Digital Zettelkasten: Principles, Methods, & Examples

by David Kadavy

Unlike a card-catalog in an old library, the purpose of a Zettelkasten is not to find an individual note, but rather to explore the connections amongst notes.

A Zettelkasten helps you produce writing.

it. But the proper way to take notes is not to copy things word-for-word (except in the case of exact quotes). Instead, you re-write it in your own words, which is even more powerful.

Second, you don't write down everything you read. You only write down the important things: Things that are interesting, relevant to your work, or that you otherwise want to retain.

Re-writing passages, choosing keywords, and linking notes to one another all cause you to think associatively. Thinking associatively has been shown to improve mood, so that explains why note-taking is deceptively fun.

Your notes contain more than just simple facts, managing your notes builds your memory, and your notes help you store and develop ideas in-progress.

What’s missing in a search engine is the unique relationships you can build between notes to generate new insights and ideas

The purpose of a fleeting note is to say, "here's something interesting I might want to remember or refer to some day." You need to record just enough information to later decide whether you want to turn your fleeting note into a literature note, permanent note, or someday/maybe.

Literature notes are informal summaries you write about a piece of media you've consumed.

To write literature notes, you have to think about what you learned, and how you might explain it to a friend (or your future self). This helps you remember the material better than you would otherwise.

Permanent notes are explanations of a single idea, annotated with metadata about the subject of the note, other notes that note is related to, and the source of the note.

You usually write permanent notes using literature notes as your source. You take only the most important ideas from your literature notes, and turn them into singular notes you can connect with other notes. Once you have many permanent note...

Once you've exported your highlights, review them and highlight, once again, the parts of those highlights that are the most interesting.

Look at the highlights of your highlights and re-write the interesting ones in your own words. You're now turning your fleeting notes into a literature note. It's okay not to summarize every highlight. Only worry about the information you most want to learn or that you can foresee wanting to use in the future.

Now take only the most interesting ideas from the literature notes, and turn each into individual permanent notes. Permanent notes should have one idea per note.