There’s a whole bunch of publications and videos about note making systems, all too often taking Luhmann’s slip box as cue, singular example, or even as note making’s furthest historical horizon. So with some hesitation I approached Bob Doto‘s ‘A System for Writing’ as it joins that list of resources. I originally postponed buying it, but it came well recommended in my PKM network. I’m glad I did pick it up in the end as I do appreciate the work.

The book has three sections of three chapters. Part one about making notes, part two about making connections between them, and part three about writing various types of outputs. It’s this third section that provides the title for the book, and it’s also the part that I took the most from.

The first two parts about making notes and linking them, while providing me with little new insight, do make some valuable points that deserve more repetition. It puts emphasis on how your notes are centered on personal knowledge, on the meaning you yourself put into it and derive from it, by linking. Doto also does something that other works on this topic do very little of: showing actual notes in various stages of creation. When I read Ahrens’ Smart Notes book, I disliked it was all tell and no show. Doto weaves his showing and telling together, and that makes it a much more useful practice oriented text. Doto also made me for the first time see value in the alphanumeric system he uses in note titles (similar to Luhmann), as a good indicator of which parts of your collection are more developed than others. He uses that as potential points of entry for writing.

The part about writing is very useful I think. What is your Zettelkasten for? Most other works focus on getting stuff into a Zettelkasten, and often don’t bother to ask to what purpose. Bob Doto puts that purpose front and center.

He presents his writing system as an active practice, in parallel to and integrated with his note making. Writing includes all forms of it. Small messages on social media, answers on fora, blog posts, and longer texts like articles, essays and books. Seeing it as a spectrum where one type of text can inform the creation of another and can form a cycle, rather than as discrete standalone artefacts is connected to his perspective as written output being part of an ongoing conversation with different types of readership. Writing as inputs into conversation, with readers, other authors, historic authors. This chimes closely with how Kalir and Garcia in their book Annotation see annotation as conversation and social interaction just as much. This appeals to me, my blog has always been about conversation, but also provides a perspective to make the threshold for writing much lower. Writers block sounds hard to overcome, but who ever has conversation block? This section to me is stronger in comparison I think with Ahrens’ book, again beause of show not just tell, but also because it doesn’t wave away details where Smart Notes in my memory more suggests it’ll happen automagically.

In his system for writing the author’s emphasis on managing the writing process rather than the writing speaks to me. Also he shows how he scales the level of management with the scale of the writing (with tweets and books at opposite ends of the scale). Day logs and creative logs are his tools in doing that. Using those and his tasks oriented management approach allows him to work on multiple writing efforts in parallel, and spend time where his energy takes him. In contrast to how I may have multiple draft texts in parallel rather than writing efforts, and then usually have no way to enter any one of them easily to work on it. Doto’s described system provides a ratchet effect to his writing. Such ratcheting I have and experience in my note making and every day usage of my notes, but not yet in my writing. I will incorporate that in my own practice.

In the past 10 days after reading I found one suggestion extremely valuable already. Not in the context of writing, but in the context of following my energy and in switching tasks in my current burned-out state of mind. Interstitial journaling, a term and suggestion from Tony Stubblebine , is about writing down what you did after a task, how it felt or went, plus what you intend to do next.
I have done more things on more topics and feeling energy rather than losing it in the past week when using interstitial journaling to track and follow my energy. Making an entry facilitates the switch between tasks, because it is already part of that switch, rather than logging as the end of just the previous task. I have a habit already of adding to my Day log note after each task and appointment, and the Day log is my key jumping-off point for all my note making. Over time it has mostly become a pretty dry and sparse log however. Did this, 10 am meeting X etc. Interstitial journaling lets me pay more attention to what it means to me and what next. My Day logs in the past week have become more verbose, and provide more meaning as well as starting points and new branches. It reinforces the ratchet effect of my notes in a qualitative new way for me by incorporating my emotions and in the moment perceptions.

Wayfinding, The Art and Science of How We Find and Lose Our Way. This is a fascinating book. It is fun to read but also highly relevant to me in multiple ways.

Wayfinding, orienting ourselves, is an old skill providing an evolutionary advantage. Our brains are evolved for it with cells that fire in distinct places, to mark boundaries, for head directions, in recognition of landmarks or in grids at different levels of resolution. They allow us to build cognitive maps of our world. How we navigate and what happens when we get lost and fear grips us impacting quality of decisions is however just the beginning.

The book brings together recent research on the connection between our navigational skills, cognition of abstract concepts and mental decline due to aging. Reading it renewed my urgency to do more with Systems Convening in our work, helped me think about my mental health, and about physical fitness w.r.t. aging and dementia, something that runs in the family.

I picked this book up last May in an independent book store in Utrecht, Steven Sterk. Burn-out and depression are akin to being lost, and it’s why this book jumped out at me browsing the book store.

Read it over summer, and have now finished transcribing my annotations from the many post-its I added to the book’s pages. Some 6000 words in total.


The book Wayfinding next to a large pile of post-its with annotations that I removed from the book after transcribing them into my notes.


Yesterday we visited the Centre Pompidou in Metz, which we greatly enjoyed.

As usual the exit was through the gift shop, and there I came across Steal Like an Artist, the 10th anniversary updated edition from during the pandemic, by Austin Kleon.

I have read the original and own it. But when you come across the work of someone, who like Austin Kleon has been in my feedreader for a very long time, and especially if you’re in a museum like Centre Pompidou, how could I not pick up another copy?

I re-read it yesterday and today, and in my current burned out state some of the familiar advice resonates differently this time. What are the things that give me a sense of wonder, what strikes me as beautiful? What and who do I choose to let influence me? Time to recalibrate and up my game in stealing like an artist.

Jo Van Gogh-Bonger, the widow of Vincent van Gogh’s brother Theo decides to make Vincent world famous, using the many paintings she has left after her husband died. In this day and age Gina, a student, traces her work and story. A calmly paced story, so calm it felt as if the first two thirds were an introduction to the actual story. Yet a story that gets stronger towards the end. Read with much pleasure.

I bought this book by Swiss author Simone Meier last month in Zürich, when it had just been published.


Les pissenlits, Vincent van Gogh 1889, as we saw it in Winterthur the week I bought Die Entflammten about how Jo Van Gogh-Bonger shaped his legacy.

A 2015 short story of first contact. An alien race, detected by their signal emissions is visited by a two person mission. The aliens are humanoid in shape, but have but a single eye. The cyclopes choose their leaders based on the adversity and grief they’ve suffered. Tear tracks are taken as a sign of wisdom. Bought and read because I enjoyed Olders 2016 Infomocracy trilogy enormously. There is a new set of Holmesian short books by her set on Jupiter, not sure if I’m interested in those.

A fun, beautiful and moving novel that I enjoyed mostly in one sitting.
Starting in the nineties, that time when computers and digitisation were common enough to be open to many smart newcomers but still rare enough and simple enough to quickly get a grasp of the field, it stretches to present day. This allows a reflection from our current cultural perspectives.
Myself I was a few years earlier than this book is set (the book is set in second half of the nineties, with me gaining internet access in 1989 at university, and playing the games that got released in the first half of the nineties), but enough overlap. The protagonists are gamers and game builders. The fictional games described are believable enough to feel you may have seen them at the time or wish to play them. Gaming, early internet era, depression, grief, the topics are very relatable to me and carry enough echoes for me from that same era to strongly resonate with.
Recommended.