Purpose: show to my process for growing notes over time so that they can integrate parts of my thinking or parts of my actual notemaking process into their own system. Audience: Obsidian zettelkasten knowledge Management Community [[Your notes should be pieces of understanding rather than pieces of truth]] # Notemaking Strategies for Growing my Notes How do I know when it's time to grow notes? To be honest, I there is no clear cut answer. It's largely a matter of determining what part of the research process you are in. One of the way to create this emergence is through zooming out. You can zoom out either by summarizing or by generalizing. Summarizing simply works by summarizing a bunch of ideas in the same note. Generalizing works by creating a new note and generalizing a bunch of other notes. There are a couple types of generalization: Generalization by grouping: works by taking a series of notes with related characteristics and bringing them together. My favoriteds way to do this is through the creation of [[MOC]]s. Generalization by emergence: works by taking a series of notes and creating a new emergent idea out of them. For example, the human body as a thing (and idea) only exists because all its cells relate to each other in very specific ways. If the ways how the cells interact significantly changes then “human body” ceases to exist. A person is able to speak, but a cell, a tissue, an organ, or any of the parts of the human body alone do not have that property. ### Remember Most basic from of our PKM systems is to remember information which resonated with us. ### Understand The process of explaining the authors point's in your own words. This involves defining the boundaries of your objects of attention in the source. #### You can do this in three ways: Definition by description: define the boundaries by describing what the object of attention means. For example, antifragility is a property of systems that gain from disorder. Definition by example: give an example of your object of attention. One example of an antifragile system is your immune system as it's good to give it stressors every so often so it is ready for a true pathogen. Definition by prototype: define boundaries by contrasting it or comparing it to another object of attention. For example high clementine's are like oranges but smaller. ### Apply Application happens when we contextualize the context of application or the context of existence for a given object. We can do this through making claims or making relationships. Claims often require more information than relationships because we have to back up our claim. Relationships can be: - unary - relationship between an object of attention and itself - binary - relationship between two objects of attention - ternary - relationship between three objects of attention - N-ary - relationship between N objects of attention The more complex the relationship that emerges from the parts, the more likely there will be [[Emergence]] because the whole starts to be different from the individual parts. You can even form relationships between and idea and a relationship: ![[Pasted image 20221202123739.png]] ### Analyze Analyse means to be able to (create and) explain a complex connection among ideas. In particular, connections that are not so obvious. ### Evaluate Evaluate means to be able to evaluate the quality of an idea. That often means to be able to justify its very existence: Why were the boundaries of the idea drawn this way? Why is a relationship the way it is? What are the reasons for a claim? ### Create Create is the Highest Order Skill. It means the ability to produce original work. In practice, it is the demonstration that you are able to look at a network of ideas and synthesise them into new ideas (or new works). That usually means to create generalisations as ideas that emerge from our network of ideas. But, for our purposes, it may also mean we can create knowledge that no one else has created before. To give me insight into how to grow my notes I follow the four questions of peanut butter goodness: 1. "That reminds me" 2. "It's similar because" 3. "It's different because" 4. "It's important because" [[Connecting your notes through the idea compass]] The Idea Compass is a [[Zettelkasten]] inspired way of connecting your notes. I first heard it from Vicky Zhao and Fei Ling Tseng on a Linking Your Thinking Workshop video. [You should watch the original video for more insight into the process.](https://youtu.be/-7r9t9T9Aww) It works by asking yourself one of the four main questions below or sub questions to think about how to connect a note. ![[3FDF4F27-6035-421A-B4CF-2415A05C2870.jpeg]] In this next section I will go through three actionable methods you can use to grow your notes once you know how to connect part of Bianca's Build Your Knowledge Portfolio Course which I recently participated and finished. ### Freewriting These free writing techniques all work by writing things down freely. The mindsets they use are understanding [[Your notes should be pieces of understanding rather than pieces of truth]], writing through your thoughts no matter what they are, and not interrupting yourself at any point. Simple Freewriting: Set up a timer and just follow the flow of thought without any extra constraints. Brain dump Freewriting: This variation is exactly like the simple freewriting, but no timer required. Triggered Freewriting: Use a question or an observation as prompt to kickstart your freewriting process. The prompt can be anything: - An idea - A question - Your feelings - Your physical sensations - A situation you want to think about - Something you are currently looking at Prompted Freewriting: this is like triggered freewriting but every time you get stuck you come back to the original prompt and ask the question, "what else can I think about?" Just be careful not to come back too soon. Extreme freewriting: like braindump freewriting but there is no stopping or erasing. This reminds me of Crash and Burn from Matthew Dick's Storyworthy in how to get story ideas. ### Quick Jots They are essentially [[Fleeting notes]] you write when you don't have the time to put down a more fully fledged idea. ### Bullet Pointing ![[Pasted image 20221115093056.png]] Perfect for the actual outlining of ideas, videos, articles, or some other piece of content. While creating your next bullet spawned from a previous one you have to decide whether to make it its own main point or a supporting idea/point from the previous bullet. This is good for organizing an argument but it requires an organize first mindset as you have to know where you would like to put a point before you write it down. [[How to use the Obsidian graph view for notemaking]] One of my favorite features of Obsidian is its graph view. It's one of the best ways to get a visual representation of your PKM system. It's also one of my favorite places for [[Notemaking]]. How do I use it for notemaking? #### Spot easy pickin's The graph view lets you spot easy pickin's by toggling off show existing files only. This is because you can spot unmade files attached to notes you have already fleshed out. By starting out fleshing out these easy pickin's you can get into a notemaking rhythm and enter the [[Flow State MOC]]. Then you can tackle those more difficult notes you have been waiting to process. #### Spot BOAT notes By toggling orphan notes you can spot BOAT notes, notes floating in the sea with no connections, that you can look to find places for in your system. #### Triangulation [[Triangulation]] is the process of determining a point based on the position of two other points. Using the graph view, you can triangulate by seeing how two notes can connect to a third. #### Local Graph Local graph is like normal graph but much more local. Better for spotting connections between things once you have found something through your bigger filtered graph view. [[What determines a notes value]] The first is by looking at your core and peripheral noes. Core notes are notes that are at the center of a network of notes. Peripheral ideas are at the side. Tags can indicate how well developed an idea is as well as what needs to be done to improve it. When developing your ideas through sensemaking you can do so on a local or global level. On a local level you look to sensemake in individual notes as well as note couplets or triplets. In global sensemaking you take a group or cluster of related notes and network them together. This reminds me of [[MOC]]s. We can think of developing our notes as progressing up the revised Bloom's Taxonomy Pyramid. ![[Pasted image 20221206094427.png]] %%Go through and create sample questions for each part of the pyramid.%%