I’ve had a pretty good run for January on Deep Work. But February will not be so kind.

This upcoming week I’m going to be training some new I-Corps instructors at GW, so I’ll be working most of the day Wednesday through Friday.

It doesn’t rule out doing any Deep Work on those days, but it’s not going to make it easy. So there’s really Monday and Tuesday only this week.

The week after that I’m joining my wife in Hawaii for her meetings and some… potentially Deep Work, perhaps. We’ll see how it goes.

And the week after that I’m doing more work on the I-Corps trainees as well as returning from Hawaii via SF for a couple of days.

You get the idea.

So I have the same agenda — flesh out the 7 Hard Problems chapter on “Individual Wealth and Commonwealth” — but it’s going to go more slowly than January. I’ll be lucky to finish the Piketty book this week.

And what about the week just past, you may well ask?

Last week I had a big diversion. I immersed myself in the Zettelkasten technique for note-taking.

Huh?

Well, I’ve been unhappy with the quality of my notes for 7 Hard. And the unhappiness came to a head maybe the week before last.

Coincidentally — I think it was from Lifehacker or some other PIM-ish source — I ran across a book about “Smart Notes”, by Sonke Ahrens.  Needless to say, I bought it at once and dug right in.

Ahrens does not have the most straightforward presentation of his subject, but the book eventually covers a note-taking system of stunning interest. I devoted most of the Deep Work last week to grokking it and only on Friday did I take a pass on continuing my Piketty note-taking with the new system.

I will report more as I get more familiarity with it.

(Cool aside: I was googling around for Zettelkasten and found the name of an academic friend who was YouTube-ing as an expert on some of the Zettlekasten software. I viewed his videos with great interest. Nick Cifuentes-Goodbody, thanks!)