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.