Welcome to Verstreuen—meaning “to scatter”—where I unpack the ideas I’ve collected this week in my 🗃️ Zettelkasten, “note box,” personal knowledge management system. Here, I’ll share the highlights, insights, and stories I find interesting—and think you will too!

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🗃️ This Week’s Highlights

This week's notes come from 81 new additions to the Zettelkasten—here’s the three that stood out most to share with you:

🟨 Defining patience as a virtue

🟦 Why real improvement often starts with subtraction

🟥 Boundaries as Scaffolding

Growing up, I was told “patience is a virtue,” but the phrase always felt vague, almost passive. Was I just supposed to wait idly, trusting the process holding onto my cards until the moment was right?

I read the 48 laws of power a couple years ago and have been in the process of transferring the notes into my zettelkasten when this idea stood out as a potential answer to the question of patience — not a passive state, but a coiled spring, primed for action.

This kind of restraint-based patience made sense to me. It’s something i’ve felt before, late at night playing chess with roommates, the discipline of holding onto a move, the tension as they play their next piece and you wait to spring your trap — waiting for the exact right moment to act from a position of control.

But the more I sat with this model, the more I sensed something was missing.

There are moments in life when we’re not holding power that still require a form of patience — not sitting in readiness, but pushing through uncertainty. That’s when I began to see a second kind of patience: endurance-based patience — less about striking, more about pushing through. Not waiting for a trigger to act, but staying committed through long, often unrewarded action, trusting that the outcome will eventually emerge.

The truth is, patience isn't one thing — it's a spectrum.
At one end, you have restraint: the patience of strength, waiting for a clear signal to act.
At the other, you have endurance: the patience of persistence, pressing forward even when no signal comes.

Both are vital — but they demand different kinds of inner discipline.

Restraint requires the strength to hold back when action would feel easier.
Endurance demands the strength to press on when quitting would feel justified.

Understanding these boundaries reframes patience not as a passive virtue, but as a dynamic tension between action and stillness — one that demands constant awareness to stay aligned to its strongest form.

Patience, then, isn’t just about "waiting well." It’s about knowing whether you are waiting for a moment — or working toward an outcome.

It’s about choosing your mode of discipline: holding back — or pushing forward.

The mastery of patience is not the mastery of waiting.
It’s the mastery of action —
the discipline to pause and reassess when endurance turns into blindness,
and the courage to act when restraint hardens into fear.

—🗃️—

I've always been a tech person — someone who wants everything on the computer. Especially when technology gives you more than you put in, like a budgeting app that tracks and analyzes your spending highlighting trends you’d never spot on your own..

But for some things, technology detracts more than it adds.

Take habit tracking.

I’ve tried almost every app out there — the ones that build your streaks, send you reminders, draw fun charts over time.
But no matter how polished they were, I always slipped.
The notifications became background noise. The charts stopped mattering. The habits faded.

Then, by chance, I won a tiny journal at an event — a simple gridded notebook.
It struck me that it could work better than any app had.

I set it up manually:
Sticky notes to create sections for daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, and yearly habits.
The pages fill visually, just like an app.
There are streaks, visible in ink.
And the notebook sits in plain sight, a physical reminder with no pop-up alerts — and no easy distraction into a dozen other apps.

What’s missing are all the harmful elements the apps had quietly introduced:

• Notifications I could ignore.

• Analytics that turned focus into vanity metrics.

• A phone in my hand that hijacked my attention.

This notebook does one thing.
And so far, it’s doing it really well.

Improvement came not from adding more — but from removing what was quietly harming progress all along.

—🗃️—

I've always been a little too obsessed with perfect organization.
Neat lines.
Perfect categories.
Everything in its place.

But real life isn’t perfect.
Ideas shift. Priorities evolve. Complexity leaks across categories.

The longer I’ve spent building systems, the clearer it’s become:
Perfect categorization doesn't exist.

And worse — chasing it often damages clarity instead of supporting it.
It builds rigid structures that trap you inside yesterday’s map of the world.

I’ve felt it myself — spending hours designing the "perfect" folder structure, only to realize a few weeks later that the project had moved, the categories didn’t fit anymore, and I was stuck forcing new work into old boxes.

The system meant to help me move faster had become the thing slowing me down.

We tend to think of boundaries as walls between categories:
Hard, defensive, permanent.

But good boundaries aren’t walls.
They’re scaffolding — temporary structures to hold complexity just long enough to act.

• A projects early PMO that evolves as the team grows.

• A city’s zoning codes that shift with the neighborhood.

• An athlete’s training plan that adapts across seasons.

Scaffolding stabilizes — then steps aside.

Good systems know when to redraw the lines.
They know when to erase the walls.

The point isn’t perfect separation.
The point is temporary clarity.

Good system design doesn’t demand the world fit into static categories.
It creates, and then recreates, categories that move with the world.

• Tags instead of rigid folders.

• Living documents instead of frozen templates.

• Modular workflows instead of brittle pipelines.

Strong systems stay alive by staying flexible — by keeping clarity stronger than control.

Because the goal isn't to lock down complexity.
It's to keep seeing clearly enough to keep moving.

—🗃️—

Closing Thoughts

Across patience, subtraction, and system design, the pattern is the same:
Real strength comes not from forcing the world to match our plans, but from shaping ourselves to meet the world as it is.

Patience isn't passive — it's active focus inside uncertainty.
Subtraction isn't loss — it's strategic removal of what hurts progress.
Organization isn't rigidity — it's flexible clarity that adapts to real inputs.

In every case, growth comes from staying alive to change, not clinging to structure for its own sake.

The work is not to build perfect systems.
The work is to stay clear, stay adaptable, and keep moving forward — even as the lines shift under your feet.

Thanks for reading Verstreuen! 👋 Until next week -GH