The Idea Compass

is a method of notetaking created by Fei-Ling Tseng in her article The essence of the Zettelkasten method, demystified and explained further in the talk The Compass of Zettelkasten Thinking .

The core concept is how to expand and explore an idea by having a formalized "compass" framework for connecting and linking ideas.

You start with a particular idea and ask yourself specific questions corresponding to the four cardinal directions.

so here we go. This is The Idea Compass. It's a systematic way to survey the context of an idea and you may notice there are some very strong geographic terminologies being used here i've had i found it very useful to use analogies for note taking and how to approach note taking

Atomic Idea

because note taking is a rather abstract activity

but when someone says, "Okay, I'm gonna put you in the middle of a landscape that you don't know, but you understand you're the point you're standing at, and you're trying to understand the lay of the Land, what do you do?" Well you Look Around right you use and you may even Use a Compass to orient yourself so you know which direction you're looking at. That's basically the idea of The Idea Compass.

you may have seen this little box of like very boxy navigation from one Neighborhood to another in wikipedia it's really interesting how they distilled what is usually like a very influxed geographical situation and they've put it in a three by three grid so you can like go up you can go sideways like that is a really interesting um like a minimal uh navigational system kind of like if you're playing mario on the game boy or something like that.

so the compass uh goes from north, west, south and east and these are like the major themes uh that um starts with north. so north, the North Star like the guiding principle what is upstream of this idea and the questions that you see listed beneath here are the ones that i created for myself

but really you can create questions that help prompt you better

uh these are all here you know we'll share resources afterwards you can copy this and kind of like make it your own but i want to tell you that like this is not like the be all and all the perfect system as it stands on the slide they're meant to be toyed around with tinkered and personalized

okay so north is whatever is upstream

West is what reinforces this idea what is similar to this idea [⇒ Similarity]

South is what exists downstream of the idea and where can this idea lead to

East is sort of opposite of west in that instead of reinforcing it it's transforming the idea so what competes with x what is the opposite of x but also what could supercharge x and make it 10 times better 100 times better

so think of these as conversation starters for engaging with an idea

⇒ Chinese Story Structure

and now this is what both vicky and i have found is that using the structure of the compass we're able to gain more clarity into how we should be thinking about the Zettelkasten Method um and we're less lost we're less wondering like is this is this the right thing we feel like we're gaining traction when we're working with our notes and that is incredibly exciting