Digital Zettelkasten: Principles, Methods, & Examples

by David Kadavy

While computers often feel like bumper cars for the mind, it’s not the fault of the computers. As Nir Eyal has pointed out in Indistractible, humans have been prone to distractions for all of recorded history.

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.

Retain what you read: No more forgetting what a book was about the moment you finish reading it. The Zettelkasten method helps break reading down into a series of engaging rituals that repeatedly expose you to the most interesting things you've read – thus helping you retain what you read. Retrieve it quickly: No more fumbling through pages to try to find that passage you want to reference. With your digital Zettelkasten, you can copy and paste the exact quote in seconds – along with bibliographic information, if you choose to record it. Know what to read next: Your Zettelkasten helps you follow your curiosity in a productive way. If you're looking for something to read, you can look in your Zettelkasten to see what sparks your interest.

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. Have ideas: Because your Zettelkasten frees your mental energy from having to remember and retrieve things you read or wrote long ago, you have more mental energy available to think about new ideas. The act of organizing your notes is just enough a challenge to spark new ideas without burning yourself out.

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.

Google is not a substitute for notes

But your notes are not simple records of facts and figures. They can be, but inherent in your Zettelkasten is your own thoughts.

Bicycles change gears. Depending upon your strength, energy level, and the terrain, one gear works better than another. The same is true of our tools. You can't use a piece of technology without it also using some part of you. Just as pumping up a steep hill in a bicycle’s lowest gear would fatigue you, always using the highest-power tool can expose you to distractions that limit the depth of your focus on the contents of your notes.

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...

Our concept of productivity is still stuck in an assembly-line modality. But great ideas are not constructed in a linear and step-by-step process that would be more "efficient" if only those steps were done faster.

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

Experienced academic readers usually read a text with questions in mind and try to relate it to other possible approaches, while inexperienced readers tend to adopt the question of a text and the frames of the argument and take it as a given. What good readers can do is spot the limitations of a particular approach and see what is not mentioned in the text.

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.

Again, the way you might re-write such a passage might be different. I'm using less-precise language than Ahrens'. I dropped qualifiers like "usually" and "tend to," because that fits better the kind of writing I do. That's what makes it "in your own words" – you re-write it as you might write it in a finished piece.

Now take only the most interesting ideas from the literature notes, and turn each into individual permanent notes.

Don't feel like you have to follow every step of the process. Sometimes it's more productive to review old notes, read something new, or write something than it is to process what you've just read.

Choose keywords that are specific to an idea, and unique from generic ideas.