Digital Zettelkasten: Principles, Methods, & Examples

by David Kadavy

Note-taking is not mindlessly writing down everything you read

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.

You're not likely to find all those connections on a Wikipedia page.

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.

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.

The "someday/maybe" designation helps reduce worries that the idea might fall through the cracks, without obligating you to follow up on the idea right now.

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

Whether you've read a book or an article, listened to a podcast, watched a documentary, or had a conversation with an expert, 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.

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.

resist the urge to copy and paste.

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?

McKee’s advice is about how seventy-five percent of the work on a screenplay goes into the climax. This advice is connected to Hemingway’s observation about icebergs. So my permanent note for the McKee quote is not tagged #writing, nor #screenwriting, but #IcebergPrinciple.

The four main contexts around which I’ve designed my own rituals are: active, lying down, reclining, and upright.