Planting The First Seeds
I’ve been interested in starting a writing practice and sharing my thoughts with others, but have always had just enough excuses to prevent me from ever hitting publish. It may have taken a couple of years, but it seems I’ve finally run out of them.
Actually, the thing that helped me eliminate the bulk of my excuses was recently completing NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month). The idea of the challenge is to “complete” a novel in a single month (November), but the rules are pretty loose. Some people (like me) don’t really want to write a novel, so the generic goal is to write 50,000 words by the end of the month. This comes out to roughly 1,667 words per day.
So if I didn’t write a novel, then what did I spend my 50,000 words writing? I spent about 20% writing morning pages and 80% writing in my Zettelkasten.
When it comes to morning pages, I really like how Tim Ferriss describes them:
It’s the most cost-effective therapy I’ve ever found.”
It’s essentially a 5–10 minute stream of consciousness writing session. I typically dump all of the negative thoughts I’m having into my morning pages with no filter. This allows me to create some distance between myself and my thoughts, removing the emotional charge that would otherwise have the idea stuck in my head on repeat.
Zettelkasten is a note-taking system created by Niklas Luhmann, who was a prolific German sociologist. He wrote more than 70 books and nearly 400 scholarly articles across varied subjects: law, economy, politics, art, religion, ecology, mass media, and love.
The key to the system is that each idea or thought is limited to a self-contained note. Luhmann limited himself to the space of an actual 3x5 notecard. I have a digital system in place but keep to a similar philosophy of shorter self-contained notes.
The biggest differentiator for this system versus other knowledge management systems is that each note acts as a single node that can be referenced, linked, and tagged. Notes can exist off on their own, can continue a line of thinking from a previous note, or can branch off to explore another idea that’s tangentially related.
As your zettelkasten grows with more and more notes, it becomes like a second brain: an extension of your own brain that’s great at everything your wet brain isn’t.
Which brings me to the name of this publication, Branching Thought, and how I plan to use it. I want to start publishing different zettels (notes) from my zettelkasten to force myself to write more clearly, think more in-depth, and create a life-long writing habit. Each note should be valuable on its own. Still, it will likely continue to branch deeper into the subject, branch tangentially into related topics, or form the connecting branch between two separate domains.
Eventually, there should be a web of interconnected notes, with clusters forming organically around specific topics. For example, my current zettelkasten has 570 notes (many only partially finished), and this is what it currently looks like.
I view this project as both a creative outlet and a way to hopefully find others who are interested in similar topics to discuss and explore from different perspectives. I also like the idea of putting my thoughts out there to be challenged.
My goal is to create a blog that I would enjoy stumbling across.
Continued: [[202001151848 Anatomy of an Atomic Note (Zettel)]]
