Produktivität

There are 6 posts filed in Produktivität (this is page 1 of 1).

The Zettelkasten as a Knowledge Management System and Beyond

There are a few topics that have been on my mind for decades, one of which is how to store and retrieve information and knowledge in a meaningful way—essentially, a Memex. In the 90s, I was a fan of Apple’s HyperCard, and since then, I’ve tried many things, but nothing has proven reliable. Data formats have disappeared (like Apple’s HyperCard), and even though the technical possibilities today are much broader than back then, I don’t have the impression that they have solved the fundamental problem. There is no quick fix that reads articles and books for you and also makes you understand them. I don’t trust summary services like Blinkist, not to mention that they don’t help me with scientific articles either.

In recent months, I’ve turned again to a system that I had used in the 90s but abandoned in favor of HyperCard: the Zettelkasten. Not just any box with index cards, but a Zettelkasten following the Luhmannian principle. Niklas Luhmann was one of the most significant sociologists of the 20th century, with an incredible number of academic publications to his name. His Zettelkasten, which actually consists of several boxes, contains about 90,000 slips and is being digitized at Bielefeld University. Luhmann attributed his productivity to this Zettelkasten system, and after several months using it, I can understand why. So how does the Zettelkasten work?

First of all, there are a few fundamental principles:

  • The quality of a paper depends on what has already been written. In an ideal world, the thoughts in the Zettelkasten are already formulated well enough to be directly incorporated. The goal of the Zettelkasten, therefore, is to generate insights that are worth publishing.
  • Everything you read is processed and placed into the Zettelkasten. Rather than following a strict plan (as is often recommended when writing academic papers), everything goes into the Zettelkasten and is, if possible, linked together right away. Luhmann himself always wrote his slips with the thought in mind of how they would fit into the existing notes. But new ideas can also emerge from the Zettelkasten at any time.
  • Writing about everything instead of starting directly with a hypothesis also has the advantage of reducing exposure to confirmation bias, which causes one to ignore anything that might challenge the hypothesis.
  • Highlighting in a text is useless, the learning effect is zero. According to Luhmann, thinking cannot happen without writing. Handwritten notes are preferable to those typed on a computer, as they tend to capture the essence better, thus facilitating understanding.
  • The Zettelkasten is not an archive, nor is it an idea graveyard like Moleskine notebooks.
  • There is no information hierarchy; thoughts can simply be inserted into Luhmann’s system wherever they fit. For example, if you have a note numbered “1,2,1” and another “1,2,2,” you can just insert a “1,2,1,a” if a thought is missing here. There’s no need to pre-think endlessly about what the best structure is.
  • Self-discipline is more important than IQ. A smart working environment ensures that you don’t face resistance from the start.
  • Daily work with the Zettelkasten leads to a new KPI for knowledge workers: How many notes are created each day!

How exactly does the Zettelkasten work?

  • When reading a text, “Literature Notes” are created, which contain only your own thoughts about the text, written in your own words.
  • These then lead to “Permanent Notes,” which are added to the Zettelkasten. The Literature Notes are discarded (this is also why I sent back my Scribe, since the Literature Notes could not be created with it).
  • Additionally, there are “Fleeting Notes,” which contain all the ideas you have.

The Zettelkasten system is highly minimalist, with no fancy notebooks or software tools. The reduction, or even restriction, to what is essential also stimulates creativity and thinking (see Stokes 2001 and Rheinberger 1997). Of course, there are software solutions like The Archive, and they would have advantages for me: I don’t always have my Zettelkasten with me. On the other hand, I’ve learned that when I’m sitting in front of a computer or iPad, I tend to get distracted. Therefore, I now carry index cards with me.

Here is an interesting video about Luhmann’s Zettelkasten, where he explains it himself starting at minute 37:26:

And here is the researcher who is now delving into the Zettelkasten:

 

About Time Management for Children and the Loss of Time

Merlin points to 5 topics that children should learn in every school, and this includes time management. Unfortunately, I’m offline and can’t read up on what age this is supposed to be suitable for, but I’m not comfortable with this thought:

Learn to make a to do list. Learn to prioritize. Learn to break things down into 30 minute blocks of time. Learn about actionable items.

Didn’t it start with the fact that you had to do your homework before you were allowed to play outside? At what point do I tell our daughter that I want to check her priority list? When I’m back in the States in April, I’ll be looking for a time management book for children, maybe that’s a gap in the market next to all the Seiwert titles and thus more money to be made than with Web 2.0 books.*

At the beginning of January, an article by Matthias Drobinski, “The Loss of Time”, appeared in the SZ, about which I had wanted to blog for some time, and this article by Merlins is a good hook.

Germans have never had as much time as they do today, and at the same time the quality of this time of life has multiplied, according to Drobinski. There is no comparison between the tired seniors of the 50s and the retired people who are active today. At the same time, the lack of time is omnipresent, because the time saved by better transport connections and modern communication channels disappears through new “time-consuming purposes” instead of being used for non-purposeful purposes.

The ubiquitous facilitations are used for multitasking and give rise to the flexibilized person desired by the economy, who then has time off when the global constraints of the company allow it. But it is above all the loss of time spent together that makes the loss of time. And this will get worse rather than better in the face of economic pressures:

The acceleration processes will continue, the pressure on the individual will grow to spend his or her life as a being acting everywhere at the same time. Interestingly, it is economists who are currently talking about the acceleration trap […], who are calculating how much the curse of permanent interruption costs when employees no longer come to work because of all the calls, e-mails and Internet excursions.

Finally, Drobinski calls on politicians to ensure that the “stade Zeit” in the form of universal holidays is preserved, because after all, it holds society together. Last but not least, he emphasizes that the Bavarians are doing very well economically with the many public holidays.

As little as I believe that this is due to the holidays or the “staden Zeit”, Drobinski is not wrong on the other points. Does it really make sense to drill children for it at an early age? Is the dawdling of the kids unnatural or the multitasking of the adults?

Moleskine: First-class idea cemetery

I’m a fan of the sinfully expensive Moleskine notebooks, even if I sometimes question the meaningfulness. The magazine of the Süddeutsche has also done this. Because the true purpose, according to author Tobias Kniebe in view of the results of a long-term self-experiment study, would be to cultivate the feeling of having recovered one’s aphorisms, bon mots and ideas in a valuable place that corresponds to their unique quality. Once it is full, it goes to the shelf (more aesthetically pleasing than ring blocks with partly loose sheets), where it would never be looked at again (here I can contradict the author, from time to time I look there). Kniebe’s conclusion: The Moleskine protects the world precisely from the profundity with which one would otherwise have to annoy one’s fellow human beings, and it safely locks away just the most embarrassing flashes of inspiration: a small poison cabinet with reverent black lids, a first-class funeral of ideas.

And Mr. Kniebe is definitely right: If you pursue an idea over a longer period of time, it can stretch over several Moleskines, and that doesn’t make it any easier to find and process the idea again…

Productivity: David Allen’s Getting Things Done

I recently introduced Life Balance, which is superior to the usual to-do lists. However, not all activities can be mapped in it: a lot of paper ends up on every desk, countless e-mails arrive in every mailbox every day, and Life Balance offers no immediate help (at first). That’s where David Allen’s Getting Things Done comes in.

Getting Things Done, also called GTD by followers, is the description of the organizational method of David Allen, who helped over 1,000 people to work more organized and thus more productive as a consultant for 20 years. Ultimately, he has created a system that creates clarity in a positive working style about what needs to be done, when and how. At the same time, Allen points out that no system can be universally valid, but it is still better to do anything at all than nothing at all. However, once you have achieved an improvement in productivity at one level, the challenges of the next level put the rules that are only just working to the test.

Allen’s system is based on two points:

  • Everything that needs to be done is put into a logical system that you know you can rely on. This system does not mean the head.
  • For each input (everything that somehow comes in is called input) a consistent decision is made.

Everything must therefore be brought into the system, otherwise the mind is occupied with it and is not free; only if the system is reliable, the subconscious mind trusts this system and does not constantly remind you of what actually needs to be done (and usually at a time when you can’t work on it at all).

So it is quite salutary to first take stock and write down everything that needs to be done. Often they are also obligations that you have imposed on yourself. Here it is important to clarify what the obligation is and what needs to be done to be able to fulfil it. At the same time, it is important how the commitments are written down: besides result-oriented thinking, the most important factor is to write down the next step that needs to be taken. For example, don’t change tires, but call the workshop for an appointment for a tire change. In other words, to-do lists should not be a collection of matters, but rather work steps to be performed.

I was particularly fascinated by the process, which Allen offers for free download as a PDF on his website. Because the first obstacle that has to be overcome is the decision as to what it actually is, what has just come in as input, to grasp: Can you even carry out an action with it? Is it something that could be of value now? Sometime? Depending on what the answer is, there is a decision and an action to be taken. This process alone allows me to work through my desk and my e-mail inbox within a very short time. No more panic or a guilty conscience that somewhere between the mails or the stacks of paper there is an important piece of information or a building block of my project that could trip me up in the next moment.

This is just a brief outline of the GTD system. Anyone who complains about too much work and stress is recommended to read the German edition with the somewhat awkwardly translated title Wie ich die Dinge geregelt kriege, which costs less than 10 euros on Amazon.

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Productivity aid: Creating notes from books and magazines

Sometimes it’s the little tricks and tricks that increase your productivity, and that’s how I felt about this “life hack“, as its inventor Phil Gyford calls it. After reading about it on 43 folders last week, I bought large post-it notes, stuck some of them behind the cover of a book, stuck one on the opposite side of the text I was reading, wrote my notes on what I read, stuck full-written post-it notes on the last page and took a new piece of paper from the front. No extra notepad to carry with you (on which you make other notes in between anyway, so that the notes on the book are fragmented); all you need is the book with a stack of sticky notes and a pen. Once you have read through the book, you can take out the notes, stick them next to your monitor and digitize what you have written. The large Post-It notes cost about 80 cents and are a sensible investment for me for people who have to write down what they have read so that they don’t forget it.