The Gestalt Garden

Overview

The Overview shows the main knowledge structures of the Gestalt Garden. If this is your first time exploring my ideas and reflections, this is the ideal starting point :-)

You can also explore the Gestalt Garden through the lists of posts, notes, and tags.

Table of contents

1. Productivity

(Personal) productivity is the ability to achieve your goals effectively and efficiently.

2. Creativity

Creativity is the ability to do novel, valuable work with outcomes that are hard to measure and that doesn’t follow a set of predefined steps.

3. Writing

Writing is the ability to convey knowledge in writing and, moreover, to think through writing.

4. Zettelkasten

The Zettelkasten method allows you to create an integrated thinking environment. But unlike other methods, it not only copes well with complexity: it thrives on it.

5. My creative projects

The goal of this section is to show you the creative projects that I have developed (or am developing) publicly at the Gestalt Garden.

Apoptosis, my collection of short stories

“Apoptosis” is my first collection of short stories. I already have all the texts written, and now I’m editing and formatting them. It’s a creative project with a lot of meaning for me.

List of short stories published to date:

You can read more about this project on the following pages:

Work Diary, the reading habit

The “Work Diary” is a series of articles where I share what it’s like to work on a creative project.

I started this diary with the idea of writing a short book about the reading habit. Along the way, I greatly improved how I read and also learned quite a bit about two note-taking methods: Zettelkasten and Build a Second Brain.

But something unexpected happened: I discovered that—counterintuitively—reading more does not necessarily mean generating more value in your work. Reading is important (it’s a requirement to be able to generate value), but it’s not the activity that generates value itself. What really creates value (and is the most limiting factor) is your ability to integrate what you read into your life.

Because of this revelation, I feel I don’t need to keep improving my reading habit. Currently (2025-05-20), other parts of my workflow are more limiting, so it makes more sense to prioritize those instead. What has happened in this project is a common pattern in creative work: you start with a problem (how to improve the reading habit), look for a solution, and during the process discover the problem doesn’t actually need to be solved.

The only thing left to do in this project is to write an article explaining this revelation, and once that’s done, the project will have fulfilled its original purpose :-)

You can read all the diary entries here (however most of the articles are only in spanish).