I cut down the number of nodes because I felt like the project would be too tedious at scale, and having a handful of very fruitful nodes would make it harder to show if the rest of them weren’t doing anything.
I’m not sure I would say the method’s lost its novelty for me, since it’s more of an afterthought to note-taking usually, but I’ve found it unrewarding to look at this web of concepts swimming together and not get any eurekas out of it. It’s possible that cutting the chaff out might produce a tighter web that makes more meaningful connections, but this seems like a very daunting housekeeping project if I can really do it at all.
Drawing connections between Zettelkasten-style atomic ideas is better to me than full-throated complicated ones, and that’s where I’d apply the virtue of narrowness—if you try to smash whole fields together you get new fields less often than smashing ideas together generates new ideas.
I cut down the number of nodes because I felt like the project would be too tedious at scale, and having a handful of very fruitful nodes would make it harder to show if the rest of them weren’t doing anything.
I’m not sure I would say the method’s lost its novelty for me, since it’s more of an afterthought to note-taking usually, but I’ve found it unrewarding to look at this web of concepts swimming together and not get any eurekas out of it. It’s possible that cutting the chaff out might produce a tighter web that makes more meaningful connections, but this seems like a very daunting housekeeping project if I can really do it at all.
Drawing connections between Zettelkasten-style atomic ideas is better to me than full-throated complicated ones, and that’s where I’d apply the virtue of narrowness—if you try to smash whole fields together you get new fields less often than smashing ideas together generates new ideas.