When you get used to heavily linking notes, your workflow will change. And so will your system of notes evolve into a Zettelkasten.

Connect. There’s two ways to connect notes: let them point to each other directly or form keyword-based collections.

Loose Filing and Interconnectedness are Key

I was amazed just how many notes I had on the topic.

When you create connections between them, though, you will be surprised to see them paint a bigger picture. This is different from the reference notes I mentioned before.

I can identify every note by its unique timestamp. The timestamp of a note’s creation becomes its ID. I refer to a note via its ID to create connections between them.

This is a first step to conquer Collector’s Fallacy: to realize that having a text at hand does nothing to increase our knowledge. We have to work with it instead. Reading alone won’t suffice: we have to create notes, too, to create real, sustainable knowledge.

Taking notes thoroughly means you can rely on your notes alone and rarely need to look up a detail in the original text.

We may expand our knowledge permanently only by storing notes permanently.

Thus, reading without taking notes is just a waste of time in the long run. It’s as if reading never happened.

As knowledge workers, we’re inclined to look for the next groundbreaking thought, for intellectual stimulation: we pile up promising books and articles, and we store half the internet as bookmarks, just so we get the feeling of being on the cutting edge.

To collect is a reward in itself.

do I browse the web for fun or to expand my knowledge? This determines my mode of reading.

I deal with the inflow of information by forcing myself to select quickly which items deserve my attention and which don’t. I can’t pay attention to everything, and I can’t read every article from start to finish.

My RSS feed reader is not an inbox in the flow chart because I consider my subscriptions to be outside of my system, just like the whole web itself is outside of it.

I consume my RSS subscriptions on my iPhone. I can’t write notes for my Zettelkasten note archive from my iPhone, though. The note-taking software available just don’t do what I need. Only from my Mac do I have direct access to the full Zettelkasten note archive at the moment. This creates a gap between the inflow of interesting articles and the outflow of useful notes.

Smartphones are great for filtering – not so much for processing stuff

There, the articles will be downloaded for you so you don’t need an internet connection all the time while you sieve your unread items list.

Skimming is especially useful to get ahead of hundreds or thousands of new feed items. You have to get the interesting pieces out of the feed reader and into a collection you’re going to process later, or else you’ll likely never see the end of your surprisingly long, intimidating “unread items” queue.

Reading the articles is the bottleneck, thus “feed reading” becomes “feed skimming.” When I read an item in my RSS reader in full, I do so only for entertainment. Doing the actual reading in my RSS reader slows me down so much, I won’t be able to reach the end of my list of items in a reasonable time.

the problem with RSS is that it’s so convenient to subscribe to websites that you will eventually end up with more items in your feed queue each day than you can read.

The reading list can’t be placed anywhere else in the flow: it can’t be part of a permanent reference file, for example, because a list of web pages has zero long-term value.

I don’t consider my RSS feed subscriptions to be an inbox. Instead, they are a fraction of the whole web, outside of my knowledge system. I have to work with the items to find what’s useful and what isn’t. Lots of articles are irrelevant to me. Also, the items are many – and none of them die if I don’t act on them. In short, they behave like anything else on the web.

Process the notes you took, integrate them into your knowledge system.

Reading on the web should be like reading books: after you found what’s useful, take note of it.

Instead, create a reading list you’re going to review and work off routinely.

Now the web puts stuff in our lives in different ways. There’s social networks on the one hand, and website articles or blog posts on the other. The key question is: how do you deal with various input streams of information efficiently so you don’t waste time juggling them?

How am I supposed to deal with these streams when only a fraction of the links are of real value to me?

Be tied to my highlights, annotations, and bookmarks in a non-proprietary, searchable, and shareable format. Make them public if I want to.

There’s a lot of generalization in my summary but the core issue is an extraordinarily high level of friction in the process of finding, organizing, and sharing digital content.

ineffable

bashfulness

confessional

edifice

tomes

Laziness is often the other side of the productivity coin. Rather than a sign of inefficiency and unproductivity, it can be the result of smart work freeing up time for well-deserved idleness. Furthermore, it can be the trigger for smart work in and of itself.

The apparent paradox stems from a lack of nuance in the definition of laziness. “For all these arguments against laziness, it is amazing we work so hard to achieve it,” writes Hal Cranmer in In Defense of Laziness.

You will be shocked by how often you trick yourself into falsely thinking that you have understood something. You will write and think, “Oh, is this why I think that? I didn’t know that.”

There are other advantages to conversations with regards to creativity, thought-provoking impulses, and inspiration, but for thinking deeply about a topic, writing is superior to a conversation.

You are also more likely to look stupid, but that is a price you must be willing to pay.

The next step is to let others examine your reasoning—publishing.

This workshop is for you if you want to:Build and create thingsEnhance your working memory when dealing with complex ideasNever lose the ideas and hard-earned insights you've hadConstruct a well-formed essay or write a bookDevelop a living system of related thoughts that you can tend to throughout your lifetime—and then maybe even pass it on to your relatives as the gift they never knew they wanted ;)Never worry about forgetting your valuable ideasKeep Optionality: the ability to pivot or shift careers, side projects at the drop of a hat (or the onset of a pandemic!)

cusp

resemble

Rebellion

revelation

adopted

creepy