The Opposite Collector’s Fallacy

Or: Maintaing a Zettelkasten for Personal Growth

‘Processing, not collecting’ has become one of the mantra’s of the Zettelkasten community. And for good reason: this is exactly what building a Zettelkasten is all about. Building a Zettelkasten for personal growth however I soon found the dichotomy to be too limited. I felt that Zettel shouldn’t replace all the stuff I collect, but rather act as a ‘map’ to navigate it. Here’s how I managed to make that work.

TL;DR: I’m keeping ‘raw material’ (thoughts, quotes, book and podcast notes) together with the topical Zettel in the same text archive, using tags and a different Zettel ID format to distinguish between the two. This allows me to create links between the two and stay in touch with the original thinking and sources, thus creating a more complete second brain and allowing more room for developing and connecting new ideas.

‘To know about something’ isn’t the same as ‘knowing something’

Before I first came in touch with the idea of a Zettelkasten, I had already been building a collection of quotes, stories and personal thoughts/journal entries for a long time. I felt like someday this collection might be useful, but as my collection grew, it became harder and harder to navigate and ‘stay in touch’ with. Most of it was rubbish anyway; an angry rant about a roommate is hardly relevant a year (or even a week) after being written down. I usually did have the impression writing a rant like that down might be useful at some point to help me understand myself, but as time advanced, its apparent relevance would always get completely lost. And I had no way of distinguishing this particular journal entry from other, more meaningful thoughts, except for a superficial and very random tagging system.

When I discovered Zettelkasten I came to understand this idea of hoarding everything that might be useful had a name: The Collector’s Fallacy. The term was coined and consisely described by Christian Tietze as: ‘to know about something’ isn’t the same as ‘knowing something’ (source). According to Tietze, the way to make sure the first turns into the second is by processing information rather than collecting it. To stick with the roommate-rant example for a bit longer: When I now read back what I wrote about that situation, it helps me know about what happened and how I felt, but it doesn’t help me know, understand. Why was that moment important enough to write down? Did I feel the same way at other points in my life? How do those moments relate? What can I learn from them? How can I use the lessons learnt to grow and become a better person? That is what a Zettelkasten is all about: connecting all the dots into a meaningful whole.

Processing means editing

Creating a ‘meaningful whole’ doesn’t happen of itself. Processing means editing — cutting out the useless parts, trying to make the remaining parts as concise as possible. If you want to get a grasp of what I’m talking about, check out Andy Matuschak’s Notes: every note is a meaningful atom in the larger system. Every word is in the right place, not one is redundant.

That’s really cool and all, but I’m not Andy. I’m a poet, a dreamer, a thinker. I love collecting phrases that touch me without (yet) understanding why. I love writing down whatever I feel, however fleeting it may be. I love redundant words. I write down what I don’t yet understand in order to understand. It may seem useless now, but at some point it might make sense. If processing means getting rid of the useless parts and keeping only the ‘essence’, to me the essence would already be lost.

The Opposite Collector’s Fallacy

This is what I’d like to call the Opposite Collector’s Fallacy: the idea that your current self is capable of deciding what to keep and what to throw away for your future self. This is a very limited approach of processing. It only works with the current body of knowledge. It only works backwards, not forwards. It doesn’t promote the growth of ideas that haven’t fully grown yet.

I realised that what I needed in a Zettelkasten was a means of connecting all those floating pieces of text into a meaningful whole without getting rid of the original words themselves. What I needed was a map for navigating this growing body of collected texts. And just like an actual map, it would be a simplification of the complexity of the real world in order to navigate it; a layer on top of the world, rather than a replacement of the world itself. And in order to promote growth, that map should ideally be as complete as possible, containing even the vaguest sketches of places I had only ever seen from afar. A sketch can always be improved, but if you never start sketching, you’ll never get the full picture.

Drawing the map

So here’s what I did:

1. I added a letter to the Zettel ID’s in order to separate and distinguish different types of text. A journal entry gets the ID 200523J01 whereas a quote will be 200523Q06 and a book… you get the point. Each note also gets a corresponding tag (#source/journal) so that the different types are easily navigable from Bear’s nested tag menu.
2. The actual atomic Zettel (the ‘map’) also get their own tag and letter: the T (for ‘topic’ or ‘theme’). This way I can easily filter out the ‘clutter’ to navigate the map. Topics cover things like insights (Always be radically honest to yourself), questions (Am I really a programmer?), sentiments (I feel unsatisfied at work), concepts (Morning pages) and ideas (The Opposite Collector’s Fallacy).
3. Every new source entry goes through an inbox first, from where it gets processed. Here processing obviously doesn’t mean eliminating (except perhaps for the really useless stuff), but mapping: creating bi-directional links to topics.
4. These topics may or may not exist. When a source note is about one or more topics that don’t exist yet, I create a new topic according to the following principles:
   1. Topics should be atomic: they should cover one clearly defined topic. They should be formulated as clearly as possible to define their contents.
   2. Topics should not try to be be evergreen. In contrary to what Matuschak does, I’m trying to gather insight in life and that’s always temporal. When an idea gets ‘replaced’ with a new one, I don’t actually replace it, but create a follow-up note (with, of course, bi-directional links) in order to be able to see how my thinking developed.
   3. Topics don’t have to be finished in order to get started. This is very important. Even a vague sketch with hardly any information is a good start. It enables your ‘future you’ to build upon it (see the earlier map analogy). It can always be improved, merged with other topics, or followed up.
5. The newly created theme or topic ends up in my inbox, so I can continue doing what I was doing and trust it will be processed at some point. At that point I can try to link it to existing topics, change the wording, etc. before it really goes into the Zettelkasten. Sometimes this leads to the creation of new topics, which in turn lead to the creation of new topics, which can then be linked to earlier topics or maybe just a random inspiring quote I collected. Everything is connected.
6. Bi-directional links are important, but I prefer adding them manually so that I can actually turn the links into a useful map instead of a huge list of automatic backlinks. I’ve found that automatic backlinking tends to lead to a new kind of Collector’s Fallacy, where everything is connected, but there are so many (unorganized) connections that it’s hard to discover the real links.

What it looks like

Here’s a little example of how a resulting topic-note might look:

---

200517T09 A topic doesn’t have to be finished to move it to the Zettelkasten

Created from [[200517A01 Demski – The Zettelkasten Method]]

• This is the opposite of what I wrote in [[200511T02 Is it important to distinguish between temporal and evergreen notes?]]
• The main benefit of this is that you get the (much loved by Roam users) ‘stumble effect’: the next time you write about the topic, even if it’s five years later, you’ll stumble upon related thoughts without having to do any active searching. → [[200517T06 The stumble-effect]]
• It allows for ideas to grow

Related

• [[200517T02 Taxonomy of notes]]
• [[200511T02 Is it important to distinguish between temporal and evergreen notes?]]
• [[200517T06 The stumble-effect]]
• [[200515T01 Time is always relevant for notes]]
• [[200522T02 You don’t have to empty the inbox immediately]]

Journal

• [[200515J01 I’m trying to control organisation too hard]]

Quotes

• [[200517Q03 Don’t feel bad if you start a card and leave it mostly blank forever]]

#topic #main/zettelkasten

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