224 - Zettelkasten as an Idea Tracker
You can think of the zettelkasten as an idea tracker. So for a graduate student, I think of three realms of knowledge that these ideas exist in. The zettelkasten is about tracking the knowledge existing in all three realms. First Realm + Second Realm = Third Ream.
The first realm is established knowledge. This means reading the works of your professors and their colleagues, laying out a map of what the established knowledge on a subject matter looks like.
The second realm is new information. Because creativity comes about from the interaction of your old knowledge with new knowledge, it is important to be taking notes on the new knowledge you purposely expose yourself to.
The third realm is your creative output. Creative Knowledge is the byproduct of mixing the former to realms. It is an important to track this information because it can help keep from retreading areas you’ve already explored. You can make more informed exploratory decisions by knowing where the dead ends have been.
Because our memory systems aren’t designed for the long term tracking of such information, it helps to have an external system that can track all the knowledge/information you are working with. This is why we have books. Books are a form of externalized memory. Zettelkasten is just another way of organizing and engaging with your externalized memory. It is also a way of more easily integrating others externalized memory (books written by others) into your own thinking (zettelkasten).