Digital Zettelkasten: Principles, Methods, & Examples

by David Kadavy

If you have a few minutes in the waiting room at the dentist, which are you going to choose: dig into a big project such as reading a dense book, or kill time with social media? When you have a digital Zettelkasten, there’s a third option: do small things with small notes, straight from your phone.

If you have a few minutes in the waiting room at the dentist, which are you going to choose: dig into a big project such as reading a dense book, or kill time with social media? When you have a digital Zettelkasten, there’s a third option: do small things with small notes, straight from your phone.

Instead of using my brain power to try to remember things, I'm using it to write better articles, newsletters, and books. I finally found a bicycle for my mind.

Instead of using my brain power to try to remember things, I'm using it to write better articles, newsletters, and books. I finally found a bicycle for my mind.

Zettelkasten method is a way of organizing paper in a non-hierarchical way.

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 retain what you read – but so you can turn that knowledge into writing.

Sometimes ignorance is more comfortable than learning, because learning means we have to go through the work of changing.

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.

There's little in this world more frightening than the blank page, and re-writing something in your own words is much easier than filling that blank page.

Your brain's associative engine is even more active when you add keywords and link notes.

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.

Search engines and the internet are not a substitute for your notes. 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.

productivity is about Mind Management, Not Time Management.

Paper notes may help you remember the material better. Research suggests that writing by hand improves retention.

Using Markdown – which I’ll describe in a bit – you can do the formatting you need, without your fingers leaving the keyboard.

Books: As I read an ebook, I make highlights (fleeting notes). I later export those highlights to plain text and keep them in my "Inbox," so I know they need to be processed. I condense those highlights into a literature note. I make permanent notes for each of the most interesting ideas. I store the highlights I exported in my "Raw" folder.

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.

While literature notes are good reminders for quick review, the act of writing literature notes also ensures you understand the material. Aside from direct quotes, literature notes are in your own words. 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 notes, you can construct a rough draft for an entire article or book.

So, resist the urge to copy and paste. Even when you're recording an exact quote, take the extra effort to re-write it (very carefully!) You'll be surprised what you discover.

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

When you were reading the book, you were more focused on reading it, not on thinking deeply about whether or not a passage was useful. Now as a separate task you're asking yourself which parts are interesting enough that you want to re-write them in your own words later.

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.

Experienced readers ask questions while reading and relate to other possible viewpoints. Inexperienced readers take the viewpoint as a given. They don’t think about what’s not mentioned in the text.

By trying to think of how to describe the passage in my own words, I activate the associative machine, which often causes the current idea to collide with some other idea in my mind. Associative thinking promotes a positive mood, so it shouldn't be a surprise how fun this task is.

The archivist asks: Which keyword is the most fitting? A writer asks: In which circumstances will I want to stumble upon this note, even if I forget about it?

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.

The note also has several other components: My own thoughts, links to related notes, which literature note it came from, and keywords used to organize the notes.

The way people choose their keywords shows clearly if they think like an archivist or a writer. Do they wonder where to store a note or how to retrieve it? The archivist asks: Which keyword is the most fitting? A writer asks: In which circumstances will I want to stumble upon this note, even if I forget about it? It is a crucial difference.

Generally, I reserve my computer time for linking, tagging, and organizing notes; I summarize fleeting notes while reclining; I read while lying down; and I take fleeting notes while active. I also access my notes in various stages from my phone while waiting in lines, at restaurants, or in waiting rooms. This context is especially good for highlighting my highlights from a book.

The point of a Zettelkasten is to turn your notes into completed writing. The act of note-taking helps solidify knowledge in your mind, while developing miniature rough drafts you can turn into completed writing.

I use my tag index as a starting point. I rearrange the index according to how an article might flow, then I re-write from scratch in a separate document. In this way, I’ve eliminated any chance of writer’s block, as I can mostly copy what I’ve already written. But in the process of re-writing, I always find a more crisp way of stating my point, and I often get additional ideas that aren’t in my notes.