Zettelkasten

Published

An analog note taking system that emphasizes connections between atomic ideas. First introduced by Niklas Luhmann.

Related:

  • Richard Hamming talked about the value of connecting disparate ideas to think creatively about problems.
  • Andy Matuschak uses a similar system and makes it available publicly on his website.
  • Luhmann’s essay on learning how to read talks about the demands on the reader to learn from ‘theoretical texts’ by uncovering what is important and connecting it to existing information.

See also:

  • Make Notes More Useful With Better Links

    Zettelkasten notes become more useful the better links you make between them. That’s because you want to find connections to things you did not expect, not what you already know (otherwise you would have gone directly there to begin with).

  • Personal Note Taking Practice

    Knowledge work processes should be accretive (rather than ephemeral or ad-hoc). For note-taking, adding new notes should make other notes more useful and the accumulated knowledge should lead to new connections and thereby new ideas.

  • Niklas Luhmann

    A sociologist famed for his prolific output–he wrote 70 books and 400 scholarly articles on a wide range of topics. He came up with the Zettelkasten system as a “second brain” to work through connections of ideas.

  • Querying Stats from Org-Roam

    You can run queries directly on the org-roam database directly (it’s just a sqlite database) to get interesting stats about your Zettelkasten.

  • Second Brain

    A tools for networked thought that allows the user to offload a process into something external to themselves. This augments one’s ability to do certain kinds of tasks. For example, a zettelkasten offloads the collection off ideas and their connections into ‘off-brain’ storage that can be queried later thereby removing the need to memorize and retain accumulated knowledge.

  • Zettelkasten Is a Mind Map Where Nodes Are Notes

    An easy way to explain a Zettelkasten system of taking notes would be to explain it as a mind map (connections between discrete concepts) combined with atomic notes (each note has a single topic). Rather than a node being a word or phrase as in a mind map, each node is a note.

  • How to Take Smart Notes (Literature Notes)

    A book by Sönke Ahrens about taking notes to improve productivity and writing which is incredibly convincing but extremely impractical in describing what to actually do.

  • Heterarchical Note Taking

    Notes can be organized and structured into heterarchies (nodes with multiple relationships without a strict hierarchy) by creating an entry note that encompasses other notes (a note of notes). In Zettelkasten, this is referred to as a ‘structure note’. This has the advantage of late binding, you don’t need to worry about the hierarchy of information up front and multiple associations can be created using the same notes (which would not be possible without duplication in a strictly hierarchical system).

  • The Mundaneum Was a Paper Internet

    In 1895, Paul Otlet and Henri La Fontaine built a paper internet with 18MM index cards affectionately referred to as the Mundaneum. They sought to catalog the world’s information (much like Google) but quickly ran into the physical limitations of such a thing. As more information was added, they realized the 15,000 drawers needed to hold all those index cards was never going to be enough.

  • Reflections on Writing 500 Notes

    I’ve now written 500 notes and roughly 84,000 words since May 25, 2020 in my Zettelkasten. Here are a few thoughts and observations.

  • Tools for Networked Thought

    Tools that enable connections between ideas and memories help to improve the growth of accumulated knowledge. These tools build a ‘knowledge graph’ that mirror the way the human brain functions and offer the possibility to query it in ways that we typically access knowledge and memories, by context and association.

  • AI for Notes

    Now that my Zettelkasten has over a thousand notes, I’d like to try to quite literally create the experience of a conversation with my second brain. The AI interface should be conversational rather than search queries. It should draw from the knowledge in my notes and respond in natural language. Finally, it should be useful in helping me make connections between ideas I hadn’t thought of before.

  • Digital Gardening Is a Grander Vision of Zettelkasten

    Digital gardening is a superset of Zettelkasten principles applied to public content. The ethos of gardening is more free form and doesn’t emphasize the experience of the visitor. The reader of a digital garden would benefit from Zettelkasten principles such as atomicity (one concept or idea per note). Content in digital gardens should be structured at the leaf nodes for a more useful visitor experience.

  • The Garden and the Stream

    Streams are a metaphor for the majority of the Internet we interact with today characterized by time-ordered events that require context to understand.

  • Elaboration Leads to Understanding

    An overlooked part of understanding information and not merely memorizing it, is to elaborate on the meaning of something you just learned. When taking notes, it’s easy to end up with a detailed list of things without actually understanding the content. Without connecting the ideas with what you already know, you can’t attach the ideas to any scaffolding that would be needed for generating new ideas later (or even recall them).

  • Hyperfine Village Organizes Ideas Spatially

    I came across the idea of a hyperfine village from Lisa Hardy. It’s a novel way to organize your ideas into a metaphorical “village” so you can more easily recall them in context later. Rather than search or rote memory to recall an idea later, you can go for a stroll in your village.

  • Notes Are Insurance for Ideas

    The true value of taking notes is not for recall later, it’s to give you the safety to forget. The act of note taking creates safety by providing insurance for ideas—if you need this information again you can find it later and therefore don’t need to worry about keeping it in your head.

  • Andy Matuschak

    Researcher who focuses on how to improve the productivity of knowledge workers.

  • Reflections on Writing 1000 Notes

    I’ve now written 1,000 notes since May 25, 2020 in my Zettelkasten. You can see my reflections on writing 500 notes and here are my thoughts since then.

  • Memex Device

    A fictional device from the essay As We May Think, written in 1945 by Vannevar Bush, which both stores knowledge (books, notes, annotations, conversations) and connections between them allowing someone to follow trails of associated knowledge. A memex is an example of a tools for networked thought that builds on top of existing knowledge.

  • Zettelkasten Attracts People Overly Concerned With Their Tools and Process Rather Than Practicing

    I’ve noticed that discussions on Zettelkasten forums and comment threads in HackerNews when a new Zettelkasten-like tool is shared are overly fixated on the tools and correctness of the process. Because there is an original source implementation (Niklas Luhmann), people judge the ‘purity’ of an implementation rather than focusing on the activity itself. This makes some intuitive sense, it’s hard to judge the effectiveness of a tool because note taking has compounding effects and most compounding benefits occur at the end so instead people judge in a more near-term way.

  • Writing Essays from a Zettelkasten Outline Is Much Faster

    When writing essays, starting from an outline of Zettelkasten notes makes it much easier and faster to write. This method separates the structure from the narrative. For example, finding notes and related ones keeps your thinking at a higher level of abstraction (atomic ideas or concepts) instead of getting bogged down in how you will word it. Once you have the outline, you are filling in the narrative that connects the ideas. This leads to faster progress compared to doing both at the same time.

  • Note Blogging

    A blog of working notes that others can read and follow along with to learn about interesting ideas and things you are coming across. I find it easier to keep up due to my note taking practice especially compared to writing full-length blog posts or tweets. It would be interesting to follow along notes of other people to learn about new things.

  • Knowledge Work Should Be Accretive

    Most knowledge work is ephemeral–we write documents, emails, code and then it’s done. The ways in which we work don’t tend to compound or accumulate over time. This makes knowledge work lossy. A good example of this is note taking–we tend to never look at notes once they are written.

  • Org-Ai Is Chat for Notes

    I started building AI for notes to help me chat with my library of notes. The result of that exploration is org-ai—my one of one software that helps me remember what I’ve previously written, summarize information. Under the hood it uses vector-based similarity search and LLMs and agent-based AI to extract useful information from my zettelkasten in a chat-based interface.

  • Learning How to Read (Literature Notes)

    An essay from Niklas Luhmann about learning to read and how there are different kinds of books that require different approaches.

  • Effects of Note Blogging on SEO

    Since I started publishing my Zettelkasten notes, I’ve noticed a large change in overall search engine traffic. My personal site and notes have doubled in impressions and clicks. Notably I receive more impressions from search engine visitors than I do from tweets from my Twitter account.

  • Org-Roam

    An Emacs library that recreates Roam (software that implements a Zettelkasten-like system) using org-mode.

  • Incremental Writing

    A process for long form writing where you start writing independent units of ideas/topics (similar to ‘atomic notes’ in Zettelkasten) and synthesize them in a separate step. This allows you to focus on the most interesting and important things first rather than writing linearly.