“Looks like an alien abduction”–were the first words out of my mouth as I tumbled into the Pantheon, gaping at the triangle of light streaming down through the oculus, my mouth hanging open. One hand in my pocket, the other clad in a black leather glove, holding onto a Field Notes notebook, I wandered around trying to put into words the feeling of lightness and awe and the smell of roasted chestnuts wafting into the Grant Rotunda through the open doors. This is the picture imprinted in some corner of my brain, of my first trip to Rome. Anthony Doerr’s memoir Four Seasons in Rometook me right back to that place.
His memoir is set in the year Bush got elected a second time. The same year in which Pope John Paull II passed away. There is an entire chapter(or maybe two) dedicated to the biggest funeral the world has ever seen. Pantheon is a recurring character in the book, where even objects, streets and places have a vitality breathed into them by Doerr’s lyrical, anthropomorphic writing. You can picture the thick heat of summer, synchronized ballet of starling murmurations, taste the fresh tomatoes and olives.
I have been a fan of Doerr’s writing style from the first page of Cloud Cuckoo Land. In this memoir he writes about the year he spent in Rome on a writing fellowship at the American Academy in Rome, while living in the Monteverde neighborhood and working on a book set in France during World War II, which I’m guessing is the Pulitzer prize winning All the Light We Cannot See(it is not explicit). Doerr and Shauna, his wife, are also in the throes of early parenthood—their twins are 3 months old. The book is at the same time a love letter to Rome as it is the trials and tribulations of caring for infants round the clock – the sleep deprivation, overwhelm, the guilt when one partner ends up with the bulk of child rearing responsibilities.
You are granted front row seats to Doerr’s writing process. His astute observation of everyday Romans, their customs and idiosyncrasies. How he ekes out short flashes of deep work between parenting and reading works of Pliny. Rome pulses, throbs, flows around you with the cast of characters brought alive by Doerr’s writing – the watchman of the Academy building, the shopkeeper with whom he trades in halting Italian, the warm old ladies who dote over the twin boys, Tacy the nurturing babysitter who herself is an immigrant in Italy, away from home and her own son. By the end of the book I yearned to know these people some more–didn’t want the book to end.
My craving for Rome unsatiated, I continued on to other books set in the city. Jhumpa Lahiri, the Pulitzer prize winning author of Namesake and Interpreter of Maladies lives in Rome and now writes exclusively in Italian. She is a superwoman as far as I am concerned—to gain mastery in a new language and to write such beautiful works in it is a feat I cannot comprehend. Lahiri’s Roman Stories is chock full of poignant stories of immigrant experience. It makes you question the concept of belonging and home. My favorite is “The Steps” – a public staircase that means different things to different people. It becomes a totem of the human condition.
I followed this up with In Other Words, Lahiri’s memoir that spans her life until now–Italy the connecting thread. Ann Goldstein translated it into English, she also translated Elena Ferrante’s works. In Other Words intricately lays out Lahiri’s Italian education. She makes you ponder about the meaning of one’s home country—is language and love not enough? Unrequited love is a looming presence — the one sided love between Lahiri and Italy, the place she longs to call home, though it keeps her at arm’s length. Her longing for acceptance is wistful, palpable.
On Rome – “Too much beauty, too much input; if you’re not careful, you can overdose”.
On Writing – “And doesn’t a writer do the same thing? Isn’t she knitting together scraps of dreams? She hunts down the most vivid details and links them in sequences that will let a reader see, smell, and hear a world that seems complete in itself; she builds a stage set and painstakingly hides all the struts and wires and nail holes, then stands back and hopes whoever might come to see it will believe.”
Last week I spent 20 out of 40 of my working hours talking to people — in 1:1s, in team meetings, in brainstorming sessions. I also read 8 different tech blogs, 2 open source documentations, 10 tweet threads, 3 StackOverflow questions, 10 pull requests, 2 design docs. All of this in one week. By the end of the week I may have discussed some 20 different things prompting 100 different streams of thoughts. But if you ask me to recall all of it now, sadly, I will not be able to.
This is unsurprising because our brain does not have infinite storage. Memories are formed when neural pathways are traversed frequently. Thinking multiple disparate thoughts does not have that effect. In his book Deep Work, Cal Newport talks about the importance of focussing without distraction to train those neural pathways and create a deep understanding in a particular domain. This means long focussed hours, without distraction and context switch. Context switching leads to something called as “attention residue”. This happens when people are unable to fully disconnect from a previous task before starting another. This leads to some carryover thinking from the previous task and takes away from the focus that should be given to the current task.
There is an endless array of productivity tools that help you organize your calendar to get more focus time or ones that will help you manage your meetings or set reminders and what not. But what has been life changing for me both in terms of making me a better writer as well as a better Staff level engineer has been this technique called “Zettelkasten”
Zettelkasten is German for “slip-box”. It is a system of taking notes and cataloging them such that ideas and thoughts emerge out of it like magic! It turns the process of writing on its head. Most of us approach writing by picking a topic first, researching the topic second and writing third. The Zettelkasten method encourages you to always be in research mode. To make notes about what you read, learn, discuss and cataloging it around topics. You don’t need to research the topic because you already did that during your day to day readings and discussions.
So how do you go about it? It’s pretty simple really(so simple that it is easy to overlook)
Every time you read a book, a blog, a technical design doc— make short notes! Not only when reading, every time you have a discussion, listen to a podcast, have a team meeting — make notes. . Let’s call these Rough Notes. These can be really short notes, scribbles on a napkin even, something to help you recall the material.
At the end of the day, go through your notes and produce a paragraph about your own take on the material. Let’s call this Master Note. This is your personal opinion, takeaway etc. Write this paragraph on a new sheet of paper.
To this add a Reference section and link the original material here. If it is a book — add a link to the book. If it is a podcast — a link to the podcast. If this is about a conversation, then context about the meeting — who were the participants, what was the topic of discussion, where was it held. Why is this important? Later on when you combine several master notes to come up with your own written material, you won’t have to search for references at that time. References are available inside the master notes ready for use.
At the top of your master note add a number. This should be unique to each master note and increasing in time. This number will be used to reference your note from the catalog system and should also provide time based ordering. This is important because this ordering helps you see how your thoughts and ideas evolve over time. You can choose a timestamp or a human readable date for this. Let’s call this the Index. The index helps you reference your master notes in this system.
Now comes the crucial part. After you write your master note, think about the overarching themes or topics this master note could be related to. Think hashtags. What are some hashtags you will add to this? These are the Boxes in your slip-box. These can be existing boxes or new boxes. These boxes become entries in your catalog system(the slip-box). A master note may belong to several boxes. This is where your index comes in handy comes in handy. Instead of copying each note to add to different boxes, you simply make copies of the index and add the copies to each box it belongs to. Keep the master note in a separate box from where you can retrieve it by the index When adding an index card to a box you can choose a position relative to other cards to add additional ordering.
Over time some boxes in the slip-box will become heavier than others. These are the more popular topics. Once a box reaches a critical mass of index cards, it can be potentially turned into a written material. Depending on the amount of material at hand — it could become a blog, a research paper, a design proposal or a book. Your notes are organized, references are already linked and timeline is codified. With some minimal editing effort this can be a good written piece.
“It could become a blog, a research paper, a design proposal or a book.”
Why I love this?
Writing frees up your brain for more thoughts: By writing things down as you read, listen or perform a task, you can achieve closure. This reduces the amount of “attention residue” that may seep into your next task as you context switch. At the same time you don’t have to worry about forgetting things, because you already wrote it down.
Writing forces you to clarify your thought process: If you have ever written a technical design doc(TDD), you can understand this feeling. As you start writing the TDD you’re forced to think about finer details of the design. It forces you to explore questions you otherwise would not have. Very often it also makes very clear what is doable and what is not. This is why we were tasked with book reports in school. It is an important tool to aid reading comprehension. By writing what we read we solidify our comprehension of the material.
Never miss useful stuff by always being in “research mode”: When you tackle writing by picking a topic first, and researching second, you focus only on things related to the topic when you are researching. This means you end up missing all the other useful things in the research material not related to your topic. Besides, picking a topic first leads to pre formed opinions. Whatever we read next often serves that opinion. This has the potential to introduce bias as we tend to find things that support our view. When we read things without an agenda and make notes as we read, we treat every tidbit of information with equal importance. We don’t know it yet but we’re researching multiple topics at the same time. This is very powerful!
Never lose your notes!: How many times have you taken notes in a notebook never to find it again. I have stacks of notebooks lying under my desk that I have never so much as flipped through in years. I may not even comprehend what was written by me after all this time. By cataloging your notes you can not only find it later, but also use it for creating useful content.
“When we read things without an agenda and make notes and catalog them as we read, we treat every tidbit of information with equal importance. We’re researching multiple topics at the same time…we just don’t know it yet”
The concept of slip-box is great! But how do I use this with digital tools?
Great question! I mean who buys beautiful Moleskine paper notebooks anymore(**wink wink**). All jokes aside, I still use small notebooks, but only for making rough notes. This is because I’m faster at scribbling into a paper notebook than typing on my computer(I get distracted when the squiggly lines appear). For my master notes I mainly use two tools:
Obsidian is a neat tool that keeps all your notes locally on your machine. You can use the backlinks and forward links to create virtual “boxes” in your slip-box. Obsidian also generates a neat graph where nodes in the graph are topics(boxes in the slip-box). Over time some nodes become bigger — these are your more popular topics. One big plus for Obsidian is that its local first and open source. You’re not locked into to a service or cloud storage. You can also add plugins to add more functionality.
More recently however, I started using Notion for everything from making daycare lists, TODOs, shopping lists etc. Notion has several templates you can use for basically anything. There is even a template for Zettelkasten. When you create new pages using this template it generates a UID for it which is basically like the index card I described above. There is a section where you can add “Tags”. These are the boxes in your slip-box. You can also group these notes by tags to find topics.
Notion is free for personal use. I like the simple interface and the fact that I can access it from any device very easily.
That is all folks! As always feedback is welcome. Let me know if you found this useful. Toodles!
Anderson, Michael & Bjork, Robert & Bjotk, Elizabeth. (1994). Remembering Can Cause Forgetting: Retrieval Dynamics in Long-Term Memory. Journal of experimental psychology. Learning, memory, and cognition. 20. 1063–87. 10.1037/0278–7393.20.5.1063.
