Andrei's blog

MetaLearn: Zettelkasten

Index

  1. Pre-Story
  2. ZettelKasten <-- skip here
  3. Resources
  4. Software

Pre Story

Taking notes, managing task lists, and keeping calendars while staying organized is a universal problem, that many are trying to solve.

I can list more then 10 note taking/calendar/TODO list apps from the top of my head:

The list goes on, and on, and on.

Productivity Apps are heavily advertised, promising huge increases in work, learning, and organization speed. The scope of those "Productivity apps" goes far beyond note taking and towards communication apps like Slack or collaboration platforms like Miro.

Many Note taking apps are paid, have flaws, are hard to sync with each other etc. Because nearly every large company releases their own note taking app that work well within their own ecosystem, there is a severe lack of standards.

People really like wasting their time changing apps, software and using software for things it isn't intended for.

In an ideal world, there are standardized protocols that allow any app to seamlessly send information to any other, and there are syncing services capable of keeping all the apps across all devices on the same page at all times.

Unfortunately this is far from reality and the internet is a patchwork of plugins and APIs that are spread across platforms and blocked on every other step by a paywalled service or terribly designed apps.

Ironically, one of the most successful "productivity madmen" lived in the 20th century, and did his work on paper. The name is Niklas Luhmann and his method was Zettelkasten.

ZettelKasten

TLDR: Always make notes, make short notes, link the notes, tag the notes, index the notes.

Zettelkasten ("slip box") is designed primarily for writers, who have a lot of thoughts and information to organize. It was used way before Niklas Luhmann, but he is the most famous practitioner (he published 70 books and piles of articles).

If you are hooked, please skip this Blog post, and head straight for the resources below. You might want to invest 2-3 hours researching and looking at examples before "really getting into it."

Resources:

The Zettelkasten is supposed to act as a "second mind" that handles the memorization of information. Knowledge is stored as a network of connected thoughts and associations. The Zettelkasten tries to replicate this.

Every zettel (note/slip) is a thought or fact. Every note has an ID (number) that can be used to link it. If you want to link 2 notes together (because they are related) you write their IDs on one another, and put them back.

Later, when looking up a note, you can check all linked notes and maybe find something useful for whatever you are doing. Reminder: Zettelkasten is for Writers, who need to organize and connect large amounts of scattered information for their work.

This has an advantage over a traditional folder hierarchy note book, because notes from different categories can be connected and linked, this prevents tunnel vision and can lead to a better understanding of both topics.

Technically a Zettelkasten is a mess of numbered notes. In order to find an initial note to explore the link connections from it, Luhmann used indexes with keywords, as well as a more sophisticated ID system, which allowed easier navigation of the Zettelkasten.

Modern technology makes organizing notes easier. Lookup is faster, and the indexing is done for you. Most Zettelkasten software will support tags, folders and backlinks. There are also endless tools to take notes on the phone from books, videos, podcasts and photos.

Conclusion

I highly recommend checking out the Resources I linked, as they contain more clear and detailed explanations. And remember not to waste to much time in the settings and configurations 2-3 hours max.

- very qualified zettelkasten expert

Edit

I realized that this is THE topic I virtually know nothing about. As it turns out, the modern zettelkasten madmen (they call it "digital gardens" now) already explained everything I described here 10 times over at 10 times the quality.

Click Here: scroll to the very bottom to go through some examples and maybe try finding your way back to this blog at some point. (I have just realized I have been just scrolling for an hour.)

You don't even need to make your own digital garden, I can assure you someone already did the work for you somehow at some point.