Re: [emacs-humanities] How do you keep engaged with your writings?

[M . ‘quintus’ Gülker]

Am 01. Februar 2021 um 16:10 Uhr -0800 schrieb Oliver Taylor via 
Emacs-humanities:
> Seems like I’m not alone in struggling to figure out how to best use
> computers and paper notebooks to organize my life!

Seems like it. Kind of cool.

> For paper notebooks I’ve taken a lot of inspiration from 2 systems:
> Bullet Journaling (seems I’m not alone), and Pile of Index Cards
> (which had a wiki[1] and an informative photo album[2] whose example
> photos are not in English, but all the comments and descriptions
> are).

These are quite interesting links. I will probably read through this
over time. Too bad it only is available on the Wayback Machine, which
is rather slow.

> Numbering the pages of a notebook and reserving a few pages at the
> beginning for an index have had the biggest impact on getting the
> most out of my notebooks. Basically, any time you write something
> you might want to read later you name it in the index and write the
> page number.

There exist notebooks which have got some empty table of contents
pages preprinted already, which might be of use here. The system
certainly sounds interesting and I always like widening my view.
Thank you for the insight.

Currently, what I am doing is this. I carry a small notebook around
with me that I use to catch any thoughts that might occur at the most
unfitting of times (which they do). Later that day (or in reality:
usually a few days later, because I simply do not get around to it) I
go through the last pages I have written, select the thoughts that I
think matter and put them into my zettelkasten, usually in a more
elaborately worded mannor. I do the same with reading notes; during
reading I take notes pretty liberally into my notebook, but in the
transcription step I skip quite a number of them since in
retrospective I do not feel them to be important anymore.
Occasionally, I replace the notes for an article I read just with a
summary of the article if there were not enough different aspects in
the article[1]. For the transcription step, it really helps if you
have a notebook with a bookmark ribbon. Just leave the ribbon where
you stopped transcribing last time.

On a side note, after we had the fire discussion I decided to go
all-in and try a paper zettelkasten. Let's see if it works out over
time. What I can say so far is that I have pretty quickly started
drawing figures on some index cards to visualise my thoughts,
something which I definitely did not do while using computer-based
cards. Sure, it is possible to integrate with tools like Graphviz/dot
or use ASCII art, but drawing some arrows by hand is just much easier.

> But I do have a general rule for the distinction: computers are for
> organizing, paper is for thinking.

I can only agree here. For coding, I have often drafted flow charts on
paper or simple UML diagrams before I started coding.

  -quintus

[1]: If you store a summary of an article you read, always write the
summary yourself and never copy an existing abstract. Many paper
abstracts are just awful, and even those that are not will not make
you remember what *you* cared about in the article. Summarising the
article yourself will make you identify it quickly in whatever note
system you use. At least that is my experience.

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