reply to u/dotphrasealpha at https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/11z08fq/what_type_of_note_did_niklas_luhmann_average_6/
The true insight you're looking for here is: Forget the numbers and just aim for quality followed very closely by consistency!
Of course most will ignore my insight and experience and be more interested in the numbers, so let's query a the 30+ notes I've got on this topic in my own zettelkasten to answer the distal question.
Over the 45 years from 1952 to 1997 Luhmann produced approximately 90,000 slips which averages out to:
- 45 years * 365 days/year = 16,425 days
- 90,000 slips / 16,425 days = 5.47 slips per day
In a video, Ahrens indicates that Luhmann didn't make notes on weekends, and if true, this would revise the count to 7.69 slips per day.
260 working days a year (on average, not accounting for leap years or potential governmental holidays)
- 45 years x 260 work days/year = 11,700 days
- 90,000 slips / 11,700 days = 7.69 slips per day
Compare these closer numbers to Ahrens' stated and often quoted 6 notes per day in How to Take Smart Notes.
I've counted from the start of '52 through all of '97 to get 45 years, but the true amount of time was a bit shorter than this in reality, so the number of days should be slightly smaller.
Keep in mind that Luhmann worked at this roughly full time for decades, so don't try to measure yourself against him. (He also published in a different era and broadly without the hurdle of peer review.) Again: Aim for quality over quantity! If it helps, S.D. Goitein created a zettelkasten of 27,000 notes which he used to publish almost a third more papers and books than Luhmann. Wittgenstein left far fewer notes and only published one book during his lifetime, but published a lot posthumously and was massively influential. Similarly Roland Barthes had only about 12,500 slips and loads of influential work.
I keep notes on various historical practitioners' notes/day output over several decades using these sorts of practices. Most are in the 1-2 notes per day range. A sampling of them can be found here: https://boffosocko.com/2023/01/14/s-d-goiteins-card-index-or-zettelkasten/#Notes%20per%20day.
Anecdotally, I've found that most of the more serious people here and on the zettelkasten.de forum are in the 4-10 slips per week range.
<whisper>quality...</whisper>