This year, I read Justice for Hedgehogs1 by Ronald Dworkin. In philosophy, ethics was always my favorite topic. In fact, I always was into most of the topics of practical philosophy. I heard about the book a few times already and I thought it’d be great to extract knowledge from a contemporary author’s work for my Zettelkasten. Also, people said Dworkin is kind of resurrecting a Socratic take on morality, so I was intrigued from the start.
These are the posts so far in chronological order:
I create a plan and read the book: skim for basic understanding first, take Zettel notes from your first findings, then read selectively for deeper understanding.
I plan to write a long term paper at University later this year. It’s going to be about the book Justice for Hedgehogs by Ronald Dworkin, and I’ll be able to mostly work with this single source exclusively. Consequently, there won’t be much additional research. How does the Knowledge Cycle apply if you read a book and don’t do research? I invite you to take the “Summer Knowledge Challenge” and find out with me.
It’s important to manage working time. Managing to-do lists is just one part of the equation to getting things done when it comes to immersive creative work where we need to make progress for a long time to complete the project. To ensure we make steady progress, we need to stay on track and handle interruptions and breaks well. A short Knowledge Cycle will help to get a full slice of work done multiple times a day, from research to writing. This will help staying afloat and not drown in tasks.
There’s a tendency in all of us to gather useful stuff and feel good about it. To collect is a reward in itself. As knowledge workers, we’re inclined to look for the next groundbreaking thought, for intellectual stimulation: we pile up promising books and articles, and we store half the internet as bookmarks, just so we get the feeling of being on the cutting edge.