Andy's Working Notes and Me

The public working notes of Andy Matuschak are a big inspiration for me when it comes to my digital garden. You can see, though, that Andys main goal is coming up with novel, groundbreaking ideas – as he is moving at the knowledge frontier of his field.

This is not my aspiration, at least for now. My personal goal is to first build up, map out, solidify my knowledge and build scaffolding for personal insights.

This is why my approach differs from Andys. In his taxonomy of note types he writes that, for him, "the practice of writing and revising notes is, at its core, about trying to move up [a] rough ladder" of increasingly sophisticated note types. It is evident that the public notes we can see are pretty high up there, pretty refined, information dense, clear. This must be the tip of an iceberg of invisible notes that keep it afloat.

In my own digital garden, at least in this stage, more of this iceberg will be out in the open. That means more information, more context, and also less focus and conciseness. I am aiming for notes that are atomic, i.e. about one thing, but I won't neccessarly be short and to the point about this thing. I might collect information relating to it, link more and more blog posts, add quotes, etc. about it. In puristic Zettelkasten ideology this is information that belongs to separate "literature notes", but I'm neither a purist nor an ideologist.