Focused - 209: A System for Writing, with Bob Doto

Episode Date: July 30, 2024

Welcome to Focus, a productivity podcast about more than just cranking widgets. I'm Mike Schmitz and I'm joined by my fellow co-host, Mr. David Sparks. Hey, David. Hey, Mike. How are you doing today? Doing great. Looking forward to seeing you in person in London in a little bit. Yeah.

Yeah. I'm now on the plan where I've been waking up at like 5 a.m. every day as I'm trying to slowly get my body closer to London time. When you get to a certain age, jet lag actually becomes a thing. I never understood it when I was young, and now I do distinctly. But we got a special guest here today. So welcome to the show, Bob Dotto.

Hello, thank you. Thanks for having me. And I can concur with the jet lag and aging. Yes, it's no fun. Phenomenon. Now I've got to the point where I just go early. Like if I have a trip, like I'm doing a thing in London, I'm gonna be on stage, I don't wanna be a zombie.

So I'm just gonna go a few days early. Cause I know that I couldn't show up that day and do it. And I was talking to a friend of mine who is a bit older than mine and he says, oh, as you get older, then you go a week early. Oh. I'm like, well, of mine who is a bit older than mine and he says, oh, as you get older, then you go a week early. I'm like, well, this is gonna be fun. I can't wait to discover that.

But either way, Bob, you wrote a new book called A System for Writing. And again, you can find out about Bob Dotto over at BobDotto.computer. What a CV Bob has reading the back of the book. His first adventure in self publishing was the Buddhist punk rock zine. I love that, that you photocopied.

I remember, I'm of a certain age when I remember zines that people made on a photocopier and distributed by hand. So that's kind of awesome. You worked for Parabola, a magazine I used to subscribe to. And you've got all sorts of stuff you've done. Tell us a bit about you, Bob. Yeah, I mean, that's the core of the literary side in a lot of ways. Yeah, I got my start just photocopying interviews with bands and taking photographs of them on my camera,

printing them out, having my mom photocopy all of it at work, which I often tell people was absolutely shocking to me that you could photocopy on both sides because then it actually felt like a real book, even though it was just stapled together. Um, so I was kind of hooked on that. You could just do this. If you had a mom or a parent who had a photo, access to a photocopier, you could just do this. If you had a mom or a parent who had access to a photocopier, you could be a writer. So that was my first, that was my introduction into that.

The internet must have really blown you away then when you realized you could self-publish. Yeah, so libraries were a huge deal for me. I would, you know, my friends and I would hang out at libraries and most of the books we were looking at were like on surfing or Buddhism or something. Um, but when the internet came out, it was just, I was so, I was a kid in a candy store and still am to this day. I really do, as much as I critique tech and things like that and have love hate relationships with it all. I really do love internet as a thing in the world.

Um, so yeah, so I, I started there with the zines and self publishing just became my thing for decades now. So what's the arc here from self publishing to this book because, uh, self-publishing to this book because your portfolio is pretty diverse. And it feels like this book, maybe it's a system for writing and this is something you've been doing for a long time. So why did this book come out now? Did it take you this long to crystallize your thoughts? Was it that this is now the time when you've got the technology tools to do the

best version of this The system but or how did we get here? So I started getting interested in Sort of thinking about writing as a system a more formalized Quasi formalized system like around 2019 or so it's where that's really where I first heard about PKM I had no idea what that was. Zettelkasten. I actually came to PCAM through Zettelkasten, which I'd heard about maybe a little earlier, but I wasn't like paying attention.

I didn't know there was like a scene quote unquote around it. I didn't know there were people talking about it online. I just did, I assumed because the internet, but it just wasn't really on my radar. So around 2020, like many people, I started picking up on this community and finding a place for myself in it. You know, I had things to say and I had lots to learn. So I was participating in it quite heavily and still am. And I did all the things that people do.

You know, you read Sanke's book and you read, there's wasn't really another book at the time, but you read that book and then you read what you can online. And for three months, you're absolutely confused and have no idea what's going on. And I then it's then started to click. And when I was talking to people, I just, there were so many people made every day there's more people online being like, I want to learn this. I don't understand it. Everybody's saying something different.

Please help me. So I started writing these articles, short things, you know, 101 style. What is a fleeting note? What is a this? How do you do this? People responded well to them. And at any given time I have like six books, 10 books, just kind of waiting to be written or starting to be at different stages or they're at different stages.

And this was one of them. I was like, someday maybe I'll write a book like that. And then the way it works for me is the books just kind of race, you know, one takes the lead for a while and another one takes over. And this one just started to snowball. And I got a sense of what I wanted it to be. And it came to be. Things switch at some point for me,

where that little race that's going on between books, all of a sudden every other book falls to the side, and I'm just kind of in the muck of the single book. And I really just wanted to write a book that people in this community could feel confident recommending. That was my goal. That's what I set out to do. I think I achieved it. It seems like people are recommending it, but that was my goal. A book that people could recommend. Well, I have to admit, Zettelkasten for me has always been a bit of a black box. I mean, I understood the basics of it.

I understand the kind of like lore behind it, but I was wondering, is Zettelkasten even relevant today where we've got computers that, you know, we don't need a box full of index cards anymore. Is this stuff even relevant? But let me jump in here real quick because I think that we probably need to define some of this stuff for some listeners. So Zettelkasten is this slipbox idea popularized by Nicholas Lumen, who was this prolific creator who wrote all of these research papers and he credits his ability to do all this to this analog slip box he has with the index cards. And you can correct me at any

point here, Bob, if you, because you've studied this more than I have, but that was my introduction to PKM as well. And PKM is personal knowledge management. That's how I stumbled upon your stuff, Bob, is you were doing stuff with our mutual friend, I think, Nick Milo. And I liked what you were saying about it. But I had a negative reaction to the slip box idea. And also you mentioned Sankeh Aaron's book, How to Take Smart Notes. And I think that if anybody who is listening to Focus has heard us talk about this previously and has gone down the same rabbit hole, they probably have had a similar experience, which is why I really wanted to have you on the show today, because you're talking about this stuff in a way that

it wasn't making my blood boil. So with that as context, go ahead and answer David's question about Zettelkasten now that the audience maybe has a frame of reference for this. How do you really feel, Mike? I'm not sure. Yeah. Zettelkasten brings up a lot of feelings in people. And I think it's part of what keeps its relevance.

The relevance is obviously, and this sort of speaks to your point, Mike, that there is relevance for people and I'll talk to that. But there's this other side, this kind of phenomenon side, which is it makes people feel things. It challenges the way they thought things should be organized. The people who are in the scene have very strong opinions, so they might feel something about that. And it's got all the stuff for a really vibrant subculture. Like as far as subcultures go, whether it's punk music or this or surfing or whatever, it's just like that.

It's got devotees and gatekeepers and people just trying to, why can't we all get along and it's got mystery, it's got everything you need to be a vibrant subculture. So in part, that's why it's relevant because it just makes people feel things and want to do things and say things and talk and think. I think it also is of course relevant. I mean, here we are talking about it, right? The, the idea of using a paper-based slip box. I don't think a slip box will ever really go away.

People like to work with tactile things. Um, I certainly do. of using a paper-based slip box. I don't think a slip box will ever really go away. People like to work with tactile things. I certainly do. I find myself, even though I use Obsidian for the vast, vast majority of all my writing and certainly my Zettelkasten work, I will definitely take notes on individual note cards. I was doing it just the other day actually. So the tactility factor for people who get something from that. But even just the ideas, you know, Nicholas Luhmann's ideas about the way ideas can interact, precede kind of predict what we're experiencing now. So the fact that we can do this digitally is right there in his work.

And Johanna Schmidt certainly talks about it. Johanna Schmidt is one of the primary researchers of Nicholas Newman's Zettelkasten work. Um, he references or makes reference to that in a number of his essays that this kind of foreshadows, Licklin's way of doing things foreshadows what people are able to do today. So I don't really think it's so much like, do we need to do it this quote old way, as much as people want to? Which is just to say by old way, I just mean the paper-based way.

But the ideas are certainly relevant and certainly contested to this day. Any forum on PKM will have people saying you absolutely need folders and people saying you absolutely do not need folders them being the Zettelkasten people And that's the thing that I love about your book. You obviously have a system It's in the title a system for writing But what I got out of this was really some component pieces that you can connect in intentional ways Which will make the act of writing a lot easier. And I think that it's important that people recognize

writing is not just for the people who want to publish books, it's a really important way to clarify your thoughts and have better ideas around different topics, which I think is the whole idea behind the Zettelkasten in the first place. And just to, you know, I maybe sounded a little bit more angry than I really am, but I read, you know, how to take smart notes because everybody was talking about it. And the first time I read it, I was like, this is ridiculous. Who in the world does this? I reread it a second time and I

was able to dig a little bit deeper. Okay, there's some conceptual stuff here that I can figure out how to apply. But I think in the Zettelkasten sub-community that you were talking about, if you just kind of wander into that, you're going to encounter all of the stereotypes that you just described, all the different people who are saying the different things. And it's really easy to get overwhelmed and be like, these people are crazy. Who in their right. Fine. Would do all of this stuff. And, uh, it doesn't have to be that crazy. I think is, uh, what you would say, but I'll let you respond. Well, the Zettelkasten scene, I'm going to keep calling it a scene because it is,

and it is a subculture is playing out. I've been involved with a number of subcultures my whole life as my CV shows, and it is playing out exactly how they all play out. Exactly. You have the people who are there early on, who have kind of a rule the roost sort of, they can say what they want and it's kind of all lauded. And then you have a wave of new people coming in. They don't like that. So they hunker down the new people are bringing in different ideas. It's changing the narrative and everybody's kind of vying for, you know, this is at the top layer. People are sort of vying for who gets the right to control the narrative of

what's, what we're really doing here. Because I've been through that since I was in my, I started playing in a band when I was 13. So I've been around scenes since I was 13, which is that's 33 years. I don't have to, I don't feel as strongly maybe as some of the other people in controlling narratives. What I've tried to do is to present the narratives, present what I feel is my practice, what I think is a good way to do things,

but present in a way so that people could do what you said. Sort of take from it and build what they need to build with it. I've been a teacher for many years, so I've been around students who need to be taught different ways. I have this information. I came to this book and this scene with this information. So my intent was to hopefully present that to people and it sounds like at least I'm I'm hesitant because it's all just starting with this book. I reached it a week ago So I have my fingers crossed you can't see that it sounds like that's what people are getting from it

I can only speak for myself But yeah, I think you do a good job of this and it kind of starts with the introduction We don't need to break down, you know every single component of the book here but I was struck by the very first thing in my notes is that you did a lot of writing, but you didn't consider yourself a writer. And I think that probably influences the position that you're taking in the scene, you know, where it's like, I kind of sort of stumbled into this. Whereas if you really wrap your whole identity around, oh no, this is who I am, this is what I do, maybe you feel a little bit more strongly that you need to protect the norms and set up certain boundaries around things that you

consider are sacred. But the thing I like about your writing is I feel like there are no sacred cows in your writing. These are the things that I've tried. These are a bunch of examples. This is what I did with around this particular topic and how I organized all this stuff. But I think that's very approachable. And I think that is something that is not obvious, at least. I'm not going to say it's not there, but you do have to maybe dig for it as you stumble into the Zettelkasten scene. Yeah. Yeah.

I like to tell or remind people that I've known a lot of writers who write circles around me and they have never heard of a Zettelkasten. So like, there's no way I could sit here with a straight face and say, this is how you do it. This is how writing happens. And this is how you do it, this is how writing happens, and this is how you have to organize ideas. Because I'm thinking in my mind of someone I know who's a very prolific writer, and I've been to his house,

and it's an absolute disaster of books. Books just piled everywhere. I wish I could show you the photo. He does not use a Zettelkasten, he's not organized in that way, and yet every day he's out there writing, writing, writing. So yeah, if you have that background, you have to come with a little bit of a sense of this is a way, but it is not the only way. But it is a good way.

I mean, I think for me, systems are the equalizer. I am not a particularly smart person and I need systems in order to get things in place to do the work. I've known that about myself my entire life. And it's always been kind of my MO, right, is to set up a system and then work in the system and then I can make good things. But if you just tell me to write a book without any kind of structure or system, it's never gonna get done.

Yeah, that's why I really wanted to kind of, and that's why I titled the book, A System for Writing, because I am similar. Though I wrote without a system most of my life, I wrote with some sort of, something I sort of cobbled together. But it was only, uh, when I started investing in this system that I talk about in the book that I really felt

like, okay, I'm actually a writer because I actually know kind of what I'm doing right now. I feel like I can do it again, right? That's something I mentioned in the introduction. You know, I would write and write and write, but I had no idea. Something would come out and I'd be like, wow, that that's great. It worked and people seemed to like it. No small, it could be a blog post, could be a small book or whatever,

a zine or something, but it was such a, uh, tour de force, so to speak, that I just had no idea how it got done. And then when I was done, I was like, well, I probably can't do that again because I don't even know where to begin. This, what I present in the book, dramatically, it just 180 that whole process, I can go into my Zettelkasten and my writing area of obsidian, and I can just pick and choose things to start working on because I have notes related to them. If I need more information, some of that will be found in my Zettelkasten,

but if it's not, I have ways to find it elsewhere. It just gave me kind of a structure, a structure, a way to frame and form what I was already doing. And it has been extremely beneficial or helpful to me. This episode of Focus is brought to you by ZocDoc. There are some things in life where it's okay if it's totally terrible, like trying a new type of milk in your coffee, rolling the dice in a new workout class,

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That's Z-O-C-D-O-C dot com slash focused. Zocdoc.com slash focused. Our thanks to Zocdoc for their support of the Focus podcast and all of Relay FM. One of the things you do in the book that I think is excellent, because this is the kind of thing that I think a lot of people need to see, is you spend a lot of time talking about capturing ideas.

I think for so many of us, we don't realize how important that step is. You know, why is capture a big deal and why is it so hard? I mean, the simple answer for the first part is because we forget things. That's why it's a big deal. So if you're a writer or anyone who wants to express or put together something for export, like for to release into the world, you probably want to keep track of what your thinking is on it. And it's hard because it's an extra step.

I think about this a lot and in particular relating to this idea of friction. Capturing, even for me, it still feels like an extra step. Even if my phone is in my hand, even if I'm looking at my phone and I have an idea, I still have to click out and do this thing with my thumb, drag it around this greasy screen, find the app, type it in, et cetera, and then come back. So it's a pivoting. And for, I would say many people, if not most people, that pivoting feels like a drag, you know?

It's just, you don't wanna stop what you're doing. You know, we like, we have eyes in the front of our head, we walk in one direction, we don't necessarily wanna stop what you're doing. You know, we like, we have eyes in the front of our head. We walk in one direction. We don't necessarily want to be ripped around the other direction right away. And that can, it can feel like that to have to capture an idea in the midst of something. There's also this belief that's common among people that I'll just remember it later, you know, so I don't really have to do that. Um,

those are, can be problems for people. Um, but that said, I feel like people who are really trying to write or are writers and very actively writing, they already kind of do that. They may not do it in like a note taking app, quote unquote, but they may have a piece of paper on them at all times. I certainly did, you know, up to today, you know, I keep a piece of paper folded with a pen so that I can just capture stuff. So I think people who are invested in the writing process kind of know this just from

somewhere that they just kind of have to do that. It's helping these other people who are coming to this kind of new to understand the importance of tracking what you're thinking, just getting it out of your head. The old dictum, the old as in like from the 90s or whenever David Allen first wrote getting things done or early aughts, you know, the mind is for having ideas, not storing them. I think it still holds. Agreed. And you in the first section of the book kind of talk about some different phases of the

capture, the way that you capture things. And I think that we should unpack this a little bit because this kind of fights against one of the pitfalls maybe with capture, especially for people who have a bunch of ideas. Once you get those wheels turning, you capture a whole bunch of things. You can feel like, well, I have to make something out of every single one of these things that I've captured because after all, this was a brilliant idea. If you don't have any sort of way to separate these into where are the really good ones and which ones maybe need to be incubated for a bit, then it can be a little bit overwhelming. But you introduced in the book,

which I thought was pretty brilliant, the idea of a sleeping folder. You wanna explain how that works? Sure. Yeah, sleeping folder, I came up with, I'm sure many people have them, but I came up with it for myself because of my tendency to have an inbox

that were lots of ideas in it that I just can't, I just don't know what to do with them right now. So I needed a place to get them out so that my inbox wasn't so overloaded. And it started to, through that, it started to refine its purpose a little more. But basically you have an inbox, you know, with most systems these days, writing systems, note taking systems. There's an inbox, your ideas go in there. It's kind of a place to triage.

Some people call it kind of a waiting room. And then you would take those ideas out and put them, distribute them within your system. The sleeping folder is for when the ideas in the inbox are hard to process, right? You just for whatever reason your mind's not with it with that particular idea or whatever the case may be and you need to get it out of your inbox. Why? Because you want your inbox to feel like a welcoming place, not an anxiety producing place. So the sleeping folder helps with that. I can take these ideas that I took in a heat of passion, but I had a great idea maybe in the middle of the night. And two days later I go to process my inbox or look through it.

And I say, I don't remember how this relates. It's not really that interesting to me anymore, but I feel like the vibe was right when I took it. So I'm just going to take it and put it in my sleeping box or my sleeping folder. And I'll come back to it in six months or whatever and just see if its relevance has, or it's become more relevant. Because things change, new ideas come in, maybe I'm reading a new book and all of a sudden

this idea that didn't make sense earlier now starts to make sense and I bring it into my network, right, my Zettelkasten or wherever it needs to go, project folder or something. But yeah, just to say one other thing about that, this kind of relates, this does relate to the Zettelkasten in particular. What I don't want people to think is that the notes in a Zettelkasten need to be particularly high level. Notes know, notes can, they can be half thoughts. They don't have to be fully formed ideas. You know, the Zettelkasten,

at least according to Nicholas Lumen, is meant to suss out what's important and what's not on its own in a way, right? But the more you add to it, the more ideas you bring into it, the more your ideas will, the value of your ideas will come into focus. Just by the nature of more ideas are linking to it

or connecting to it. So this idea that you might've thrown in just kind of on a whim starts to take shape because all of a sudden you've been adding more notes that relate to it or inform it in some way. Yeah, you know, I had a listener, right, me complaining because I did a field guide on obsidian and a lot of it is about collection and capture

and putting all this stuff together. And he was a professor who wrote a lot of papers and he said, well, the thing you don't get is that the ideas are cheap. Like it's easy to come up with an idea of the hard work is putting it into something that you can publish. But I would argue that a system like that serves two masters. It does give you ideas, but it also makes it easier to do the hard work. At least in my experience.

Using Obsidian and Zettelkasten in particular? Or just length thoughts and atomic ideas. Yeah. Yeah. I obviously don't know what the responder was referring to specifically, but yes, ideas are cheap sometimes and they come into your Zettelkasten or your linked thinking database, whatever you're using, and they develop, just like I said, because other ideas connect to it.

And that's where you start to see the forming of bigger ideas, more complex thoughts, more complex ideas, et cetera, by being able to connect and relate notes containing ideas. Yeah, that was one of the powerful things from that first section was that you mentioned relationships between your ideas is really what gives them value and that kind of spurred in me the fourth level of reading by Mortimer Adler in How to Read a Book, the syntopical reading where you're not

just reading a book about habits in isolation, but you're kind of taking the ideas that the author is presenting there and you're stacking them against the other things that you have read, the other ideas that you've collected. And that was kind of one of my aha moments was like, oh, so just because this person has a New York Times bestselling book and they profess to be a guru doesn't mean that I should just adopt everything that they're telling me. I should be weighing these arguments and I should be deciding for myself what's the value here and what am I going to capture and what am I going to connect inside of my idea development system? And I think there probably are lots of ways that people

could do that. I just got back from Macstock where I did a presentation on mind mapping and I talked about how I use that to develop ideas sometimes. But being able to connect these pieces, I think helps you see things more holistically. You get a more complete picture. But also you mentioned specifically when taking notes while reading that these aren't just all of the things that you agree with or all of the things

that you want to have here because they support a worldview that you already have. You talk about a worldview that you already have. You talk about capturing things that you disagree with. And I'm kind of curious how you work those into your, uh, your connections. So I'm writing focused. Like I am. That's, that's my end game for most of this. Yes. Well, because writing is thinking to me. So writing is where I think about these ideas.

I don't really think about them inside my Zettelkasten per se. It's when I go in there and see these relationships I've made, which of course involves thinking, but I see these relationships, pull them out. And I say, okay, now I've got this material. Um, I'm going to work with it. Right. Let's see what's actually here. What do I agree with?

What do I disagree with? So pulling ideas or coming across ideas I disagree with in a book, it will typically trigger a, an idea of my own. So for me, it's not so much about taking an idea I disagree with and putting it in my Zettelkasten and say, here's a great idea. I just don't agree with it. It's that here's the idea I don't agree with and putting it in my Zettel cast and say, here's a great idea. I just don't agree with it. It's that here's the idea I don't agree with and here's why. And the reason I do the here's why is because I plan on writing about that

someday or, you know, I think I plan on writing about it someday. Who knows what happens, but so I trying to show in that section, uh, or trying to help readers, especially people who are sort of coming to this stuff for the first time, that you can take so much more from a book or from a piece of reading than just like, here's their core thesis and I'm going to put this in my notes because it's important. You can put ideas in your notes based on reading because you just had a feeling, because it reminded me of something your mother said, because it reminded you of a dream, because it's something you vehemently disagree with.

And now you, your next article is writing itself because you really want to speak to this point. Like you need to loosen up, you know, see the book as like an object or an oracle or just containing, it contains many, it contains legions, right? And you can pull from that anything that inspires you in any direction. So even that section that you're referring to is like two pages long,

but that's what I'm trying to present to people. Right, and then you do something with those things that you capture, whether you agree with them, disagree with them, whatever. Do you wanna talk a little bit about the different types of notes that you've got here? You're talking about book notes, those are reference notes, and then you talk about main notes and the things that you just capture because this is one individual point or idea that I had that goes into your Zettelkasten. How does all that stuff tie together?

Yeah. So this is the second, if we're talking as like in terms of beliefs that a person needs to have in order to come to the Zettelkasten or come to any kind of work that's related or adjacent. The first is obviously that it's important to capture things, that you should get things out of your head somewhere in an external source. The second is that you need to do something with that, right? So many people take notes, you know, I've got to remember to do this, or this is an idea,

and then I'm going to write about this. And they say, great idea for a book. And then that's it. What they don't do is they don't take that idea and transform it into something that can be networked throughout a larger system. And that's where the main notes come in. So if you're taking your so-called fleeting notes, your quick captures,

just ideas as they're passing, you have those down in one place. You're reading a book and you're citing, you know, page 22, it says this page 33. It says this page 44. This is a great idea. I should write about this someday. At some point you go back to those, the literature note or reference note, as I call it, and the quick capture of fleeting notes. And you say, what, is there anything interesting here? You know, is it, and I did all this capturing, but is anything worth something? So you go back and you say, okay, I'm going to take this idea in the book. I use an example of algorithms are confusing.

I remember taking that, that note once. And I remember I wrote into it, which I put in the book, you know, C. Zuboff, it's a writer about, wrote a book called Surveillance Capitalism. And I said, algorithms are confusing, C. Zuboff, because I thought that's where I heard it. Great. So what I do then is I go back to that source, Zuboff's, there was a documentary there, I get what she actually said about algorithms being

confusing and then I frame my idea, my thought on it. And this can be very quick, it could take you a little time, but for me it's often relatively quick. And I put that main idea or that my primary idea into a note. I'll reference the source where I got it from just in case I need to do that later on. And then I'll think about other notes in my Zett just in case I need to do that later on. And then I'll think about other notes in my Zettelkasten that this idea might speak to and form or relate to directly. And that's where at that point we are in the Zettelkasten. We are in this distributed network of ideas.

Things are starting to connect. So it's that going back to your quick captures, going back to your reference note, your reading notes and taking from them and turning them into something that's actually useful and usable in your writing or in your thinking. Yeah. And this is where we, we pivot maybe from note taking to note making, which I think is a very important concept and also tied to the whole idea of focus. I like how you kind of mentioned in your book,

these threads of these ideas, you call that a train of thought. And I mean, we're probably all familiar with the concept of a train of thought, but I had never heard it applied to the development of ideas in that specific way. And I think that is pretty accurate because the picture I get in my head of a train, specifically like an old steam engine, is that it takes a while to build some momentum.

But once you have some momentum, then it continues to move fairly, fairly easily. And this is the thing, you know, regardless of whether you have specifically fleeting notes and reference notes and main notes, I think that people should consider with this is, you know, what are the ways, the systems that you can develop and Bob's is a pretty good one here for maintaining your focus on the things that are important and developing those ideas specifically, I think is a very important application of focus regardless of what the outcome of that writing happens to be. Yeah. Yeah. Two people I should mention right now in regards to this, note taking versus note making, you know, it was an idea I had heard of, but I really came into focus through our mutual

friend, Nick Milo. The things I caught of him saying about note making really kind of crystallized it for me, what it was. And it is, it's this move from taking, doing the capture to making something of the capture. The other person to mention is Sasha Fast from the zettelkasten.de forum who really pushed the development and the practice of so-called structure notes, what we call structure notes now, um, which are these larger notes in your Zettelkasten where you can take trains of thought or ideas developing like in a sequence, bring them into this larger note and then work out that development. That's the space for a lot of people where they can now see the ideas in direct relationship with

one another and are given room, like physical slash digital room to actually explain why these connections are made in greater detail, which of course informs your thinking on the matter. It shows you where you might have some blind spots or some gaps in your thinking. It also for writers, it shows you, do you have anything here that you can actually say? It's great to have a long train of thought in your Zettelkasten. This note relates to this, relates to that, relates to that. But can you actually say something about it? So I feel like the structure note is, is an important part of the Zettelkasten for many people. Now I personally don't have a need for too many structure notes

because I'm writing constantly. So my writing is my structure note because I work digitally. I can have as many half written documents as I need. So when I have a train of thought that I want to develop, I pull it into a writing document and just start writing. And it becomes just a unpublished work or a work in progress. But for other people, especially people who aren't, you know, intending to write constantly

or their great opus or really write much at all, the structure note is a place where you can actually just get into the ideas and unpack them and see what you've got. And just to clarify, can you explain a structure note for folks that are not familiar with the term? Sure. Yeah. So if you have your main notes, which are these individual, roughly single idea

ish notes, um, connecting in your Zettelkasten relating to one another, these relationships, if you're going to do anything with them, need to be explored, expanded, deepened, whatever. So a structure note functions as a place to do that. So you would simply open up another note or if you're using a paper-based system, you could just have, it could be a sheet of paper, something that has a little room to it. And you bring your ideas from that, say, train of thought into this new document, and there is where you can unpack, develop, and explore the relationship between the ideas you have that come from that train of thought.

So the example I give in a book, in the book has to do with pratyahara, this concept that comes out of Hindu yogic philosophy. It's the idea of turning inward in a yogic practice. And I have a number of notes in my Zettelkasten that speak about this. But I have a number of notes that speak sort of adjacent to this. They look at it from a Christian angle. So it's not quite pratyahara, but it's still this idea of going inward when you're reading or doing spiritual practice.

I brought those notes into a structure note because I wanted to see how these ideas related. How does the Christian concept of going in relate to the Hindu yoga concept of going in? And that was a place to do that. So technically it's, you got a title at the top and you have your notes stacked in some sequence that makes sense to you, and you contextualize them. You type in, write in why these ideas are related, and you start to kind of form your thinking, right? You form your thinking on the concept or on the topic. So I think I have a example of this, and you can tell me if this is missing

some of the key elements of a structure note but this sounds a lot to me like Nick's concept of a map of content which kind of clicked for me is the workbench where you're developing these ideas So I didn't really know how to do that But I took a stab at it when I was trying to create my codified thoughts around the topic of habits and I started with that Charles Duhigg model where you've got the cue the routine and the reward and there's that that loop and when I read that that book and I came across that idea it never really sat well with

me so I'm typing all of this out in my note on habits and I'm because I'm using obsidian I've got callouts that say you know the problem with this model is that as soon as the cue is triggered the routine happens automatically. You don't really have a choice. So then I bring in, you know, the James Clear model from Atomic Habits. Oh, there's another step here now where there's a temptation and sometimes we give into it, sometimes we don't. Well, this feels better because now we have some agency in the process. I'm not a rat in a machine. But then it opens up another loophole. What determines

whether you follow through with that thing. And then you read, then I read out tiny habits by BJ fog. And there's a whole chart that goes along with this. And I'm finding that as I am writing this note, my thoughts become clear. There's a quote that thoughts disentangle themselves through lips and pencil tips. I've discovered also through clicky keyboards. And as I go, you know, I'm just finding additional things to plug in here. It's like opening new loops. Oh yeah, I've got something that kind of ties to that. And then the end result is that I have this structure note on this is what I think about the topic of habits. And if you would ask me before that, I've been, oh yeah, yeah, I know what I think about that. But then if I tried to explain it to you, it's kind of clumsy.

The distillation that happens as I write all this out in my structure note means that by the time I'm done, I can explain it to a nine year old. Yeah. That sounds right. If you were to just say, I had, if you were just tell me what you did there and you say, what is this called? I would say that's probably a structure note. And yeah, Nick Milo's maps of content, um, idea and concept, uh, is related for sure. Um, it's sometimes framed slightly differently.

I think the maps part, uh, of that title pushes people towards like, uh, this is a, an index or a way to find things in my database. And I, I certainly think that's the way it was presented earlier on. Um, and that has kind of the concept has, uh, developed, has been developed over time. So now people talk about it more as like in the terms you're using, you know, it's a place where you can kind of organize your thinking and understand stuff. It also can function as a way in, right? Certainly when I came across it, it was more about the like, it's a way in, it's a way to find things. Um, but

that has developed over time. So yeah, there's definitely some crossover there. But the thing I want to just like drive home for people is that, uh, you can collect all these things about what other people have said and you can have a general sense of what you think about things. You have no idea what you actually think about the things until you create these types of opinion notes. In my experience, as you are creating them, that's really when the clarity comes. And in terms of a system for writing, that is the thing that points you in the right direction as to, oh, here's what I want to create

as an artifact out of this. Which I think is also maybe a missing piece for a lot of people. We'll get to the actual writing part here, but I think if all you do is collect things, eventually it can feel a little bit overwhelming. And when you start to express what you think about things, it's almost like a release valve.

Oh, yeah, absolutely. I mean, expression in this world, this context we're talking about expression is so, I find it to be so important for one thing. It's a really great filter. Like if you're working on something and even if it's not just one thing, it's a really great filter. Like if you're working on something, and even if it's not just one project, just like you're developing these ideas around some field of study, it's going to inform what you capture and it's going to filter what you capture. So all of a sudden, you know, for a lot of people in the beginning, they just capture everything when they come to these sort of concepts of second brains and settle classes and things.

and they come to these sort of concepts of second brains and settle classes and things. And I saw it, I used to be a mentor at the building a second brain class course. And that's what you see is people, I capture everything, I don't know what to do. I capture on this side, everything's interesting to me now. So I capture everything. And that's great, that's part of the process.

As you start expressing, as you start taking your ideas and developing them kind of in the same way you start expressing, as you start taking your ideas and developing them kind of in the, in the same way you were doing with habits, you start to curate what you're capturing because you need certain kinds of information and you're drawn to things that are related to the thing you're working on. So it really can help you hone in, right? Your capturing practice becomes a lot more bespoke to use it. My fiance is an interior designer, so I hear this word often. Your curation becomes a lot more bespoke.

It becomes a lot more specific to your interests in the moment. To me, it acts a lot like a flywheel where once you get it turning then each rotation becomes easier and produces greater results. So the the act of expressing it like you were talking about, I've actually got a model called the creativity flywheel which is kind of how I made sense of this stuff in my head. But I realized exactly what you're describing that once I create something and there's some output, then there is clarity as to what things are actually useful in terms of capturing more things. And it alleviates a lot of the pressure or the FOMO maybe. There's all this stuff out there and I don't know which of it is important.

So I better capture all of it because after all David Allen said, your brain is for having ideas not holding them. And I'm just gonna throw all this stuff into the digital archive folder, and you really don't know what's in there, you don't know how it connects, and it feels overwhelming. The only thing I would add to that is,

I don't know if it's output or distillation. I don't know that you need to, output implies that you're putting it in the world. And I think just spending time in the data and, and the distillation of it and figuring out your own thoughts and writing about it, even if it's just part of the Zettelkasten system, to me, that is enough to get the payoff. Yeah, you're definitely touching on my very large bias in this conversation, which is towards, I'm an output guy. So, and once I turned 40, I was like, that is what I do.

I output. So yeah, so I'll definitely, you'll hear me use terms like output or releasing it into the world or expressing, et cetera. But of course, yeah, you're absolutely right. Distilling and just being in the system, being in the stuff of your ideas and working with it and wrestling with it is certainly a way to do it, a way to achieve what you want. Yeah.

I mean, I use it in both ways, but I can say from personal experience, I have in obsidian a thing called Sparky OS, right? And it is my thoughts distilled down on a variety of topics. Blame, we had a conversation at dinner with Blame with the kids. I know what I think about Blame because I've written an essay about it for myself in the SparkyOS. It's like the operating system knows what my thoughts are when it comes to trying to blame other people.

And that's because I've done the work. I mean, we all, people listening, everybody knows what they think about when they should blame, not blame, but until you write it down, you really don't know. So I think there's a huge benefit for it, even if you're not going to write a novel. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, I would agree. When I say output or the last step in my creativity flywheel is to create something, that's really what I'm talking about. Whether it ever sees the light of day, whether it's ever published to a server

somewhere or whether you just write a couple of sentences to get clarity on what you think about things. It's some sort of output of information. Like you've collected all this information into your brain, now your brain needs to export it in some way, physical or digital, even if nobody else sees it. This episode of the Focus Podcast is brought to you by Vitaly. Go to vitaly.io slash focus for a new era for customer success productivity and get a free pair of AirPods Pro when you book a qualified meeting. Vitaly is bringing in a new era for customer service productivity

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qualified meeting. And our thanks to Vitally for their support of the Focus podcast and all of Relay FM. All right, so after you capture these things and you start to make your own, uh, structure notes and like we talked about in the last sections, codify your ideas. That's where things get really exciting. You want to talk to us about making connections?

Yeah. You have these ideas, you have your main notes and they are, again, they're like a single ish ideas. main notes and they are, again, they're like a single-ish ideas and they're relating to one another. Or at least you want them to relate to one another. That's really where the connections come in. So the process, so this is the, now the next belief that a person needs to have in order to really engage with this kind of a system.

You want to capture your ideas, you want to transform them to something usable, but now you want to relate them to other ideas. This is where your great big Pontific idea you had in OneNote starts to meet the ideas, meet the other ideas in your Zettelkasten. It may shrink a little bit, it may grow a little bit. Other ideas may inform it in a positive way. Other ideas may challenge it. Who knows what can happen. It depends what you've been bringing in Rosetta Casten, but nothing really happens until you start showing these relationships, how these ideas relate. And in the book, I talk about these relationships at kind of not different levels, but they're different qualities, right? So the first quality is you have an idea and as you're recording it or

transforming it into a main note, you think of another idea that's in your zettelkasten already. So this idea you're capturing is kind of related to, or speaking to maybe, maybe in a very direct way, this other idea that's in your zettelkasten. That's the first connection. The next step is to say, okay, does it relate to anything else? That's the context in which I captured this idea, or I created or made this idea into a main note,

but what else does it speak to? And that's where you kind of step back, broaden your vision a little bit. Could it be used as a metaphor? The example I give in the book is, I forget what the exact example is, but it's something about the quality of soil. My fiance and I are in this very large homesteading project that we're working on.

So I'm thinking a lot about soil and quality of soil and what you can grow in certain kinds of soil. So say you have a note on soil quality. You know, you're, you're thinking about that idea because you're also thinking about soil erosion and we've gotten a lot of rain in the past year and how to keep soil from, from leaving your property. But then you say, okay, this is about soil quality of soil. Does this relate to anything else?

Could this relate to ecosystems in general? Do I have any ideas in my Zettelkasten that relate to, in the book I talk about communities, like soil needs to have a very diverse and rich composition. How does that relate to other ideas about rich composition? Could that be the importance of diversity in group thinking, whatever, right? But you take this step back and you say, you think about how does this idea relate to others in my Zettelkasten, even if it's not so explicit in the moment. And at that point, if you find something, you establish that relationship or you link it and you state why say this relates to X because of X, Y, Z. At that point, you can leave it.

Your work is kind of done for now. You've established the relationship, uh, multiple relationships, and there doesn't have to be many, it could just be the one, but it could be as many as you, you can think of. Um, and when you come back to your Zettel cast, and that's when you start to see what's been happening. So another idea might've come in later and that related not to the original soil

idea, but to the idea about diverse communities or something like that. And all of a sudden, when you, when you go in, you start seeing these relationships, seeing these quote trains of thought developing, I could take this soil idea in this direction, sticking strictly with, you know, homesteading or farming. I could take this soil idea and talk more, use it more as a metaphor about how communities developed or dynamic communities developed, develop. And from there, that's where when we talked about structure notes earlier, that's what you would take out and put into this other place to develop further. So you

say, I'm actually more interested right now in the soil note as a metaphor for dynamic communities. I'm going to take that out over here and we're going to look at it and explore it and develop it. And that's where things really, really start to happen. Tim Cynova This is the part that fascinates me is the intentional making of these connections. And this is also why I think, um, you know, right now there's a lot of talk about AI and making these connections, but some of the more valuable connections are things that there's no way an AI bot or an LLM would be able to make the connection between those things.

That's just the weird way that my brain has connected these, these topics as I use this crazy thing as a metaphor for something else completely. Um, and, uh, I think when it comes to connected note taking apps, you mentioned obsidian, I think we all use that one, but there are other connected note taking apps. One of the things I see people trying to do is just dump stuff in there, connect all of the links and think that that is going to surface some of these insights in these aha moments, which I think, uh, ultimately like,

what is this in service of for you? It's the writing. It's the, the output, um, just making the links isn't enough. And you talk specifically in your book about this concept of link dumping, which I think can create an atmosphere inside of your note, your note ecosystem, your Zettelkasten, but I don't think you necessarily need to be all in with Zettelkasten to, to, um, to experience some of the benefits of it and also to fall into this, this trap. So how does link dumping like water all this stuff down?

Yeah. Link dumping is a term I use for when you, uh, you have a note and you say, Oh, it could relate to this. It probably relates to this. It might relate to this. And then you just drop links in. So there's just a stack of links there. If you're like me, when you come back to that note, a day later, you know, a month, week, even a day, I have no idea why I made those connections. I don't understand the relationship.

I have to basically reinvent the wheel, do all that work again. I have to open the note that's open in front of me. I have to then click on the next link and say, what was I thinking? Especially in those kind of more lengthy connections, right? Where we're talking about like soil and dynamic communities. The antidote to that is context, right? You give context. You state why you made this relationship as you're making it.

And that can be very brief, it doesn't have to be something extensive, but it's enough to give your so-called future self something to encounter or engage with when you come back to it. And this has helped me tremendously because the connections I make in my Zettelkasten, I allow myself to be very fluid in my connections.

Things can become metaphors, things can become subplots, there's no hierarchy, right? So a big idea I have could be just a tiny little blip in some other thing. I allow that to be, but only if I can state why. So when I make those connections, I always write, you know, C-S-E-E, and then the note title, and I say, so that you can better understand the blah, blah, blah, or see this note for more on how this might relate to X, Y, Z. Just enough to remind me what I was even thinking at that time.

But yeah, people who don't do that, I see a very direct relationship between not doing that and feeling overwhelmed in their note-taking system. What's the difference between the C and the previous that you mentioned in this book? Because essentially what you're saying with those two differentiations there is that not every link is the same. Is this kind of like red crumbs? Maybe. In the book, I refer to previous NC links. Previous means it's the note that preceded this, the idea that preceded this idea that this is directly related to. So basically that's me saying to myself, you wrote this note in relationship to this other one that came previously that you were captured previously. The C-links, S-E-E-links are links that I also

call them jumps sometimes. They jump out of that train of thought. So that previous relationship is like one train of thought and the ceilings are other trains of thought, other ways in which this idea that I'm looking at could be taken or could be contextualized. So I make a distinction. There's no reason for people to do that. In fact, most people, I've most people's systems I have seen do not. Make this previous versus see distinction. But for me it's helpful.

So that's, that's how I, that's how I distinguish between the two. But at the same time, they're all just, they're all just different trains of thought. Previous see doesn't matter. All just trains of thought. Yeah. I think it is beneficial. But that was the first time I had encountered the idea of these connected notes where the order actually mattered. And I like the way that you've done it where this is continuing the train of thought in this specific direction.

And then the other one, the sea links is, okay, now we're going to now for something completely different. Right. I should say here, just because it's very important with Zettelkasten is that the development of the train of thought that you're referring to is not outlined and it is not a semantic order. So an idea that I've come up with after one that's previously recorded may be one that actually should precede that when I go to organize these things. There is no hierarchy. There's no like, there's no order within the Zettelkasten until you make something of it, if that makes sense.

It does. And that hits on one of the stumbling blocks I always had with Zettelkasten because I'd seen the examples. And if you just look at some of the pictures that you share, I think you can reinforce this without, but that your words clarified it for me where you've got like the main topic and you're switching back and forth between letters and numbers. So you've got 2.1A, you know, and as you have another idea 2.1B and the picture I always had in my head was like the Dewey decimal system at the public library where all of those were generally in alphabetical order.

And I was like, Oh, I have to go back and I have to rearrange all this stuff. But very important point that you just shared. No, you just add it to the end. It's not in semantic order. So 2.1A, maybe a very minor thing, but 2.1F or G might be the main idea. That's completely okay because it's loosely grouped together under that 2.1 whatever it is and I'm blanking on the example that you used in the book I think it maybe was around apples yeah I use that if you've taken my courses on Zettelkasten I use the apples example like ad nauseam I'm just constantly using the apples if I don't know where I came up with it, but that's what I do. But yeah, these are addresses. Nicholas Lumen needed a way to address notes,

and he needed a way to track his train of thought. So on paper, that's the way to do it, right? Is to have 1A, 1A, 1A, 1A, 1A, et cetera, et cetera. Many people who use digital do not keep to that system or use an alphanumeric system because they don't really need to. And that's where structure notes really come into play. And that's in part how and why they were developed,

so robustly on the Zettelkasten forum was because they're using digital Zettelkasten and they needed a way to work with this stuff. I still use it. I think it's beneficial to me. I like it's sort of forcing functions that I talk about in the book. But yeah, the idea, the ideas are just addresses and you don't know how these, the value of these ideas based on their address.

You know the value of the ideas based on what you see happening to and with the idea when you pull it and the others out to look at them, to explore them and examine them. And if it's a little bit messy, that's okay, because that's kind of the point. You know, you talk about anarchy and chaos, and I think the organized neat freak in me

wants all this stuff to be in perfect order. But the truth is that it kind of doesn't matter. Yes, Lumen was explicit in multiple places, not only in his one essay on the subject, but in interviews and other areas of his writing. And it was certainly reinforced by Johanna Schmidt and Kesterling, the kind of primary people surrounding Nicole Sluman's Zettelkasten work. That, Nicole Sluman talks about heterogeneous ideas. It's a way to find things that didn't make sense. I'm paraphrasing here, you know, don't seem to make sense, but now make sense.

Um, dissonant ideas, working with dissonance, um, playing with chaos, order and chaos, you know, these are lumens terms, right? And I think people forget that even in the Zetelkasten world, they forget that he was, at least according to his interviews and writing seemed very excited about experiencing how ideas, seemingly disparate ideas could interact to the point where, you know, he talks about his theories. I mean, he's, he's in an interview, he's giving a lecture, I forget where it was from. And Kisserling relates the story that Lumen talks about,

someone should be able to come to my theory, add to it something and take it in an entirely different direction. Kisserling talks about it in regards to Lumen's Zettelkasten that anyone who goes into his Zettelkasten will come up with a different theory. And that's a positive, right? That speaks to something very different than, you know, the

rational mind and, you know, um, ordering things and organizing things and having everything be kind of in hierarchy. This is, we're not there anymore. We are in some other place. Um, and I think it's integral or yeah, I think it's integral to, to the Zettelkelkasten practice is experiencing that and being able to work with and maybe even leverage that. Let's, since you brought up Nicholas Lumen, one of the points that you made, which maybe pivots us into the part on doing the writing, but you mentioned in the book,

and I let out a huge sigh of relief when I read this. You mentioned that people praises productivity, but not his writing. And you mentioned some other examples, which I won't share on air. But the tendency can be, well, I'm just gonna let my system create the output, and then I'm just gonna copy paste that,

and that's not good enough. So how do we get from all of these notes, all of these ideas to the actual written artifact, in your case, the book? How do we make this stuff into something that people would actually, including ourselves, want to read? Yeah, let's get to output now

that I was knocking it down a few minutes ago. Sure. So, Lumen is, I forget where he said this again, I've been so immersed in all this stuff that all the citations are in a blur to me right now, but he is on record as talking about not really needing to edit his work once he put it all together. He pulled the ideas from his Zettelcast and did some sort of outlining, et cetera, but basically put it in there and hit go. Now some people look at that and, you know, they, they read all about this Zettelkasten,

Nicholas Suman, oh my God, he's done all this work. And then they go read his work and they're absolutely horrified. This is like the worst stuff I've ever read. Now I want to just contextualize that just a little bit because it does relate to, to the output question. Nicholas Lumen also wrote at a time period, a time in, in writing and theory and critical theory, where it was, uh, seen, it was laudable to play with the use of language, play with meaning, play how language and the structure of language affects our

codification of meaning and disrupt that a bit. And so Nicholas Wuman is on record as talking about how he wanted his work to be not easily digestible. You see this same sentiment in the Russian formalists many decades earlier who talk about estrangement or astronomy or making strange, right? Where you write in such a way that the reader is forced to pause. So while I agree that Nikolai Suman is writing as difficult, I do tend to think that he was in on it, in on the joke a little bit. That's it. That's it.

Um, there is a tendency to, to see this example given by Lumen as being able to take from your Zettel class and put it in a document and hit send or hit go, um, to disastrous effects. Uh, the difference is that, well, what this speaks to is what we were just talking about, which is the ideas in your Zettelkasten while related are not related in any semantic way, they are just related and the relationships are there to be played with and to be, to be unpacked, but you need to take them out and do the unpacking. Should this idea go here?

Should it go up here? Is this more of a broad concept idea? Okay. If it is, maybe I'll put that up upfront because I want people to be familiar with that first and then we'll get into the granular stuff. Whatever, whatever you decide, there are decisions that need to be made. And many people, I shouldn't say many people, a number of people in the scene have sort of talked about how you don't need to be made. And many people, I shouldn't say many people, but a number of people in the scene have sort of talked about how you don't need to do that. It's all right there.

You know, you just front loaded in the Zettelkasten and writing is easy. Writing is not easy. Okay. I don't care if you have a Zettelkasten or AI or whatever, it is not easy. I worked on this book for a year and a half, 10 hour days for months and months and months on end, getting it right and getting it to read the way I wanted it to. That was not easy. What was, what the Zettelkasten did to, to benefit that process was it gave me stuff to work with out of the gate and throughout the process. I always had something to pull from and a place to go, but I still had to do something with it. And that's that whole last third of the book is talking about how do you do something with this material? You had this chaos, you're on, you know, you've signed off on, I'm pro chaos, I'm into this, but now what do you do with it? That's where your style comes in. That's where

your audience gets taken into consideration. That's where you considered length, the length of your writing. Should it be a short piece? Should it be long? Should it be a tweet? Whatever. This is where the writer comes in, right? So there's no shortcut to being a writer. You still have to be a writer. You still have to read other people. You still have to write a lot. You still have to be in the community of writers and participate. But the Zettelkasten gives you stuff, juicy, interesting, weird, wild stuff to work with, but then you gotta do the work.

And that's what I talk about in the third section of the book. Yeah, it can prime the pump for you, but you still need to do something with it. And one of the points that you make is that there's more to writing than just spewing words. It's not only about what should be included. It's about what knowing what to leave out.

And that I think maybe is a little bit of a contradictory message. Maybe when you just do Google search for Zettelkasten because everything you're describing, it strikes me that that's kind of the same approach that people currently have towards a lot of AI writing tools. Well, just write this thing for me and then I can publish it.

And that's not the best version. And your book is only, I think it's like 160 pages or something, it's fairly short. So kudos to you for practicing what you preached here. But I do think that in terms of the actual writing itself, there is definitely a higher level of quality that is evident when it's not just,

okay, I've connected all the pieces and editing it and murdering your darlings. I forget who actually said that, but that's really what makes good writing. Yeah. Yes. To Sanke's credit, Sanke Aron's credit, he does refer to the effortlessness, seemingly effortlessness with which Lumen wrote. And then of course says, wow, he really tried to put everything into every book. But what he does say, which I completely agree with is that you really become an editor. Again, I'm paraphrasing Sanke. But you have to become an editor

when you work with a Zettelkasten because you do have a ton of copy if you've been seeding your slip box. You've got all this stuff, but that whole quote, what to do with it, that's where the editor comes in also. A writer should also be an editor to some degree. And so those 10 hour days, I mean, I wish I could show you the stacks of printouts

and the amount of Muji blue 0.5 pens I ran through editing this work. the amount of Muji blue 0.5 pens I ran through editing this work. I mean, it was heavily big chunks being moved over here, other chunks being cut, things on the floor, put back in three months later. It was all over, you know, which I love. I love the editorial process, but yeah, that's labor. You know, that's labor intensive work for sure.

One of the ways that you did the work of writing, which I think we have to touch on here because David, we talk about journaling all the time. Bob, you have an interstitial way of journaling that you combine with a creative log in order to manage your writing projects. You mind explaining that? Sure. The daily journal is just my daily journal. It's one long file and at the top of the file

is today. And that daily journal has two very distinct but very simple parts. The bottom half of the day is just kind of a timeline of what I did and when. I, and, and what I think I'm going to do next, that's the kind of, so, uh, quote interstitial journaling aspect where you write what you did, what you thought about it, what you're going to do and what you think about doing it. In full disclosure, I am not that strict on it, but I definitely do it, right? I write what I did and I'll often put what I thought about it or where I think I should go next. So that, that is for sure there.

Above that is what I call the end of day check-in. And I've changed that. I don't know what the right thing to write there is. I've changed it many times, but that's the one that's stuck the longest. It just says end of day check-in. And basically what that is, is where I say what you should work, what you, as in me should work on tomorrow.

And I speak to myself as if I'm, you know, external to myself. I say, you should, you should work on this. You had a good time doing this or, you know, skip this section because it was really difficult, but you can work on this other section. It's coming much, much more quickly or whatever. And that's the prompt that kind of tells me where to, what to work on writing wise for the next day. From there, I just make a quick jump by clicking the link to whatever the project

or writing piece I have linked there. And that takes me to either the document or the, or the log and the log, the creative log is where I write Keep track of what I did in that piece in particular so when I'm Like invested in a piece of writing I at the end of the session I say, you know, this is the time This is the date and I worked on this paragraph or this section. This section is coming. Well, it's almost done.

Maybe just a few extra tweaks. No, this is all my creative log below that. Another bullet point it says, if you want, you can actually just cut the second half and publish it as is just with the first half, things like that. And that that's what I was saying before, you know, about like not having a system versus having a system. When I go to that creative log, I know what's going on. It's I'm being pointed to where I worked last. I can go review that. I have prompts on what I should work on next. I would say 99% of the time it's, it's always correct. I am correct. What I write there, um, it's good advice

to myself. And then I can just start a jump right there, um, it's good advice to myself. And then I can just start a jump right back in as opposed to what I used to do, which was, okay, I haven't looked at this in a few days. I kind of forget where my edits were. I sort of made a note here. Let me just start at the top and read through it. And then it's, I mean, that's the grueling process now less. So I could still read through the work, but I don't have to. So those two things work together. My daily log is just more general stuff, but my general

stuff includes my writing and I'm sorry, my daily journal and my creative log is specific for writing projects. Do you think that the benefit of that is the act of writing it down or the fact that you're slowing yourself down enough just to think about it? That's a really good question. I am very pro writing obviously and I'm very pro even writing small things. So there is, it feels like there is certainly something

to taking a beat and just saying what I did and what I think I should do. There is some clarity there that comes from that, and it certainly forces me to consider what's actually going on in the piece. So it's kind of a last assessment of what might be happening there. So that is true. And like I said, there's also just the explicit directiveness of it that it does just keep me involved in the work and in the process of the writing. And also argue because I have a similar interstitial practice and on my best days, it eases transition. Like, when you do

that, you finish it, you know that you've buttoned it up for tomorrow and then you go and do whatever else you do with full attention. Yeah, sorry, I thought you were talking about creative log. Yes, the interstitial journaling aspect. Definitely, yeah, there is a closure, a sense of closure that when I say, you know, finish this, no need to come back to it today.

There really is something that happens cognitively. I have read a little bit on this, that what do they call it, like cognitive shifts, or I forget the term, but something happens where my brain says, okay, we're done. We can actually let go of that. I don't need to keep thinking about it. So yeah, absolutely, with regards to the interstitial aspect.

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Terms and conditions apply. Need to hire? You need Indeed. Our thanks to Indeed for their support of the Focus podcast and all of Relay FM. Bob, we like to finish up episodes just kind of talking about what we're reading. You were talking about earlier to be a good writer.

You got to read. So we thought we'd just go through the roundup with your game. Absolutely, yeah, would love to. Mike, what are you working on? Well, I was in Max stock last weekend and visited my favorite bookstore, which is Read Between the Lines.

I'll put a link to the store in the show notes. While I was there, I got a book and I'm gonna bring it to London. And David, it is a fiction book. Okay. Which one? So I am going to be reading the three body problem and I have no idea how to pronounce

the author's Chinese name C-I-X-I-N. It's the first name L-I-U. So Lu for the last. I think it's like Xingxin Lu. I've heard it stated a few times, but yeah. Yeah. So, uh, I was there and I met someone who has gone through my cohorts and been in my community. Shout out to Hugo. He came to Mac stock. We hung out in Woodstock and we went to the bookstore and he convinced me to, uh, to pick this one up. So I will be reading a fiction book, believe it or not.

You go, Mike. I have spent the last three or four days neck deep in Bob's book, which is excellent. I haven't fully digested it yet, but I'll get it finished this week. And I paused reading The World Beyond Your Brain by Matthew Crawford when Bob's book showed up. So that'll be where I go back to once that's done.

And that Matthew Crawford book is heavy reading. It's not light reading. So it'll probably take me a couple weeks to finish it. Nice. What are you reading, Bob? I am actually in the process of re-reading some books right now. So the two I have right next to me,

The Spell of the Sentuous by David Abram. I'm not sure if any of you or any of your readers have read it, a really great book about language and especially the use of language in tribal societies, sort of pre-literate societies. And I'm also reading an old book I read for my graduate thesis called, this is a real political philosophy book

called The Political Philosophy of Post-Structuralist Anarchism, which is a very heady, very, to me, very juicy title. But yeah, I'm reading that and Spell the Sensuous for a potential future writing project that I'm working on. So I'm going back to my roots. Awesome, great recommendations.

Not exactly in the vein of the stuff we usually talk about, but I love it. Well, I have read that, the three body problem by the way, and it was wonderful. Be ready to not read or conceptualize things linearly. That's all I can say about that. All right. Yeah. Awesome.

And the thing is, it's a good book. You're gonna be tempted. There's more. So. Yeah, exactly. I see that. Yeah. Be warned. The further down you go that rabbit hole,

the weirder it gets. Okay, System for Writing by Bob Dotto. You can find it over at, was it bobdotto.computer? I love that URL, Bob. Yeah, yes. You can find the link there for it for sure. Yeah, bobdotto.computer. Go there so he can get it. Yes, you can find the link there for it for sure. Yeah, BobDotto.com. Go there so he can get it.

Zettelkasten primer, excellent book. It turned me around on Zettelkasten. It also has me rethinking some of my practices, particularly with respect to capture and how I'm managing this stuff on the software and analog side. So thank you so much, this is really enlightening. Go check it out gang. Bob, anywhere else people can go to find what you're up to? I haunt the Zettelkasten forums of the world,

most particularly the Zettelkasten subreddit. So I'm there answering a lot of questions. You can also find me in the Obsidian Discord group, but specifically in the Zettelkasten thread. It's where I kind of hang out and help people answer, again, answer questions. And yeah, my website there, that's, otherwise you'll find me surfing hopefully this week off the coast of New York City, which is where I surf these days. So you could find me in the ocean. What's the surf like there? find me surfing hopefully this week off the coast of New York City, which is where I surf these days. So you could find me in the ocean.

What's the surf like there? It's punchy, fast and often not great. Yeah. I grew up doing that. Yeah. Cause I grew up with the California beaches. And it's great, but they're not, I'm getting too old. It's hard now. So, I'm not doing it anymore. I decided I'm going to start bodyboarding or surfing or something. Cause I, yeah, I'm just not built for it anymore. I never thought about East coast surfing. It seems like that is like a level up to do that.

That's really funny because to me, California is like the, uh, the Holy grail and something I've forever been quite frightened of doing is surfing California, even though I've surfed my whole life. Depends on the beach. All right. Anyway, sorry for that little diversion game. We want to thank our sponsors today. That's our friends over at Vitaly, Indeed, and ZocDoc. If you are a deep focus subscriber, stick around. We're going to bug Bob and find out about his productivity stack, so we can't wait to do that. That's the ad-free extended version of the show. Otherwise, you can find us over at to bug Bob and find out about his productivity stack, so we can't wait to do that. That's the ad-free extended version of the show.

Otherwise, you can find us over at relay.fm slash focused. Thanks a lot, and we'll see you next time.