Digital Zettelkasten: Principles, Methods, & Examples

by David Kadavy

The Zettelkasten method has been around since the sixteenth century, but its most famous practitioner was Niklas Luhmann, a German sociologist who used it to write seventy books and hundreds of articles.

The Zettelkasten method has been around since the sixteenth century, but its most famous practitioner was Niklas Luhmann, a German sociologist who used it to write seventy books and hundreds of articles.

DuckDuckGo (or Google, if you must) is handy for quickly retrieving facts and figures while writing. But your notes are not simple records of facts and figures. They can be, but inherent in your Zettelkasten is your own thoughts.

One may think, Well you can jog your memory with internet articles. But 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.

Your Zettelkasten also lets you store incomplete thoughts and connections.

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.

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...

As you read, make fleeting notes. The "best" way to do this is to physically take notes while you're reading: Highlight things and write in the margins or in a separate notebook. I personally don't find this a comfortable way to read, so I just highlight on my e-reader. If I have

a thought I want to capture, I'll leave a note along with a highlight to help me later process it.

When you're finished with the book, export the highlights. I like to export to Markdown. A service called Readwise, which imports your highlights automati...

Sönke Ahrens’s How to Take Smart Notes explains how to choose effective keywords: 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.

Your Zettelkasten is for turning your knowledge and ideas into writing. Presumably what you’re writing will offer a unique perspective. So avoid generic keywords, such as “Psychology.” This may be hard if you’re in the beginning stages of researching a subject, but as soon as possible, create keywords based upon patterns you see, which inform theories you’re working on.