Everything compounds. Not only money, but waistlines, popularity, curiosity, and ideas.
When ideas breed with one another, the offspring are usually hideous: these are the shower thoughts, and the drunken 3am kitchen ‘creations’. Ramen pizza is probably not going to catch on.
But very occasionally, you get something beautiful.
The last post was about collecting and curating the best ideas. This post is about earning compound interest on your collection. The magic happens in the nooks where ideas collide and fuse, but we have to create the right conditions for recombination—the equivalent of turning down the lights and piping Barry Manilow through the speakers.
To earn compound interest on your money, you need somewhere to put it, like a bank account, and a practice for making it grow—an investing strategy. Same goes for information. I suggest the ‘somewhere to put it’ should be a Commonplace Book, and the ‘practice for making it grow’ should be the Zettelkasten Method.
If this is all German to you, no fear. Here’s what we’re going to cover:
- Modern Commonplace Books in a digital age
- The broken ‘file drawer’ approach to knowledge management
- The Zettelkasten Method
- Digital vs traditional tools
- Roam Research for Zettelkasten
What is a Commonplace Book?
In the dark ages Before Google (B.G.) people couldn’t idly search the collective fruits of all human civilisation while sitting on the toilet. Instead, they had to scrapbook their own homemade internets, which they called a Commonplace Book: a patchwork of collected quotes, snippets, articles, recipes, notes, and ideas. This book was interspersed with the collectors’ thoughts and reactions, and not intended for publication.

Commonplace Books reached peak popularity during the Renaissance, but they go back a couple millennia: we have examples from Marcus Aurelius, Julius Caesar, Leonardo Da Vinci, Thoreau, Virginia Woolf, Thomas Jefferson, etc.
The defining feature of a Commonplace Book is that it’s an all-purpose repository of cool ideas, hence the ‘common’—there’s no specific theme, no chronological order, and no rigid structure.
Now it might seem unnatural to keep your thoughts and ideas jumbled together like this. But the exact opposite is true: imposing a rigid hierarchy is unnatural!
The hippies were right: everything is, like, connected, man. Before we get to how we might implement a modern Commonplace Book, a quick overview of how the brain works—or more accurately, how it doesn’t work.
Floating Down the River of Associative Knowledge
There’s a river of information flowing through our brains: chatter, sensory stimuli, thoughts, feelings, books, blog posts, tweets. Something like 99.99 per cent goes straight in one ear and out the other—maybe forming a few eddies for microseconds or hours or weeks, but ultimately sluicing back out without a trace.
This is as it should be. The river of knowledge is as broad and fertile as the Nile, which is to say, full of nuggets of excrement, viral diseases, and the occasional crocodile. We don’t want most of this stuff to stick. Even when it comes to the good information, ephemerality has its appeal—I love the fact that I can forget how a novel ends and get to enjoy it all over again.
But the valuable concepts, ideas, and stories that drift our way are worth retaining. If we want to get compound interest on our knowledge, we have to stop all these precious ideas from draining straight back out the holes in our colander-brains.
That means building a framework of mental models to ‘hook’ ideas as they drift down the river. Once they’re part of the structure, we can hang new ideas on them, and so on. We end up with a sprawling latticework that expands its surface area in a non-linear fashion; like beavers took a bunch of acid and built a four-dimensional dam out of coat hangers.
Now when something comes floating down the river, we have any number of hooks to snag it with:
“Oh! This is an example of X, except in the field of Y. I think I have a case study like this. It reminds me of Dr. Z’s concept of A, except the main difference here seems to be B. I wonder how it applies to C?”
This is associative knowledge, and it’s the main way the brain stores stuff. There are no discrete categories: just a bunch of weaker or stronger connections and patterns.
Unfortunately, every generation is doomed to model the brain after the most advanced technology of the age: Aristotle and his bros thought it was an ice-box for tempering the humours or whatever, then we had the hydraulic model of the brain pumping thoughts around, then the clockwork model, then electrical lines, and now we’re stuck on the computer-as-brain model.
We’ve grown up storing our files in a bunch of folders neatly organised by hierarchy, and trying to taxonomise everything in discrete categories. The fact that people think words—a bunch of grunts strung together by monkeys—possess some magical ability to neatly carve reality at its joints causes us to lose our minds on a daily basis.1
The file-drawer approach to capturing knowledge looks like setting up open-mouthed boxes in the river, nested inside each other like Russian dolls. A new idea or nugget of information drifts along, and is funneled into progressively smaller boxes until it finds its final resting place. The boxes only have one plane open to the world, and can’t overlap, which means the surface area of the structure only grows in a linear fashion. A place for everything; everything in its place.
The file-drawer approach is very tidy, completely unnatural, and completely kills the mood for the kind of freaky ideas sex we want to encourage.

So that’s the distinction between hierarchical and associative knowledge. We want to build what Charlie Munger calls “a latticework of mental models”, with as large a surface area as possible. This not only helps new ideas stick, but creates more opportunities to combine knowledge in original ways.
Now for the specifics. I’m a big fan of the Commonplace Book, but I think we can make some major improvements to the old-school scrapbooking approach.
The Zettelkasten Method for Commonplace Books
A Commonplace Book usually has some kind of organisation. Some people use a table of contents, or reference page numbers, or use tags or post-its to loosely group related ideas. But none of these strategies hold a candle to the Zettelkasten method.
Zettelkasten’s most famous adherent was Niklas Luhmann, one of the great sociologists and systems theorists of the 20th century. Luhmann was freakishly productive: he wrote something like 70 books and hundreds of articles in his career, many of which became classics, without ever having to force himself to write.
The secret to his success lay in his research method: when he read something interesting, he wrote it down on a notecard with a unique identifier, accompanied by his own thoughts. Then it went into his slip-box (in German, zettelkasten). The placement was determined not by the topic, but by how it related to his own writing, thinking, and existing notes. Any card could end up with dozens of branching subthreads.
I don’t use Luhmann’s exact methodology, but the bastardised Zettelkasten practice I’m about to demonstrate follows the same principles.2
(The example clips are recorded in Roam Research, which is my preferred medium for keeping a Commonplace Book. More on tools later; don’t worry about this for now.)
Zettelkasten Step 1: Deconstruction
Say we’re adding some Kindle highlights to our Commonplace Book. We’ve let them sit and breathe for a while, as described previously, and they’re ready for processing.
The first thing to do is break everything down into atomic components: preferably, no more than one idea per ‘card’. The way I usually do this is to write a catchy heading that sums up the gist of the idea. Underneath the heading, I’ll break down any subcomponents or explanation into a few simple bullets as required.
Everyone recommends you translate this into your own words, but I think it’s usually fine to preserve the original text. Do whatever works.
Everything gets deconstructed wherever it happens to fall: I’m not trying to ‘file’ each idea anywhere in particular. If you really want, you can assign high-level tags that will apply to everything you’re processing, but I wouldn’t recommend it—I prefer to nest notes under the author and book title only, and get more granular in the next stage.
(The tags in this example—#Risk, #Statistics, etc—apply to the book itself, but not its contents. If I wanted it to apply them broadly, I would indent the notes beneath the metadata block.)
Zettelkasten Step 2: Assonance and Dissonance
Now we want to smash the new idea up against everything else in our knowledge graph, and see what happens. At the coarsest level, the first pass is to tag the concept handles for each atomic idea.

Since I’ve mentioned #Risk aversion and #Social contagion, this particular idea (‘Defensive decision making is NOT the same as risk aversion‘) will show up in the backlinks for those pages, alongside every other connected note.
This is gonna come in handy for future research, but it also gives me the opportunity to scan over existing notes on connected topics. From here, there are three broad categories of questions I want to ask myself:
Assonance
- What does this ‘rhyme’ with?
- Is it isomorphic to this other thing (has the same form/relationship)?
- Or is it actually orthogonal (at right angles to it)?
- Is this a subset of a broader pattern? Or a superset?
This makes me think more carefully about where I should ‘hang’ the new thing, and its relationship with all the existing things I know. Maybe I can build something new at the intersection? And once again, the connection is bidirectional: any other block or page I mention will point back here.
I use the notation #🔗aff (affiliated) to mark up assonance, because, well, #ass doesn’t quite strike the right tone.
(In this example, I add a reference to a single block ‘Man Plans, God Laughs’, rather than a broad topic or tag. This is what makes the Zettelkasten/Roam combo so powerful—every bullet point has its own unique ID)
Dissonance
- What does this clash with?
- How does it jive with my own experience?
- Who has criticised this idea? Are the criticisms solid?
- Does one idea need to displace another?
Maybe one will kill the other; more likely they are different opinions or addressing specific situations or use cases. Again, this helps me better understand both the old ideas and the new one. Here I use the standard notation #🖍cf: (compare, from the Latin conferatur).
There’s no need to resolve a conflict on the spot, especially if it’s some thorny issue that would require a ton of additional research. I might just have a vague hunch that something’s fishy, and jot down a reminder to compare against other sources. There’s a good chance I’ll stumble upon more information that will fill in the blanks down the track, and at the very least, when I come to use this info, either block will point me to the disagreement.
Relevance to my own life
- Does this relate to some current or future project?
- Does this suggest a cheap experiment?
- Do I need to take any kind of action? Read something else? Write something?
In which case I’ll tag the relevant project, add a to-do checkbox, or incorporate it into my GTD. I might also add stray thoughts, using a #📝note or similar to distinguish my ideas from the author.
So now the new idea is firmly enmeshed into the fabric of the Zettelkasten—rather than floating away down the river, or siloed in a dusty file cabinet.
Zettelkasten Step 3: Remixing
The point of collecting ideas is to use them. I’m not going to relitigate the previous post, but this is the key insight of the Zettelkasten method.
People think writing involves picking a topic, and then researching it. This is exactly backwards: after years of building chains of thoughts and connected ideas, you already have a bunch of topics ricocheting around your skull and begging you to put them on the page.
Which suggests a heuristic:
If you need to open Google for anything other than simple fact-checking, you’re probably not ready to write about a topic.
Besides, it’s much less stressful to follow your interests and let ideas emerge in their own time. Luhmann was ridiculously prolific because he was never faced with a blank page, and he always had multiple projects on the boil:
I only do what is easy. I only write when I immediately know how to do it. If I falter for a moment, I put the matter aside and do something else.
In the ideal case, converting the contents of your slip-box into finished prose is just a formality. This is never quite true for me—I always learn a lot during the final assembly—but I have usually done the bulk of the work months before I first put pen to paper.
The goal is to accumulate building blocks of ideas that are infinitely remixable, and can be assembled into whatever form you need. A tweetstorm can be a blog post, which can be an essay, which can be a book (although the trick is doing it the other way around).
And the creations you assemble aren’t limited to writing or research—they can be art, or inspiration, or wisdom, or any kind of life practice. I use my Commonplace Book/Zettelkasten for all sorts of junk.
This reassembly is where outliner tools really shine. I was initially resistant to abandon my beloved Google Docs, but now I do all my writing in Roam (I’ve copy-pasted this blog post across). The atomic structure means I can see exactly which contexts I’ve used an idea in before, and where it originally came from. And if I update the component, the changes instantly populate through the entire database.
So let’s talk about tools.
Paper vs Digital Commonplace Books
Why isn’t Zettelkasten a household name? Sönke Ahrens suggests it’s partly because the practice was confined to a small group of German-speaking sociologists, and partly because the idea is so deceptively simple.
My guess is that it’s partly because the tools just weren’t appealing. If I had read about the original Zettelkasten method, with arcane numbering systems and physical index cards, I’m pretty sure I would have bounced off. Seeing these cluttered boxes full of cards instantly triggers an aesthetic ‘ick’ factor. I realise this is dumb, but what can you do. I’m dumb!

My first exposure to the Commonplace Book was an old blog post by Ryan Holiday. Ryan writes his notes down on physical index cards too, but without the same system of cross-referencing. I’m pretty sure he has dividers for topics, and separate boxes devoted to book projects.
This was simple enough to get me started on the practice, although I did it digitally from the outset. I often draw and brainstorm on paper, I love physical books, and I understand the whole tactile thing. Ryan makes good points about hand-writing forcing you to be more discerning about what enters the system.
But…screw that. I hate writing by hand; I barely earned my pen license in primary school and it’s all been downhill from there. I not only don’t want to use a physical box full of index cards, I can’t—at least, not with my current lifestyle. Ryan Holiday has fireproof safes full of these things; I have a suitcase and a laptop.
There’s no doubt that index cards works great for Ryan, who happens to be a famous bestselling author, and may well have been the best choice until very recently. Most digital note taking tools have historically sucked, because they were stuck in the file-drawer failure mode.
In this sense, the web has also been a great disappointment. Google is gamed by SEO-savvy content marketers to the point of uselessness, wikis have the same hierarchical limitations, and Ted Nelson’s original vision for hypertext has long since become a joke: only starry-eyed fools and crackpots are still chasing those dusty old dreams.
Fortunately, one of those crackpots didn’t stop trying.
Roam Research for Zettelkasten

Conor had been studying this stuff for years when I met him. I only had a primitive practice at the time, but he got me hooked on the vision, and I helped him test the early Roam prototypes. We played with so many iterations that didn’t work. It was sometimes frustrating for me, and I was just a glorified beta tester—for him it was his life’s work.
But he and his co-founder Josh finally cracked it: Roam Research is out in the world, and making a splash.
Naturally, an army of clones have swooped in to copy the end result of years of research and development. I am not salty about this because it’s fantastic for the field of knowledge management, fantastic for consumers to have choices, and fantastic for advancing the goals of collaborative research.
Honestly, I’m not even going to try to do a proper comparison between the Roam-style tools, not least because I’m hopelessly biased. There are tons of important factors to consider—local storage, data portability, encryption, mobile app—which matter more or less to different users, and are constantly changing as the space develops.
Roam stands out to me for two structural reasons. The first is that the clones are missing the atomic nature at the level of individual ideas—the unique IDs at the heart of the Zettelkasten method. The second is that Roam is a here-for-life kind of project, not a short-term cash grab like so much of Silicon Valley. I know for a fact that Conor wants to write the Constitution of Mars with this thing.
The major points against Roam are that it’s expensive, and it has a steep learning curve. If you have the disposable income and time, I strongly recommend it, but perfect is the enemy of good (and don’t forget my glaring conflict of interest). Obsidian seems to be the strongest alternative for now, and there are others which are showing a lot of promise.
Whichever tool you happen to choose, I do think that if your modern Commonplace Book isn’t digital, you’re missing a trick.
One of the most common pieces of feedback about Roam is that it removes the friction from note taking, synthesis, and writing. You don’t want to be too discerning about what goes into the slip-box. You should be able to just write, without having to explicitly organise anything. Maybe your stream-of-consciousness diary entry clicks with the interview transcript you add a couple years later. That’s the magic.
It’s a lot of fun to just dive through the connections and see where it takes you—like Wikipedia surfing, but so much more intimate. And once the navigation of the graph view gets some upgrades, and we can move though our Commonplace Books in three dimensions, shit’s gonna get ridiculous.
can’t do this with index cards ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)
What’s Next?
My adventures in the world of knowledge management turned up three weird civilisational inadequacies. The first is that you can somehow make it through ~14 years of formal education without being taught how to actually read a book. I’m still bummed out about this, and wonder what life would be like if I’d been building this compounding source of capital from the outset.
The second is that the practice of keeping a Commonplace Book or Zettelkasten is not universally known amongst students, researchers and creatives—although I think it’s possible that the tools just weren’t there, and we might be on the brink of a renaissance.
The third mysterious inadequacy has to do with memory. Roam helps a lot with retention—the associative framework is similar to a mnemonic device, and you get multiple chances to review an idea: when you first read about it, when you curate your notes, when you hang it in the database, and through periodic exposure as it resurfaces.
But the optimal way to memorise stuff, is well, actual optimised memorising. If you don’t know about spaced repetition systems (SRS), prepare to have your mind blown. In the same way that Zettelkasten turns note taking from an ephemeral hobby into a longterm compounding goldmine of interconnected knowledge, spaced repetition turns rushed cramming for the test into a perfectly calibrated system to remember things until the end of time.
That’s gonna be the third and final part in the series. I don’t know if I’ll write it right away, because readers who aren’t interested in this stuff might be grateful for a reprieve. But it’ll be coming soon.
Further Reading
Roam White Paper
More on the file-drawer problem, associative knowledge, collaborative problem-solving, and the vision for what Roam is trying to achieve. The specifics have changed a little since we wrote this, but the technical/philosophical underpinnings are there for anyone interested.
If you prefer audio, this conversation between Conor and Erik Torenberg is the best overview. The Roam onboarding process sucks right now, but there are dedicated user websites with great guides: RoamTips, crib tours on YouTube, a Slack channel, and of course, #roamcult on Twitter.
A Lesson on Elementary, Worldly Wisdom — Charlie Munger
Like many people, this speech by Warren Buffett’s right-hand man is what made the idea of building interdisciplinary mental models really click for me. Munger: “You may have noticed students who just try to remember and pound back what is remembered. Well, they fail in school and in life. You’ve got to hang experience on a latticework of models in your head.”
I also weakly recommend Poor Charlie’s Almanack, which is a collection of Munger’s essays (here’s my review).
How to Take Smart Notes — Sönke Ahrens
A comprehensive guide to what I’ve been trying to get at here, including the full story of Luhmann and the Zettelkasten (my source for the quotes and information used in this post).
This is a terrific read because the author eats his own dogfood: the book was born of a Zettelkasten practice, and you can tell. It’s packed full of interconnected ideas, rather than the usual nonfiction gimmick where you get one central idea padded out with layers of filler and examples.
Notes:
- This mistake is as old as Socrates and his featherless bipeds, but incredibly, it still dominates a lot of arguments today: ‘What is a woman?’ Well, ‘woman’ is a semantic signifier that we use to gesture at a cluster of associative traits: long hair, secondary sexual characteristics, capable of bearing children, high estrogen to testosterone ratio, big expensive gametes, somatic cells with XX chromosomes. None of these give us a universal definition: I have long hair but I’m not a woman; some women have different chromosomes, some can’t have children, etc.
Words have fuzzy edges, and there is no one pattern that makes sense in every single context: a medical doctor will draw the lines one way; a geneticist another; a religious creed another; a sporting body another; a workplace another; a society another. Pretending ‘life’, ‘woman’, ‘consciousness’, ‘gun control’ or ‘sandwich’ are pure Platonic forms baked into the structure of the universe is the sophomoric equivalent of starting your high school essay with “Webster’s dictionary defines…”
(For a full explanation, see Scott Alexander’s excellent The Categories Were Made For Man, Not Man for the Categories.)
- You can read all about the original system in Sönke Ahren’s excellent book How to Take Smart Notes (see Recommended Reading).
I’ve been enjoying perusing your blog after being recommended these two parts in the series; was the third section ever finished?
Hi Courtney—it wasn’t and probably never will be sorry. It was going to be about the importance of spaced repetition and rote memorisation: if you’re interested, Michael Nielsen and Andy Matsuchak have some good stuff.
Thank you for the reply and starting points!
Wonderful post! I’ve just written separate posts about both commonplace books and ZK – I like how you’ve combined them together!
Aha, I just revisited this after reading it last year and being like, ‘yeah, this is awesome but I’ll have to come back to it.’ I just signed up to Roam and can tell this is going to change my life. Finally, a way to capture my random thoughts instead of just sending myself an email that I’ll never read. The connections between topics that come up days, months, years apart, easily connected. That’s where it’s at! Thanks for writing this. Thank you for your work. I have a pair of wooden rings and have been doing calisthenics thanks to you and probably a bunch of other random stuff too.
Love to hear it! Thanks Lewis, hope you’re getting after it.
I’m wondering more about facts vs ideas when it comes to building a zettelkasten. Can you say a little more about that? Eagerly awaiting the final article in the series. Thanks!
Hi Yvette, I generally don’t write down any straightforward fact or figure I could get from, say, looking up the relevant Wikipedia entry, unless it’s startling or interesting.
It’s often useful to memorise specific facts/definitions/nuggets of information, which is where the third article in the series comes in—hopefully I’ll get that one published in the next month or two 🙂
Hi Rich,
Based on your earlier reading list as per below i bought the book about taking Smart Notes. I had thought originally that it was more for authors/ content creators plus trying to reimagine a replacement for my existing Frankenstein solution of Evernote, Google Keep, One Note and various txt notes and Word Documents. And various manual notes / cards for GTD and Mind maps.
So basically I didn’t really do anything.
Then after the Dreaded Pandemic struck I found myself without my usual distractions – the paradox is that am I busier than ever yet I seem to have more energy and drive to do more things?
So I started to play with Linux and using Gnotes with it’s redumentary linking and also the tags in Google Keep to find collecttions and inter-related topics without direct links.
Then great timing to see your fantastic articles coming out I have transcribed my notes to Obsidian to see if it suits me.
This isn’t so serious for me and is more just a fun experiment. I have about 3 notes so far (new) – but I do have numerous others which are kicking around in various states. I am not writing any great book or Hollywood blockbuster – just keeping the old grey cells ticking along.
Thanks for the inspiration.
huh same, I actually feel way busier than usual even though a lot of time-sinks have disappeared.
I hope your experiment goes well. I think it’s totally valid to do this kind of thing without an external goal, purely for the satisfaction of it, and as you put it, keeping the gray matter ticking along. Sure beats crossword puzzles!
Hey Richard, nice article. I have started to build my second brain after your article on your best books of 2019 -thank you !- and using Zettlr (open source/free project and following ) but i am struggling to have some compound interest yet, certainly due to a low quantity notes. Do you have an idea on when or how many notes the second brain starts to work? Thank you again for all your work ! Quentin
Hey Quentin, great question. I think it’s a ‘for life’ kind of practice, and you shouldn’t expect it to offer much in the early days—in the same way you wouldn’t earn much interest on your bank balance in the first year or so. With that being said, there are other benefits which make it worthwhile immediately: better retention, deeper understanding, perhaps some new ideas that come up just by bouncing off your own experience. To extend the metaphor, saving money is a super useful thing to do even before the compounding starts to really kick in.
More concretely: I’m coming up on six years/~10,000 notes, and have enough critical mass that I’m often surprised by things that seem to connect independently of my own efforts. Pulling a number out of my ass, I guess that ~2000 ideas might start to get things moving? Hope that helps a little.
Yes, it did help. And i guess it will also vary deeply on one’s capacity to create link between ideas. I’ll see when it starts to becoming “alive”.
Thanks, Rich. Blimmin’ good article. In my own work I’m very often reading the resources / doing the research as I’m writing to a deadline, so I can be learning about the topic as I go by taking in stonking amounts of information (think several reports of anywhere from 200 to 4000 pages, plus primary research, plus discussing ideas with knowledgeable people). I’ve been trying to work out how to make the time to use Zettelkasten/Roam in this situation. Part of the issue has been figuring out the ‘thinking’ framework – and finding the time and energy to build it from the ground up. Your structure is really helpful for conceptualising how this could work for me. Much appreciated.
Cheers Lisa, I’m really glad it’s helpful for thinking about your specific use case. I definitely have the privilege of being discerning about which rivers I’m swimming in to begin with—if I was still a fulltime journo up to my eyeballs in information, I’d have to think more carefully about workflow. What do you do for work, if you don’t mind me asking?
I’m a lawyer practising in the Waitangi Tribunal (among other jurisdictions). The Tribunal and the Crown Forestry Rental Trust commission historians, researchers, and, sometimes, economists, to write reports on particular matters into which the Tribunal is inquiring. Until very recently the Tribunal’s work was largely district-based. For example, we’re in the closing stages of the Taihape Inquiry right now. District Inquiries run for years – I started work on this Inquiry in 2016 and this is a relatively small inquiry and I was somewhat late coming to it. This is largely because the Tribunal is inquiring into all the Crown actions in a defined geographic location from 1840 to the time of the Inquiry. So for Taihape there are 21 issues in the Tribunal’s Statement of Issues, all of which have (usually multiple) reports that relate to them. Because an Inquiry is such a long process there’s inevitably changes in workload depending on what our other clients are doing, and some lawyers will move on to other firms, so by the time we get to this stage of writing closing submissions my firm will have put it’s hand up to write closing submissions on topics that don’t affect our clients (so we haven’t paid much attention to that area). This means reading all the historical reports and claimants briefs of evidence related to that topic, learning truckloads, and then writing convincing legal arguments that you present to and defend in front of the Tribunal Panel. The Taihape Statement of Issues is at https://forms.justice.govt.nz/search/Documents/WT/wt_DOC_116360149/Wai%202180%2C%201.4.003.pdf, if you’re interested. I put my hand up for local government closings (sounds dry but actually fascinating!). As you can see, there are 10 reports that deal with it in some way. Plus there is claimant evidence, plus other sources including academic commentary, previous Tribunal research reports for other inquiries, and reports of previous Tribunals. So far my submissions for this topic run to 75 pages and I’m still reading and writing. All this will be gone from my head by Christmas at the latest, because I have the next massive amount of information to process on some other matter. I regularly come across all sorts of interesting things in the course of my work and that would be incredibly useful to have in an easily recall-able form years later. So I’m very excited about Zettelkasten/Roam, and your framework.
Oh wow, that’s full-on! For some reason I thought the Waitangi Tribunal was already winding up the last of the claims (whoops). I’d be really interested to hear how your workflow evolves on this kind of thing, and especially with Roam, because one of the big philosophical clashes in knowledge management is the extent to which notes should be ephemeral vs permanent. If you end up having any insights about how you decide which information you want to retain more-or-less forever, and which is the higher-volume short-term/context-specific stuff, let me know!
The District Inquiries are winding up, but there are a bunch of kaupapa inquiries into matters such as health disparities, treatment of military veterans and that sort of thing. Plus there’s the urgent inquiries, such as the current one into Oranga Tamariki. Long story short, inquiries will be around as long as the Crown keeps buggering things up so I don’t think I’ll be out of a job any time soon. Sadly. Interesting point about ephemeral vs permanent. That is definitely something I think about, and I’m glad you articulated it. Law is a permanently moving and evolving beast. It retains much of its basic form – the Bill of Rights of 1688 is in force in NZ, and we relatively often cite cases from the 1800s or, sometimes, earlier. But if you think about how much legislation is passed every year (which has to be followed by judges interpreting it, and thereby ‘making’ law), there’s a massive amount of change. Currently I struggle with choosing what to put in to Roam in the first place, because I sort of need to think about permanent vs ephemeral at an early stage. I know you’re supposed to put everything in and filter later, but there’s just so much information that I don’t know how I could do that without slowing my current output by tens of percentage points, which isn’t an option most of the time. So I’ll keep you in the loop as I develop my thinking and practice around both the early and late stage filters. And if you’re ever in Nelson or nearby, look me up!
Nice article dude, I was locked out of roam for awhile, but you’re selling me back into it. I’m a sucker for compound interest. Wanted to mention that I asked Cal Newport about what he thought about one of your books you recommended (Range) by David espstein. And he actually responded! Small world dude.
Cool—I’ve found him pretty accessible too. What’d he say about Range?
Yeah he basically said it wasn’t that incompatible with his own work. It’s okay if you move around to a bunch of different jobs or careers as long as you stay long enough where you actually build up real skill (career capital) that could translate into a different field. I think he used David epstein himself as an example. You can listen to his reply on Ep. 2 of his new podcast! it’s pretty early into the episode
Thanks, I didn’t know he had a podcast. Yeah I don’t think there’s any incompatibility either—have been thinking about this a lot in the context of optionality and decided that while you wouldn’t want to be a skittish dilettante or a hyper-narrow specialist (silent risk), there’s a ton of room in the middle.