Digital Zettelkasten: Principles, Methods, & Examples

by David Kadavy

And that’s what a computer is to me....it’s the equivalent of a bicycle for our minds.”

Has the computer fulfilled this promise?

Zettelkasten is German for "slip box" (Plural: Zettelkästen). In analog form, a Zettelkasten is literally a box filled with slips of paper, each slip with a note on it, as well as metadata used to organize those notes.

The Zettelkasten method is a way of organizing paper in a non-hierarchical way. Instead of being restricted to keeping a note only under one category, or having to make multiple copies of the same note to put in various places, notes are organized so that you can arrive at one individual note through various routes, and that note can lead you to various other notes

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.

I have a hard time imagining an ultimate use for a Zettelkasten other than writing.

Retain what you read:

Retrieve it quickly: No more fumbling through pages to try to find that passage you want to reference.

Develop your ideas: Instead of starting each writing project with a blank page, you already have written short passages you can stitch together to create an instant first draft.

The act of organizing your notes is just enough a challenge to spark new ideas without burning yourself out.

Note-taking is not mindlessly writing down everything you read

word-for-word,

What is the difference between the point of highlighting and taking a note? Perhaps highlighting is for stuff I think is important and notetaking is for stuff I think important to remember. Perhaps highlight is for information I might want to return to when I find the content of a note taken over the same material as summarizing something I might want to share or use in detail.

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.

I recommend plain-text files.

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

Plain-text files are offline-compatible:

Rather than the .txt extension of plain-text files, Markdown files have the .md extension.

Here's the workflow I suggest as a starting point for your digital Zettelkasten.

Fleeting Notes: Notes you take "on the fly." Literature Notes: Condensed notes of an entire article, book, etc. Permanent Notes: Notes summarizing a single idea. These are assigned keywords and linked to other notes.

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

Someday/Maybe

You often come across things that are interesting, but not interesting enough and/or not relevant enough to your current projects to investigate further.

Raw is for storing the "raw," exported highlights from books or articles.

Here’s what that folder structure looks like for my Zettelkasten:

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

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

a literature note is something you can review to remind you of the main points you learned. This often takes the form of a bullet-point list, perhaps broken up by topic.

For example, as I'll explain more in a bit, when I write literature notes for a book, I refer to the highlights I've exported from the book.

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

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

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...

Read

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.

Export the highlights

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...

Highlight the highlights

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

Condense the highlights into a literature note

re-write the interesting ones in your own words. You're now turning your fleeting notes into a literature note.

writer asks: In which circumstances will I want to stumble upon this note, even if I forget about it?

Break literature notes into permanent notes

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 words within double brackets, "[[", are names of notes, as in the Markdown example I gave earlier. However, the portion after the pipe, "|", in the second bullet point is a description I wrote of the link that better fits the context of this note.

words after the pipe are what will display, in place of the note title, when this note is interpreted by a Markdown-compatible application.

How to name your files

Choosing keywords/tags

create keywords based upon patterns you see, which inform theories you’re working on.