Posts and Notes

I missed a few days posting here. My granddaughters were here, and in addition, my husband and I were getting various things done that needed to get done. I am increasingly aware that a lot of things progress by way of conversations of different kinds. The spoken word, or even the diagrammatic instructions of the shed my husband is building this week, does a lot. The problems with the internet that many people are aware of and complain about (on the internet, generally, ha!) are not because words are trivial or futile. It's because of their power, perhaps digitally unleashed from context and attention-limits.

I think the reason I am thinking about conversation and talk is that I am reading several library books on the topic, right now. One I just finished was called TALK: The Science of Conversation and the Art of Being Ourselves.  It was a very readable book about the author's experiences, research and advice based on her teaching college classes on communication. Maybe I'll write more about it eventually.

Right now, though, I want to go on to mention another recent library loan. It was called How to Take Smart Notes by Sonke Ahren. Both these links take you to the authors' websites and I will try to do this consistently when this is possible. They usually tell you a bit about themselves and where their books are available, and sometimes they have extra resources to look through.

Ahren's book is a medium-depth look at a system called Zettelkasten which if you look it up on a search engine will show you that it is a big thing on the order of Agile Results and David Allen's GTD system. (I'm not linking to those right now, but I've blogged about them before). The Wikipedia article I linked to points out something I noticed while reading Ahren's book -- that his basic approach is quite compatible with AJ Sertillanges' Catholic classic "The Intellectual LIfe" which I reread for about the third time last year. In fact, I borrowed the book hoping to get more concrete ideas for better note-taking, and the Sonke Ahren book delivered this better than I even hoped, reinforcing Sertillanges' thoughtful philosophy of study in many ways.

The word "zettel" apparently means notecard or slip. And that link told me it's related to the English word "schedule". (Another feature of the internet -- more information than you can use in many lifetimes, some of it very interesting!)

Anyway, I started writing this post because it occurred to me that blogposts -- mine, at least, and often the posts I read and save from other peoples' blogs -- are often zettels, in the sense that Ahren defines them.

Permanent notes, which will never be thrown away and contain the necessary information in themselves in a permanently understandable way. They are always stored in the same way in the same place, either in the reference system or, written as if for print, in the slip-box. p 41

OK -- that sounds jargony and only partially connected with the blog-post thought. This one is better:

"When we take permanent notes, it is much more a form of thinking within the medium of writing and in dialogue with the already existing notes within the slip-box”

If I replaced " notes" with "posts", and "slip-box" with "blog", you can see what I mean. Posts on blogs are a kind of screen shot of thoughts in a moment of time. Some of them are part of a larger system of the authors' thoughts, some perhaps aren't.