How to get better at note taking using the Zettelkasten approach.
The cool thing about Zettelkasten is that it compounds your own brain power over time. It's pretty simple, but does take a commitment to achieve full benefits. I'm still in the infancy of figuring out my approach for bring Zettelkasten to life using a software tool called Roam Research.
I've been doing qualitative research and non-fiction writing for way too long - 11+ years and counting. Most of those years, I've gotten paid to do it, and I've focused my work in the health care space. More specifically in publicly funded healthcare. More specifically in the U.S. low-income insurance program Medicaid. More specifically in home and community-based services. Talk about specialization. Woof.
It's proving more difficult than I imagined it would to disentangle and unspecialize from this career. I don't know why I thought it would be any different. I suppose I thought I could easily pivot to another application of research and writing, easy peasy. To be fair, I've always lived a connect-the-dots kind of work life. Jumping around to try out different nooks and corners of the healthcare space.
I guess I severely mis-judged the challenge of putting healthcare to the side and exploring other industries and interests. More importantly - I left a highly structured world and found myself left up to my own devices, needing to figure out my own structure, completely, from scratch.
More specifically, my current challenge is that I'm freed up to use my brain to think about whatever I want, not just healthcare. And this is a problem… why? Well, because combinatorial explosion. There's just too many things I'm interested in, not enough narrowing down the scope, not enough structure in my day-to-day research and note taking.
Enter Zettelkasten. I recently read the book "How to Take Smart Notes" by Sönke Ahrens. This guy is amazing - he's very much a non-fiction research and writing philosopher. And his book offers an amazing structure to use to operationalize the Zettelkasten method.
Now's where you ask, "but then your work here is done, is it not?" And I would say, "HAHA. if only life was so simple." What I've learned is: no matter how much I learn about these fancy approaches to note taking, there is no substitute for figuring out how these approaches work, in practice, for myself.
While there's some fundamentals of note taking that are non-negotiable, the devil is in the details. And there's nuance when trying to figure out a note taking flow using a specific software program. So, I'm figuring out my custom-built process for Zetteling in Roam. It's fun, but I haven't been able to spend much time on the project after visiting my dad over the past week or so. I'm ready to get back into the mix. I'm ready to screw my brain on tight, and get my thinking a bit more organized.
So maybe, hopefully, I can start putting my years of research and writing to use in a way that's less slipshod and more organized. Never again will I underestimate the amount of structure that I got for free working in existing systems. And never again will I underestimate the undue influence of existing systems on my thinking and my creativity.
It's worth finding a way to organize my thinking so I'll not only exist but thrive outside of systems. I believe Zettelkasten is a key component for my qualitative research and writing explorations, and Roam seems like a great place to Zettel. Proof will be in the pudding, and I predict pudding for taste testing sometime before the year's end.