Digital Zettelkasten: Principles, Methods, & Examples

by David Kadavy

note-taking can be broken down into a series of pleasurable and easy activities,

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.

The other activities involved in managing your Zettelkasten, such as adding keywords and linking notes, are also just enough of challenges to be fun, and are fun in different ways from re-writing passages.

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 Zettelkasten doesn't just help jog your memory. The activities involved in managing it also help solidify your memory, so it needs less jogging in the first place.

The traditional Zettelkasten consists of three main types of notes

Fleeting Notes: Notes you take "on the fly."

Literature Notes: Condensed notes of an entire ar...

Permanent Notes: Notes summarizing a single idea. These are assigned keywords and linked to other notes.

20230704155738 zettel permanent note ID 20230704155738 A single one-off idea

Literature notes and permanent notes are organized into their own respective folders in your Zettelkasten.

Aside from your "Literature Notes" and "Permanent Notes" (or “Slip Box”), I suggest three other folders: Inbox Someday/Maybe Raw

Inbox is where I put fleeting notes that need to be processed.

Someday/Maybe is borrowed from the Getting Things Done productivity system.

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

This often takes the form of a bullet-point list, perhaps broken up by topic.

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.

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.

But, Folgezettel forces a hierarchical arrangement of notes in a system that is supposed to be non-hierarchical.

But there’s little Folgezettel numbering allows you to do you can’t do with digital notes that have phrases as filenames.

Cons: The worst part of mixing your own file-naming convention from a variety of techniques is there’s no end to how much time and energy you could waste tweaking it. You might never do anything productive with your Zettelkasten because you’re always experimenting with file-naming conventions.

Also, this method isn’t future-proof.

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.

On one hand, it’s redundant to link them to one another if they already share the same tag. Using the search function, you can find all notes related to the tag. On the other hand, that’s not as prominent a connection as if one note linked to another.

Another question is If note A is linked to note B, should note B also link back to note A?

Generally, I reserve my computer time for linking, tagging, and organizing notes;