> [!tldr] Some thoughts on the effects of having and maintaining [[My Notes]] Having these notes is a good thing. It has made me more knowledgeable and more confident in my knowledge. I draw connections between things constantly. Many times now when I have any sort of deep conversation a relevant note will come to mind. This serves as pre-structured thought that I can scaffold onto for whatever extemporaneous reason I need. It has the effect of making me sound smarter than I am... or perhaps just **making me smarter** than I would be otherwise. It has also proven to be as helpful (or perhaps more so) than my [[PDW|Data Journal]] at helping me develop a robust sense of *self-understanding*. I did not have much of an "aim" when I started these notes. I started capturing interesting things. After a while, the broad strokes of my interests emerged from the aggregation of [[Atomic Notes]] on the topic. Speaking of [[Atomic Notes]], [[My Notes are Atomic-ish]]. They are [[Slip-Box Method]]-*inspired*, but don't really function the way the true "Zettelkasten" would. Niklas Luhmann's notes were ordered into branching trees, and much smaller than this one I'm writing now. In essence they were a couple sentence long building blocks. Paragraphs that could be traversed to make fairly coherent stories of themselves. My notes are also building blocks, but probably too large to benefit from stringing together in Luhmann's [[Hierarchy|Hierarchical]] way. They are more like pages of a book. Well they are like little one man [[Wikipedia]] articles... because that's what they are. In constellation, though, I believe they may be able to sum to a whole greater than their parts alone. Perhaps this approach is "less ideal" for turning out books or some other [[Use Case Diagrams|use case]]s I'm not aware of... but I'm not one to blow up a good thing in search of a perfect thing. [[Perfection is Dangerous]]. These are producing [[Empirical]] value. Having notes makes reading and thinking a different experience. I write constantly. More so than any other descriptor, I am probably mostly a "writer". **** # More ## Source - experience