When I meet with any thing, that I think fit to put into my common-place-book, I first find a proper head. Suppose for example that the head be EPISTOLA, I look unto the index for the first letter and the following vowel which in this instance are E. i. if in the space marked E. i. there is any number that directs me to the page designed for words that begin with an E and whose first vowel after the initial letter is I, I must then write under the word Epistola in that page what I have to remark.

slip box

You need to have a habit of tagging something as a to-do to synthesize the idea further, and then periodically go back and review those and write them in a more crisp language, or build up your evergreen notes so that you have this library of thoughts that you are able to get that compound interest on.

Finally, you gain the ability to reuse previously built packets for new projects. Maybe some research you did for an online marketing campaign becomes useful for a new campaign. Or some sketches that didn’t quite make it into an old design give you inspiration for a new one. Or some book notes you wrote down casually turn out to be very useful for an unforeseen challenge a year later.

2. Possibility of linking (Verweisungsmöglichkeiten). Since all papers have fixed numbers, you can add as many references to them as you may want. Central concepts can have many links which show on which other contexts we can find materials relevant for them. Through references, we can, without too work or paper, solve the problem of multiple storage. Given this technique, it is less important where we place a new note. If there are several possibilities, we can solve the problem as we wish and just record the connection by a link [or reference].

This is the best feature I’ve found for discovering new relationships between information.

The Zettelkasten principles

Luhmann actually had two slip-boxes: the first was the “bibliographical” slip-box, which contained brief notes on the content of the literature he read along with a citation of the source; the second “main” slip-box contained the ideas and theories he developed based on those sources. Both were wooden boxes containing paper index cards. 

The 8 Steps of Taking Smart Notes Ahrens recommends the following 8 steps for taking notes: Make fleeting notes Make literature notes Make permanent notes Now add your new permanent notes to the slip-box Develop your topics, questions and research projects bottom up from within the slip-box Decide on a topic to write about from within the slip-box Turn your notes into a rough draft Edit and proofread your manuscript

Luhmann’s slip-box grew to become an equal thinking partner in his work. He described his system as his secondary memory (zweitgedächtnis), alter ego, or reading memory (lesegedächtnis).

If you’d like to differentiate between the various functions a paragraph in a text can have, look out for signal words. For example, the following literal devices may indicate that the function is to build a mental model: schema, allegory, analogy, hypothesis, metaphor, representation, simile, theory. Put a corresponding “model” mark next to these.

The students in Raphael Folsom’s Spanish Borderlands course read primary sources on a weekly basis. Rather than taking notes on 3×5 index cards as we did when I was a kid, the students take the same type of note in the Drupal system. They fill out some basic bibliographic information about the source, write a short summary of the source, and then take a note about an interesting facet of the text.

Obsidian is a powerful knowledge base that works on top of a local folder of plain text Markdown files.

Luhmann didn’t only write a lot and developed the most complex of all theoretical bodies in the social sciences. He was known for his vast knowledge and deep thinking. He didn’t run to his Zettelkasten when you asked him something. This is because he practiced thinking through writing and processing in the context of the Zettelkasten.

The Barbell Method takes this into account by integrating your reading habit into your knowledge work with two steps: Read the book. Read swiftly but don’t skip any parts unless they make you vomit or put you to sleep. Mark all the passages that stand out and contain useful, interesting or inspiring information. Read the book a second time. But now you read the marked parts only. This time you make notes, connect them to past notes (Zettelkasten Method!) and think about what you’ve read. Make mindmaps, drawings, bullet points – everything that helps you to think more clearly.

I’ll construct two forms of a Zettel: The Outer Form The Inner Form The outer form refers to entities that are necessary for its existence. The inner form refers to entities that compose its inner structure.

collections can only ease access to texts. They don’t add anything to our knowledge.

Breaking the card into more atomic pieces turned a question he routinely got wrong into two questions he routinely got right.

You can translate “Folgezettel” (literally: “subsequent note”) as “note sequence”.

Our brain can only hold to so much information at a time.

I want to extract a reusable piece out of it in a way that it can be connected to many different things eventually. I want to make a home page for this idea or fact. My hub for thinking about this.

Zettelkasten Unique Identifiers

The tags for objects are much more precise and reveal real connections. They narrow down the search way more which is hugely important if your archive grows. They only give you what you want, and not the topic which also contains what you want.

In mnemotechnic,brevitasrefers to the creating ofsuch ‘‘rich’’ if necessarily ‘‘brief ’’ units. Because there is in principle no limiton the number ofdivisionesa person may have in memory, readers could beencouraged to make ‘‘brief and compendious’’ summaries of materials theyhad learned.

Storyspace has an always-visible Toolbar and Menu to aid students. The Toolbar (Figure 2) provides, top-left to right and down: a Writing Space tool (to create writing areas), the Arrow tool (already familiar to Macintosh users) for routine selecting and clicking, the Note tool (the star) for attaching notes to text, and the Navigation tool (double-headed arrow) for creating and following text links. The Magnify tool (three windows) decreases or enlarges the size of windows. The Linking tool (boxes connected by line) enables linking of one text to other text areas. The Tunnel tool (box within a box) permits linking over widely separated writing spaces. The Compass (four directional arrows) is used to move quickly through levels of the chart, outline, or windows.

Luhmann also described his system as his secondary memory (Zweitgedächtnis), alter ego, or his reading memory or (Lesegedächtnis).

To manage your knowledge, you have to know how you work.

people need a simple answer to a complex problem.

How do you store that amount of knowledge in a way that you can access it everytime?

the more we read, the more it seems to slip through our long term memory.

A Zettelkasten is a multitude of different approaches to a common problem — the problem of knowledge management.

Now, if I notice a moment in a past Are.na conversation that highlights the topic, I add it to the topic's channel. Now the text block sits in the middle of a Venn diagram — both part of a chat log and part of a curated selection from conversations I have.

But I actually think stock and flow is a useful metaphor for media in the 21st century. Here’s what I mean: Flow is the feed. It’s the posts and the tweets. It’s the stream of daily and sub-daily updates that reminds people you exist. Stock is the durable stuff. It’s the content you produce that’s as interesting in two months (or two years) as it is today. It’s what people discover via search. It’s what spreads slowly but surely, building fans over time.

and because we largely lack the infrastructure to support their creation and maintenance

But after a while, you won’t be able to keep up. When I search for tags I get a couple hundred of notes. I have to review them to connect a note to some of them, or get a grasp of what I wrote and thought about a specific topic. Naturally, a need to organize the archive arises at this point. I can’t remember how many notes I had when I experienced this. I introduced hub-like notes when I had between 500 and 700 notes.1 I gave myself an overview of the most important notes on that topic.

The Zettelkasten method makes reading complicated texts less frustrating. You’re not necessarily trying to understand the whole text. You’re just hunting down ideas to incorporate into your Zettelkasten. Who cares if you don’t understand everything? As long as you’re extracting some ideas, you’re growing your knowledge base and the text is being useful to you.

Reading doesn’t magically increase your knowledge. Just because some text has entered your eyeballs and visited your short-term memory, that doesn’t mean you’ve learned from it. In fact, if all you’re doing is reading — and you’re doing so for any purpose other than entertainment — then you’re wasting your time. What has only entered your short-term memory will eventually be forgotten and is useless in the long term. Years later, it’ll be as if you had never read that book or that article.

The Theoretical Stuff on Note Taking & Zettelkasten Communicating with Slip Boxes by Niklas Luhmann http://luhmann.surge.sh/communicating-with-slip-boxes Luhmann on Learning How to Read https://takingnotenow.blogspot.de/2007/12/luhmann-on-learning-how-to-read.html C. Wright Mills, “On Intellectual Craftsmanship,” from The Sociological Imagination. Oxford University Press. 1960. https://archivingthecity.files.wordpress.com/2011/01/mills_on_intellctual_craftmanship.pdf The How-To Stuff on Note Taking & Zettelkasten Chapter 4, “The Work Plan and the Index Cards” in Umberto Eco, How to Write a Thesis

Posts from the Zettelkasten blog: Create a Zettelkasten for your Notes to Improve Thinking and Writing https://zettelkasten.de/posts/zettelkasten-improves-thinking-writing/ Making Proper Marks in Books https://zettelkasten.de/posts/making-proper-marks-in-books/ Create Zettel from Reading Notes https://zettelkasten.de/posts/create-zettel-from-reading-notes/ Manage Citations for a Zettelkasten https://zettelkasten.de/posts/bibliography-zettelkasten/ Extend Your Mind and Memory With a Zettelkasten https://zettelkasten.de/posts/extend-your-mind-and-memory-with-a-zettelkasten/ Preparing Fragments Helps You to Ease Into Writing https://zettelkasten.de/posts/ease-into-writing/ The Collector’s Fallacy https://zettelkasten.de/posts/collectors-fallacy/ Learn Faster by Writing Zettel Notes https://zettelkasten.de/posts/learn-faster-by-writing-zettel-notes/ You Only Find What You Have Identified https://zettelkasten.de/posts/add-identity/ Reading Habits: Putting It All Together https://zettelkasten.de/posts/reading-putting-it-all-together/

The basic idea behind Zettelkasten is to build a repository of the knowledge you gain through the years. The idea is similar to what Paul Jun, of Creative Mastery, writes about keeping a Commonplace Book, or Ryan Holiday’s notecard system. Zettelkasten adds the powerful idea of linking notes to create a web of interlinked knowledge.