This connects to What is a Zettelkasten because I’ve realized that I’d fallen back to my old habits of collecting instead of connecting without realizing. I want to get back into the proper flow of things, but I find it difficult to “just sit down” and do Zettelkasten. Sitting in front of my laptop and coming into the vault with this mindset doesn’t really help me.
Instead, one reframe that has helped me do things is to “just start” (obvious, I know), but not necesesarily immediately start with the big thing or the big idea that’s paralyzing me to initiate in the first place. I’d feel this big ball of anxiety the first few minutes as I sit in front of the vault, but as I sit and voice this out in my daily journal, I start to think of “Okay, what can I do right now?”
Naturally, I’ll take inventory of all the things that I’d done just the day before, all the stuff that still needs to be done (I have a todo list), and then that will gently push me into the flow. I start by doing chores, you know how people say that if you’re having trouble starting, try cleaning or folding your laundry? I’ve never understood that until I found my own version in Zettelkasten.
It may be something small such as renaming a title, adding a tag to a note, or
sometimes writing a user command in Lua for obsidian.nvim because I’d been
thinking about adding this one functionality. These are some of the chore
equivalents for others’ “folding laundry”. I realize that the old strategy of
“just doing” things isn’t working as well anymore as the scope of the things I
do get bigger and bigger. For me personally, it’s about starting small and the
rest will follow.