For a number of reasons lately, I’ve been looking into the Zettelkasten method of knowledge management, which I’ll talk about at length in a future post.
One thing I want to highlight before I even get there, though, is just how daunting it is to get started.
It’s not even that the process of turning more temporary notes into your own synthesized ideas is that difficult to understand. It’s that a key step in the process, linking new ideas to previous ones, is frightening when you’re staring at a blank page.
Does everything have to be bottom up from new material? I do have some ideas floating around in my head, can I scaffold those first? Do I need to flag them to come back to later?
My inclination so far is to do the crappiest thing possible, and fix it later if I have to. Perfection in PKM is far more the problem than never creating and toying with ideas at all.
So here’s to diving into imperfection! After all, anything worth doing is worth doing poorly.