Work In Progress
Consuming And Processing Information
Exploring our relationship with new ideas and concepts.
Introduction
I think that a large portion of my life is consuming and processing information. Through sources like Hacker News, Reddit, YouTube and various books. I find that I could boil down a majority of my time to the consuming and not nearly enough time for the processing.
I want to further examine the relationship between consuming and processing information. I think that I spend far more time passively consuming vast ranges of information than I have the time to actually sit down and process. Which is a shame because there is so much I would like to have known.
Levels Of Processing
There are different levels of pondering thoughts, perspectives and ideas. The level of intensity is correlated with the time spent around the material, either passively or actively digesting it. How frequently you return to the idea over time also plays a role in the depth of processing.
Zettelkasten and Note taking
Over the course of a few years I built and maintained a Zettelkasten. Which is a essentially a personal wiki. The main idea was to make ideas as granular as possible, then link them to one another. The goal was to have these atomic ideas that would be connected, similar to a neuron structure.
The benefit of this system was a more flexible structure of storing and connecting ideas together. Linking ideas together was a way to force yourself to look for relationships between ideas and statements. This would potentially help with retrieving ideas, and coming up with new ones.
The Zettelkasten system is attributed to Niklas Luhmann[1]. Who had used a system of 90,000 note cards[2] which he had used to write more than 70 books and 400 scholarly articles[1]. (Zettlekasten is German for note box)
Additional sources of inspiration: [3] [4]
Information Maintenance
One of the things that was most difficult about this system was its maintenance.