Zettelkasten Method

references

• zettelkasten.de site
• Article on luhman

points to apply

• write notes in your words
• always make something from the information you process (add context and relevance)
• software agnosticism
• there is a difference between knowing something and knowing about something
• apply this to reading on the web as well as books
• think and categorize ideas, relate to other ideas, come up with metaphors or analogies
• help place thoughts worth remembering in our mind

summary

• It is not important where you place a new note as long as you can link to it.
• The most important aspect of the body of the Zettel is that you write it in your own words. There is nothing wrong with capturing a verbatim quote on top. But one of the core rules to make the Zettelkasten work for you is to use your own words, instead of just copying and pasting something you believe is useful or insightful. This forces you to at least create a different version of it, your own version. This is one of the steps that lead to increased understanding of the material, and it improves recall of the information you process. Your Zettelkasten will truly be your own if its content is yours and not just a bunch of thoughts of other people.
• As a rule of thumb, you should always make something from the information you process. You should always translate information to knowledge by adding context and relevance. Even if you don’t use the created knowledge directly, as long as you enrich the information with relevance you are on the right path.
• Software-agnosticism is the principle that you make the opposite of what boxing-in tries to achieve. There are direct ways to box you in, for example, by storing notes in a closed-off file-format that no other software can decipher. But there are also implicit ways to make it difficult to change the software, for example by making the export process difficult, or by training the user to depend on features that are not available anywhere else. One example of how we try to avoid this is our decision to make the search function responsible for carrying out a lot of the features. Even Zettel links boil down to search. Full-text search is omnipresent on computers, and therefore you can reproduce your workflow with about any plain text editor in the world.
• At the beginning it will just contain a few notes that you will remember since they are recent, but over time they will have points that you cannot remember, and provide surprise to you (see Claude Shannon)

The plain text approach is the paradigm of using plain text files as the primary storage. Plain text is the most versatile and durable file format.

quotes

“The Collector’s Fallacy”. Why fallacy? Because ‘to know about something’ isn’t the same as ‘knowing something’. Just knowing about a thing is less than superficial since knowing about is merely to be certain of its existence, nothing more. Ultimately, this fake-knowledge is hindering us on our road to true excellence. Until we merge the contents, the information, ideas, and thoughts of other people into our own knowledge, we haven’t really learned a thing. We don’t change ourselves if we don’t learn, so merely filing things away doesn’t lead us anywhere.

Collecting, just as Eco warned us, does not magically increase our knowledge. We have to read a text effectively to assimilate its ideas and learn from it. Reading effectively means the text changes our knowledge permanently. Only when we learn from it and begin to work with the ideas it presents. We need to extract what’s inside and write things down.

If we read without taking notes, our knowledge increases for a short time only. Once we forget what we knew, having read the text becomes worthless. You can bet that you’ll forget about the text’s information one day. It’s guaranteed. Thus, reading without taking notes is just a waste of time in the long run. It’s as if reading never happened.

Filter interesting information to clear your streams. To filter means to collect the useful pieces only. But don’t stop just there, or your growing collection will hinder you. Instead, create a reading list you’re going to review and work off routinely.
Reading on the web should be like reading books: after you found what’s useful, take note of it. Taking note ensures you expand your knowledge. Everything else is either wasted time or reading for fun.
Process the notes you took, integrate them into your knowledge system. This is the biggest lever of change.