note.garden

A web application inplementation of the Zettelkasten method I’m building. Inspired by others’ digital gardens.

Ideas Behind the App

• Recording and summarizing ideas in my own words can help me better understand them, even if Wikipedia remains a more thorough resource.
• Linking new ideas to ones I’ve learned already can help me understand, contextualize, and remember them.
• Breakthrough ideas in one domain are often inspired by ideas from another (inspired by James Burke’s Connections). Linking ideas together can help form new ideas.
• Learning in public is better than learning in private. Our minds are echo-chambers: we need feedback. And most ideas have been thought already, so connecting our ideas to others’ can lead us to what is truly original.
• Finding connections makes life more meaningful

Why I Need Something Like This

• Whatever interesting thoughts I had, I found myself thinking them over and over, as if my brain were trying to hold on to them. If I wrote them down somewhere I’d be sure to come back to them, could my brain move on to other thoughts?
• The time I have to write has become shorter and less predictable since having kids: my youngest might wake up at 5am or 6:30am, and I got tired of waking at 5am to write, only to be interrupted 10 minutes later. If I can’t find the long stretches of uninterrupted time it takes to write essays, what format could I write in that fit my newfound time constraints?