each source as and when I record the link.

Action: when referring to a web resource, summarise it just well enough that if and when it disappears, my reference to it will still make sense and be useful.

2. Refer to the Internet Archive

Apparently, many articles on Wikipedia now have broken links. That’s annoying, to say the least. One potential remedy might be to link directly to the archived version of the source on The Internet Archive, or maybe another archive site like archive.is

Action: where I doubt the longevity of the source, also link to the Internet Archive’s version.

Unfortunately online archive sites are themselves quite brittle and they’re vulnerable to hostile actions like being sued for breach of copyright, or even just running out of funding. Dependence on a single small charity as the memory keeper of the entire Web obviously creates a potential point of failure and sets us up for a big problem if and when the archive site itself disappears with a 401 error or worse.

3. Create your own personal archive

A heavy-duty solution would be to create my own archive of websites I’ve referred to. Bookmarking services such as Pinboard enable this. So does micro.blog, which is a kind of Swiss Army Knife of the indie-web. These services don’t just store the link to a web page. They also create and store a snapshot of the page. But these services store the archival data in the cloud, which may present a problem in some circumstances. And both the services I’ve mentioned are tiny one-person enterprises which suffer from the risk of that one person shutting up shop. On the other hand, individuals have a greater longevity than massive corporations, ironically, and I’m writing this in the year after Google shut down Google Podcasts without any consultation.

Alternatively, self-archiving on your own computer is possible by using an application such as archive box. A reference application such as Zotero, whose primary function is to manage academic references, can also create a personal archive of pdf articles and other sources. I use this and find it very helpful. It also enables saving and cataloguing of web page snapshots.

Action: Consider subscribing to a bookmarking service, or even using an app like archivebox. Check out the archiving features of Zotero that I’m not already familiar with.

With an archive of all the sources you’ve ever referred to, there’s no danger of link rot in your own references. But this just defers the problem one level further from you. It hasn’t gone away. All the articles and sources you archive are still susceptible to their own link rot. You can only realistically archive a couple of levels of hyperlinks before the task is too massive to handle.

4. Don’t worry, be happy

Another more philosophical ‘solution’ to the problem of link rot would be to stop worrying and accept that everything changes. Going slightly further, one could recognise that forgetting is an essential aspect of remembering, and that memory systems also need a mechanism for forgetting information. The Internet’s main forgetting system is for addresses to change or disappear without notice. This is inelegant and has unfortunate side effects, yet it works, I suppose. If I imagined the Internet to be a stable repository of collective knowledge, I simply imagined it wrongly. I thought we were building a new Pyramid of Cheops, but our blueprints were those of the Tower of Babel. It turns out the Web is no more permanent than a dog breed. It’s the river you don’t step into twice. If we think we’re gazing up at the night sky we’re fooling ourselves. The web isn’t the night sky, it’s just a cave wall studded with fireflies. And so on. I told you this was philosophical.

More generally, human knowledge isn’t really like gold bars in a bank vault, which you can store indefinitely and retrieve when you like. Culture, of which the Web is one aspect, is a machine for remembering, yet it also fabricates and forgets. How this happens remains a mystery. By attempting to memorialise himself for his achievements, King Ozymandius became a byword for failure. The art historian Aby Warburg saw Memosyne, the Greek goddess of memory, as a sphinx holding a riddle. What does culture forget and what does it remember? And how does it do it?

Action: Err, none? Radical acceptance of impermanence? Just go with the flow?

5. Sow and then reap

The term ‘link rot’ has stuck because the organic process it implies seems nearer to the reality. Perhaps a better model of human knowledge would be that it’s like seeds in a seed bank. A seed bank can last a long time, provided you plant the seeds each season to grow new seeds to store over winter. This metaphor suggests that knowledge persists not through storage but through use. And this thought brings me right back around to my first solution to link rot: make notes in my own words. By writing my own version of the knowledge I’ve found, I’m passing it on to the next reader, who might just choose to do the same.

Action: Don’t try to store knowledge. Share, teach, discuss. Pass it on.

None of these solutions are perfect, or even workable. Nevertheless, just because the Internet forgot some information doesn’t mean I have to forget it too.

I wonder if there are any other solutions to this problem of the Web degrading over time. Please let me know.

Now read: Notemaking helps you remember - and helps you forget too

Tame the chaos with just four folders for all your notes - Writing Slowly

2025-03-30T11:46:54.000Z

Bob Doto’s book A System for Writing (my review) suggests setting up a Zettelkasten (a flexible collection of notes) with a small handful of folders.

These folders aren’t merely places to put notes, though. They suggest a specific workflow - a system for writing.

In-box
Sleeping
References
Main

Here’s a very brief summary of the process:

The In-box

Put your fleeting notes in the in-box so you know where they all are.

Make a regular time to process them into more permanent, polished main notes and move them to that folder.

The Sleeping folder

The ‘sleeping’ folder is a kind of in-box overflow. It’s for notes you just never seem to get round to processing. Put them in the sleeping folder and they’ll still be there when you finally feel like working on them (or you can just let sleeping notes lie). This keeps the In-box relatively small so you don’t get overwhelmed with unprocessed notes. Everyone has more thoughts than they can handle and probably makes more notes than they can handle too. It’s not a big problem - you just work on what you feel like working on and leave the rest. With this system you’ll at least be able to pick up where you left off.

The Reference folder

The reference folder is for reference notes. Let’s say you watched a movie and you want to make notes on it. Create a reference note with the name and all the details of the movie, then any notes you make can link to the reference note. This way you’ll never lose track of where a thought or idea or quote or image came from. You’ll have the details in the reference folder.

The Main folder

Main notes are a bit more polished than fleeting notes. They have a single clear idea, a title, a few links, and a unique ID.

Taming the chaos

That’s it.

Oh, and plenty of people think you need category folders or tags, like subject sections in a library. I admit this is a dominant way of thinking about knowledge. What else would you do, other than put it in categories? But this way of thinking is pretty much contrary to the spirit of the Zettelkasten. Sociologist Niklas Luhmann’s Zettelkasten was fertile because it broke down the established categories in sociology and re-constructed a major theory of society from the ground up. And art Historian Aby Warburg organised his Zettelkasten, a library and a whole institute against preconceived categories in his discipline.

Yes, chaos reigns, in a sense - but it’s structured, rhizomatic chaos.

Post on Writing Slowly - Writing Slowly

2025-03-24T20:42:49.000Z

Can you make too many notes? This guy did. #zettelkasten #notetaking #pkm

Post on Writing Slowly - Writing Slowly

2025-03-24T20:09:41.000Z

💬 This is a quiet space…

Moving to Sydney offered cheap train travel compared with Europe. “Never mind arriving,” I would say, “it’s great value just for the view.”

Looks like they’ve finally worked out the real value proposition.

Lord Acton took too many notes, but that doesn't mean you have to - Writing Slowly

2025-03-24T11:55:04.000Z

It’s intriguing to discover a prolific author with a working collection of 148,000 notes, but it begs the question: can you make too many notes?

I mean, surely there comes a point where your note-making gets in the way of the outcomes you’re looking for, and the endless writing of notes starts to defeat its very purpose.

Well, maybe. Here’s a little cautionary tale from the Nineteenth Century, a time when both empire and facial hair were unrestrained by decency.

John Dalberg-Acton (1834-1902) was a significant British political figure of the Victorian era. Did he have one of those massive walrus mustaches that they all seemed to go in for back then? Well sort of, but he also had the type of beard that make it look like its owner has just swallowed a beaver, so frankly it’s hard to tell.

He was also an important historian who nevertheless published very little in his lifetime. The consensus seems to be that he took too many notes.

Acton’s Encyclopedia Britannica (11th Edn) entry reads in part:

“Lord Acton has left too little completed original work to rank among the great historians; his very learning seems to have stood in his way; he knew too much and his literary conscience was too acute for him to write easily, and his copiousness of information overloads his literary style. But he was one of the most deeply learned men of his time, and he will certainly be remembered for his influence on others.”

By the way, it’s topical to talk about Lord Acton. He has indeed been remembered, but chiefly for his prescient aphorisms:

“Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.”

“There is no worse heresy than that the office sanctifies the holder of it.”

No prizes for guessing which Scofflaw-in-Chief this is a reminder of. Too many notes? Sad! But I digress.

That’s not all. Here’s Keith Thomas in an entertaining London Review of Books piece.

“It is possible to take too many notes; the task of sorting, filing and assimilating them can take for ever, so that nothing gets written. The awful warning is Lord Acton, whose enormous learning never resulted in the great work the world expected of him. An unforgettable description of Acton’s Shropshire study after his death in 1902 was given by Sir Charles Oman. There were shelves and shelves of books, many of them with penciled notes in the margin. ‘There were pigeonholed desks and cabinets with literally thousands of compartments into each of which were sorted little white slips with references to some particular topic, so drawn up (so far as I could see) that no one but the compiler could easily make out the drift.’ And there were piles of unopened parcels of books, which kept arriving, even after his death. ‘For years apparently he had been endeavouring to keep up with everything that had been written, and to work their results into his vast thesis.’ ‘I never saw a sight,’ Oman writes, ‘that more impressed on me the vanity of human life and learning.’’

According to Oman, in his book, On the Writing of History (1939), Lord Acton left behind only one good book, some lectures, and several essays scattered in hard-to-find journals. He also created a plan for a large history project that others would write after his death, but not in the way he had intended.

In 1998 the historian Timothy Messer-Kruse drew entirely the wrong conclusion from all this. He seemed to point the blame for Lord Acton’s little problem on the fact that all he had to work with was compartments full of paper notes:

“What may have been accomplished had Acton possessed more than a row of dusty pigeon-holes to store his notes and musings?”

Would perhaps a computer have helped him out, by any chance? Yes indeed:

“The advances in computing and communication technologies over the past thirty years have laid the material basis for overcoming the Lord Acton syndrome that continues to plague the historical profession. It is now possible for the Lord Actons of today to share an unlimited number of their notes, ideas, and annotations with the entire world of interested scholars with minimal cost. Paperless publishing through the Internet theoretically offers the means for transcending a centuries-old model of historical scholarship and breaking down the barriers between academic and amateur historians.”

Well, we’ve had another 27 years of the digital era since then, and it’s probably safe to say that while there’s certainly a ‘Lord Acton Syndrome’, the cure is not more computers.

If anything, the situation is even worse now, made so by the massive expansion of available information. Imagine what Acton would have done with all the many terabytes of historical data that’s now available at the click of a button.

That’s right: he’d have made notes on it.

In fact, Charles Oman had already understood the poor man’s real problem much earlier.

Oman saw that this limited output from such a capable scholar happened because Lord Acton tried to master everything before finishing anything. Apparently he had a great book in mind, but gathering all the necessary information became overwhelming for one person.

The lesson, for Oman at least, is clear:

“In short the ideal complete and perfect book that is never written may be the enemy of the good book that might have been written. Ars longa, vita brevis— one must remember the fleeting years, or one’s magnum opus may never take shape, if one is too meticulous in polishing it up to supreme excellence.”

Being too focused on perfection might mean our greatest work (or indeed any work) never materializes at all.

So take look in the mirror. Are you a walrus? Have you swallowed a beaver? No? Then you don’t need to copy Lord Acton’s note-taking excesses either. Make some notes, sure, but please don’t ‘do an Acton’ and die before you make something from them.

Footnote:

Oman complained about the seemingly hopeless diversity of Lord Acton’s interests, as evidenced from the wide range of his notes - from pets, to stepmothers to totems. Well, I’m not convinced this is a problem in itself. In the right hands it might even be an advantage. The real problem was that Acton doesn’t seem to have developed a system for writing, beyond the publication of his lectures.

“There were pigeon-holed desks and cabinets with literally thousands of compartments, into each of which were sorted little white slips with references to some particular topic, so drawn up (so far as I could see) that no one but the compiler could easily make out the drift of the section. I turned over one or two from curiosity—one was on early instances of a sympathetic feeling for animals, from Ulysses' old dog in Homer downward. Another seemed to be devoted to a collection of hard words about stepmothers in all national literatures, a third seemed to be about tribal totems.” See also: The mastery of knowledge is an illusion

Acknowledgement

Ched Spellman posted about Lord Acton’s problem 15 years ago. Now I’m just commenting on Spellman’s commentary on Thomas’s commentary on Oman’s commentary. Yes, this is the Internet. What did you expect?

References

Hugh Chisolm (1910) ‘Acton, John Emerich Edward Dalberg’, in Encyclopedia Britannica, 11th Edition. Vol 1, pp. 159ff. Internet Archive.

Timothy Messer-Kruse (1998) ‘Scholarly publication in the electronic age’, in Dennis A. Trinkle. Writing, Teaching and Researching History in the Electronic Age: Historians and Computers. London: Routledge. p. 41.

Charles Oman (1939), On the Writing of History. 1st Edition, London: Routledge. doi.org/10.4324/9…

Keith Thomas (2010), ‘Diary: Working Methods’. London Review of Books. Vol. 32 No. 11 · 10 June 2010. https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v32/n11/keith-thomas/diary

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The Dance of Joyful Knowledge: Inside Georges Didi-Huberman's Monumental Note Archive - Writing Slowly

2025-03-19T13:21:34.000Z

People sometimes ask, “who these days uses Zettelkasten-style hand-written notes to produce significant work?” There are literally thousands of examples from before the digital age (Leonardo for example), but what of today? Isn’t this kind of thing pretty much obsolete?

No, it’s not obsolete. I’m happy to say the practice is still very effective.

Georges Didi-Huberman (Wikipedia) is a prolific French art historian and philosopher who has written more than sixty books.

He works in and beyond the tradition of cultural luminaries such as Aby Warburg and Walter Benjamin, so it’s no surprise that like them he keeps his own massive collection of working notes.

How many? Well, a recent exhibition was based on “his immense working file, begun in 1971, comprising more than 148,000 notes” (“son immense fichier de travail, commencé dès 1971, composé de plus de 148 000 fiches”).

And his process?

“To summarize, I would say that the first work is slow, modest, obsessive: it is the creation and accumulation of cards in confrontation or dialogue with certain texts or certain images. The second is fast, exhilarating, joyful, made of discoveries: it is the reassembly of the cards, like a successful card game, on a vast table where the layout of the cards allows one to visualize a large number of them synoptically and to see unexpected constellations emerge. The third work must be rhythmic or musical: it is the writing itself, the handwriting on the entire blank sheet.
As soon as there was a box, there were other boxes and other boxes still. The file is a tool for memorization, a technical prosthesis for thought that allows one to forget many cumbersome, even paralyzing, things. But we must know how to put an end to obsessive activity and the love of repetition, in order to open ourselves more radically to the advent of differences, to the dance of joyful knowledge.” (Source pdf)

The exhibition took place at the IMEC archive (l’Institut Mémoires de l’édition contemporaine) in Normandy, France. This is the same archive that holds more than 12,000 of the note cards of writer and philosopher Roland Barthes.

I’d have loved to visit the exhibition, since this is basically cat-nip for me. Here’s part of the introduction:

“Step into Georges Didi-Huberman’s studio! A philosopher and art historian, he meticulously collects fragments of texts, photographs, and images of all kinds. As a craftsman of thought, he assembles them to create visual and textual constellations to capture our reality. Imec invites you to explore this unique “dialogue machine” and enter the heart of a tirelessly repeated writing process: looking at images, collecting fragments of thought, and telling the world through the montage of ideas.” (Source)

Well, we might have missed the exhibition, but we can still watch a presentation on YouTube (perhaps with English subtitles).

And we can watch some of the short videos presented in the exhibition itself.

And finally, yes, there is a book of the exhibition.

This vast constellation of 148,000 notes shows that the art of creative note-making is alive and well. And this is not just an archive but a philosophy of thinking and writing. Didi-Huberman’s three-stage creative rhythm: patient collection, exhilarating reassembly, and musical composition, shows how fragments, properly arranged, may reveal unexpected truths. His practice is a reminder that notes exist not necessarily as endpoints, but as invitations to a dance.

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Post on Writing Slowly - Writing Slowly

2025-03-19T10:43:48.000Z

The article that struck Will like a bolt of lightning:

What’s the purpose of making notes?

Image: Sayre Gomez at the Art Gallery of NSW.

Post on Writing Slowly - Writing Slowly

2025-03-19T07:57:11.000Z

TIL of a philosopher and prolific author who maintains at the heart of their working practice a collection of more than 148,000 notes. It’s a fascinating story, catnip for #zettelkasten fans, and you’ll be reading it here very soon.

Roland Barthes on the purpose of making notes - Writing Slowly

2025-03-09T20:00:00.000Z

When making notes on some reading it’s very tempting to try to capture everything, to squeeze every last drop of insight from a book, a lecture, a fleeting thought. It’s easy to get lost in the process, mistaking note-taking for the real work. But I’ve been reflecting on something French philosopher Roland Barthes understood: notes aren’t about hoarding knowledge or building a perfect archive. They’re about getting to the real point—writing. In this piece, I consider Barthes' perspective, alongside a couple of other thinkers who, like me, see note-making not as an end in itself, but as a way to get some words onto the page.

The writing comes first

Faced with a large, weighty source, it’s a temptation to try to make notes on the entire contents of the book or video in front of you. FOMO, fear of missing something out, is a driving force here. It’s hard to summarize a long work, and it can be tempting to make lots and lots of notes. If this feels like the monumental task, that’s because it is.

But unless you are literally writing an encyclopedia, your collection of notes is not an encyclopedia. It would be pointless and impossible to make exhaustive notes on a complex work such as a hefty book of philosophy. There’s no point trying to extract every piece of knowledge from a long book, like a juicer squeezing the last drop of juice from an orange.

Summary and paraphrase are your friends here, sure, but it’s also worth considering the fundamental purpose of making your notes.

French philosopher Roland Barthes, who used index cards (‘fiches’) extensively, recognised this. He understood that the purpose of scholarly notes is not: - to understand everything, - to remember everything, or - to record everything. No, the purpose of one’s notes, he held, is to start writing.

Barthes wasn’t creating a knowledge bank. He was writing.

He used his notes, sometimes several times over, as prompts, inspiration, and cues for his written and published output.

“D’origine érudite, la fiche devient le coin vengeur que le désir insère dans la loi compacte du travail. Principe poétique: ce carré savant ira dans le tableau de l’écriture, non dans celui du savoir.”

“From its scholarly origins, the note (fiche) becomes the vengeful wedge that desire inserts into the compact law of work. Poetic principle: this learned square will go into the table of writing, not into that of knowledge.”

Quoted in Krapp, p.12 n.31, citing Rowan Wilken, “The Card Index as Creativity Machine,” Culture Machine 11 (2010), 7–30. PDF.

OK, this is certainly an enigmatic aphorism!! “Vengeful wedge”? What does it mean? Well, I read it to mean that for Barthes, writing a note (“ce carré savant”) was less about knowledge for its own sake (“le tableau du savoir”) and more about the writing process (“le tableau de l’écriture”) it facilitated. In other words, he wasn’t making his notes primarily to know more, but first and foremost, to write.

Sociologist C. Wright Mills acknowledged a similar point in his influential essay ‘On Intellectual Craftsmanship’. He claimed that when working in and on their files, scholars are already writing.

“in practice you never ‘start working on a project’; you are already ‘working,’ either in a personal vein, in the files, in taking notes after browsing, or in guided endeavors. Following this way of living and working, you will always have many topics that you want to work out further. After you decide on some ‘release,’ you will try to use your entire file, your browsing in libraries, your conversation, your selections of people—all for this topic or theme. You are trying to build a little world containing all the key elements which enter into the work at hand, to put each in its place in a systematic way, continually to readjust this framework around developments in each part of it. Merely to live in such a constructed world is to know what is needed: ideas, facts, ideas, figures, ideas.” - C. Wright Mills, 1959. The Sociological Imagination. New York, Oxford University Press. p.223f.

I take Mills to be saying something similar to Barthes here. In their different ways they were both observing that writing is primary. Mills fully recognizes that making notes obviously is a good or even essential means to understand your source material. But the key phrase here is:

“…decide on some release”.

That is to say, develop a concept of your intended output before you start reading a book. That way, your interests will fruitfully guide your reading and note-making. You can’t make notes on everything but you certainly can make notes on something.¹ So it’s useful to choose mindfully what that something is going to be.

Work on fundamental problems

One way of doing this is to use your note system to explore your enduring concerns, those issues and questions you find yourself returning to over and over. Mathematician Richard Hamming recommended keeping a list of fundamental problems. He said:

“Most great people also have 10 to 20 problems they regard as basic and of great importance, and which they currently do not know how to solve. They keep them in their mind, hoping to get a clue as to how to solve them. When a clue does appear they generally drop other things and get to work immediately on the important problem. Therefore they tend to come in first, and the others who come in later are soon forgotten." You and Your Research. A talk by Richard W. Hamming — Bellcore, 7 March 1986.

A framework for extensive and intensive reading

Extensive reading benefits greatly from having a focus like this. You read widely, only really concerning yourself with the problem (or problems) you bring to the text with you. This provides a framework for your note making and it renders the task manageable. Your list of key problems guides your note-making and helps clarify what really matters to you.

But what about intensive reading? This is where you stop skimming and study a single text deeply. An example would be the study of a religious text for spiritual purposes. In this case, it really does make sense to create exhaustive notes. You may even spend a lifetime doing so. In such an instance you might regard this particular text as one of your basic concerns, a question you keep returning to, over an extended period. Many people have found this approach helpful: rather than reading the book in the light of their concerns, they understand their concerns in the light of the book. Religious texts such as the Bible, the Koran or the Buddhist Sutras, are obvious candidates for intensive reading and note making, but there are secular possibilities too.

Intensive reading is alive and well. Several academic disciplines share the tradition of the group seminar, in which a seminal work is studied and debated intensively. However, it may still be fruitful to keep a few personal or professional priorities in mind, the better to focus the study.

My notes are about as useful as what I do with them

Over time I’ve reluctantly discovered that my notes are only as useful as what I do with them. Sure, they help me remember things, and to keep going where I left off. They are the space where I do my thinking — but crucially, provided I do it right, they help me write.

Barthes, Mills, and Hamming all point toward the same idea: I can’t just collect notes, I have to use them². So I try to let them nudge me toward deeper questions, toward projects that matter. I might be reading widely or I might be diving deep into a single text. Either way, the real challenge is knowing when to stop gathering and start using my notes to shape something of my own. —Why not subscribe to the weekly email digest? If you want to, that is. And maybe you do.

Even if you have no intention of writing anything public and you have no ‘release’ in mind I’d still suggest it may be helpful to find some kind of lens through which to view your reading, some means of focusing your concerns. Your notes may reveal this focus to you gradually, as you write them. ↩︎
OK, I can just collect notes. Who’s going to stop me? ↩︎

My writing process oscillates between notes and drafts - Writing Slowly

2025-03-09T11:41:42.000Z

Writing, at least for me, seems to be a messy, back-and-forth kind of thing. It’s a seemingly never-ending loop of laying ideas down, arranging them in some kind of order, and then wrangling them into something that vaguely resembles coherence. It would be nice to imagine that writing is just a matter of sticking a bunch of pre-existing notes together like a jigsaw puzzle, but that’s just wishful thinking. In reality, it’s more like collage created with scissors and glue — messy, iterative, sometimes frustrating, but ultimately rewarding.

Here, I’m laying out my personal writing workflow, some thoughts on drafting (and redrafting, and re-redrafting), and how I juggle note-making with actually getting words onto the page.

A basic writing workflow

My basic writing workflow is:

rough notes and annotations (written anywhere) ->
main notes (Zettelkasten) ->
structure notes (working towards outlines) ->
early drafts ->
edited drafts ->
final drafts ->
final final drafts LOL
published work

A key venue for my rough (fleeting) notes is my daily journal. I write freely about anything and everything, then excerpt interesting stuff into a proper note (aka a main note).

Writing involves drafting and re-drafting

It’s not very realistic to imagine producing completed work simply by mashing together the contents of my notes, nor to create finished writing just from a pile of notes. That’s an attractive but hollow illusion However, my notes certainly help the drafting process tremendously.

It’s tempting to make light of the amount of work the drafting and redrafting takes, but for me it remains a substantial part of the writing process. The Zettelkasten offers a massive head start though, because it means I always have material to work with and because it’s a workshop in which to play with the structure and order of my ideas. It also allows me to continuously develop my unfinished thoughts.

What to do with new thoughts while writing

I use my Zettelkasten notes to construct and inform drafts, but during the drafting process a new thought might come to me, or I’ll notice an idea that I need to add to or expand.

By this time though, I’m already well into the drafting and editing, so I don’t usually go back to create more notes. Perhaps I should, but that would interrupt the flow of the editing work. The exception is when I realise I need to leave the draft and do some more involved thinking/writing. I’ll usually do this by means of my Zettelkasten.

The consolation to not making more notes is that if I’ve actually finished a piece of writing, I can always cite that as a source in a future note, should the occasion arise. This has been a bit of a process of trial and error. Make too few notes to start with, and my drafting process feels under-fed.

There’s no ideal number of notes

It takes quite a lot of notes before I’m happily drafting a piece of writing. But I’m not really sure what the ideal number of notes would be to create a certain length of finished work, and I suspect there isn’t really a definitive way to know that.

That said, I heard an interview with Charles Duhigg (author of Supercommunicators), where he mentioned that while writing a book he makes 200-300 notes on index cards prior to writing each chapter. (Link - 32 minutes onwards). That may seem like a lot, but each of these notes may contain just a few words.

Meanwhile, for each book he reads, author Robert Greene writes very approximately ten notes:

“After going through several dozen books, I might have three hundred cards, and from those cards I see patterns and themes that coalesce into hardcore chapters. I can then thumb through the cards and move them around at will. For many reasons I find this an incredible way to shape a book.” (Source)

When to stop writing notes and start writing drafts

So when does the note-making stop and the drafting start? Again, I’m not sure there’s a definitive answer to this question. Start too early and I don’t have enough material. Start too late and I’ve gathered far more material than I can use. Perhaps the ‘Goldilocks’ moment - when there are just enough notes to make a worthwhile first draft - becomes clearer with experience. Further, I find that starting a draft makes it easier to see what my writing is missing, so the note-making and the drafting overlap in time to a significant extent.

Towards the end of his career, the sociologist Niklas Luhmann, godfather of the Zettelkasten approach, increasingly worked on the many unfinished manuscripts he had started, rather than on creating lots of new Zettelkasten notes. His Zettelkasten had been so productive that it had helped him write far more manuscripts than he had time to publish. Several of these have been edited and published after his death, and I understand there might be more still to come, since the gigantic task of digitising his archive isn’t due for completion till 2030.

At the end of the day, my writing process isn’t just about jotting down thoughts—it’s about playing with them, reworking them, and eventually, after plenty of trial and error, shaping them into something worth reading. My Zettelkasten system helps keep the whole chaotic process from completely derailing, but the real magic (or struggle, depending on the day) happens in the drafts. There’s no cut-and-dried answer to when to stop taking notes and start writing—too soon and I’m flailing, too late and I’m drowning in material. Over time, though, I’ve started to get a feel for the back-and-forth of it.

Maybe writing is less about finding the perfect method and more about learning to live with the imperfections of the process. Or maybe that’s just me.

How do you work? Please let me know.—If you’d like a weekly digest of Writing Slowly posts sent to you by email, it’s easy to subscribe. Artwork by Louise Bourgeois. I saw this at an exhibiiton of her work at the Art Gallery of NSW.

Post on Writing Slowly - Writing Slowly

2025-03-07T02:03:37.000Z

I’m always comparing my sloppy first drafts with other people’s heavily-edited published work. So it’s no wonder I’m down on my own stuff; this is a completely unfair contest of my own making.

That’s why I’ve found Dan Harmon’s advice enduringly helpful:

💬 Switch from team “I will one day write something good” to team “I have no choice but to write a piece of shit.”

In other words, ‘perfect’ is for editing, not for writing.

Post on Writing Slowly - Writing Slowly

2025-03-05T02:28:34.390Z

I’ve been asking what comes after content?. Here’s one possibility, dreamed up by Burnout from Humans.

More at The Wild Chatbot. HT: Rowenwhite.

Post on Writing Slowly - Writing Slowly

2025-03-05T01:56:36.212Z

Nothing is immune from the law of fashion: what looks cutting edge today will date very quickly. Before long, AI-generated ‘content’ will be what you won’t be seen dead wearing. So what comes after content?

Post on Writing Slowly - Writing Slowly

2025-03-05T01:41:16.724Z

💬 This quote from This Spoke Zarathustra seemed to land for me.

kim e landwehr https://kimlosey.me/2025/02/18/115810.html

Post on Writing Slowly - Writing Slowly

2025-03-04T14:14:33.780Z

💬“I had in my mind to write three books about the world as it was, using concepts and images almost like characters. But I ended up making a long detour.” — Italian author, Roberto Calasso. (Source).

“Long detour” is an apt summary of a writing life, and fitting inspiration for my latest project.