Index cards are pretty cool (2009)
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
The flaw in my system turned out to be that there was just no convenient way to carry the cards around in my jeans pocket. They always wound up getting bent or wrinkled, and I couldn't find a way to keep the cards together that was both pocket-friendly (a binder clip isn't; it pokes and scratches) and quick-releasing (undoing e.g. a rubber band is just too much work for a quick note).
If anyone's still using a hipster PDA I'd be curious to hear what your physical system looks like and how you carry it with you.
[0] http://www.43folders.com/2004/09/03/introducing-the-hipster-...
You can get small pocket versions, and hole punches.
Younger readers might be interested in just how popular filofaxes used to be.
Losing one was like being shut out of your Gmail account today, maybe.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2002/mar/20/internet....
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2002/mar/23/politicalco...
Both of these are from 2002 which isn't that long ago.
Not to mention the cards have a short life span: I end up capturing what I need digitally and then recycle the card.
[0]http://www.levenger.com/FOLIOS-579/POCKET-BRIEFCASES-304/Bom...
It's really interesting to see early solutions to things we take for granted with modern technology.
[0] https://www.ft.com/content/0de32666-b9fd-11dd-8c07-0000779fd... (Access it via Google to get past the paywall.)
http://takingnotenow.blogspot.com/2007/12/luhmanns-zettelkas... from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13851727 is accessible and describes the gist of the system.
The summary is an arbitrarily deep tree/list of nodes. The notation for index card headings is similar to the way we typically do outlines (1, 1/1, 1/1a, corresponding to the typical 1, 1.1, 1.1.a, etc.). Searching was easy as you could find cards grouped by the first index, then the second, then the third (so 1/1a is next to 1/1b, and anything that might sit between them is a child of 1/1a). So for a physical system, despite its size, it remained manageable. References to cards located in other branches allowed for an effective-cross referencing system, and could be paired with things like index (no pun intended) or topic cards which might list a bunch of related indices.
I suspect the physical limitations may have made it more manageable than an equivalent set of mind map nodes or a wiki, and the simple indexing (and consistent, never changing, once a number was assigned it was assigned) means everything is "static" once in place, but can have an arbitrary number of children to expand on it. This means no rewriting cross-references and/or indexes.
With a wiki you might be tempted to retitle (or find the perfect title) for a page, with this it's simply done. If you think of a better descriptor you can put it on a new card and include the index as the reference.
I put some extremely un-secure features in it (ability to evaluate code on an index card) so it never was public.
Let me see what I can do.
Edit:
Ok, here you go:
https://jacquesmattheij.com/3-x-5.png
That's just two cards, one with an apple pie recipe and one with a tiny javascript snippet but you get the idea.
3-x-5 ended up being a bit of a limitation so I made the cards auto-size as you put more text on them. I thought it would be a funny interface to a hypercard like stack with javascript as the language but I didn't pursue the idea any further.
What I did end up doing was butcher it and turn it into a tool that I use daily to do my work, but it lost the index card looks.
It's been spectacularly useful for me. In my experience such a system becomes more useful with time, and with effort put in for curating. I spend maybe 2-3 hours every day with my private 'index cards'.
I guess most prolific writers in human history have been following a "write down every idea and refine it later" type system. But it must be so much easier now, with smartphones, computers, internet etc.
[1] http://zettelkasten.danielluedecke.de/en/
The technology is near trivial, mostly scripts to generate HTML5/CSS on demand, and grep for searching. The magic comes from how I use it. Short summary.
- Write down every idea, and every insight. Write down half-baked ideas. You can later refine it.
- Don't censor yourself. (That's why I don't write a public blog.)
- When writing about some subject X, think carefully about how to link X to other pages. When making a link to another entry, read/browse the entry and let what you read give you inspiration about looking at X from another angle. This can be rather inspirational.
- Curate carefully, I spend maybe 3-4 hours every day on your ZK. Have a long-term view: this is to be used your whole life. To longer you do it, the more useful it will become.
- Be clear what you want from this system.
- The whole system wasn't useful for the first couple years. Why? Because I could still remember what I had written. That changed after about a decade.
I had to work to learn to use my lab notebook for this kind of thing. In school I only recorded lab setup and results. Once I got a "real job" I realized (well it was sternly told to me) that even random calculations and stupid incomplete ideas could be very important to my employer at some point in the future if something related later came out. This included crossing things out in a way that was still legible.
When we'd sign each other's notebook pages nobody ever commented on the half-assed stuff in my notebook and I saw it in others' too.
I got this lecture too, but (unfortunately?) all that really changed was that my post-it notes were stapled into my notebook.
I understand the US Secret Service has analyzed lab notebooks in some major disputes.
(To the best of my knowledge nobody has ever looked at my notebooks after I was done with them).