What is a Zettelkasten

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planted May 25, 2021

The Zettelkasten method is a workflow to create notes that you can use to increase your long term knowledge and find new insights. It prevents you from having a mess of notes and gives you the ability to find your ideas easily and making interesting connections between them.

A Zettelkasten is a system to organize your notes in a way, that makes it easy to work with your notes, make connections between different topics and stumble upon new ideas. The goal is to make learning and writing a frictionless process, because your notes are doing the work.

It was invented by Niklas Luhmann. He was able to publish an amazing amount of papers and books, because it was easy for him. He did not need to come up with topics and research about them. The ideas came to him naturally, and he had a lot of the text in a usable format in his notes.

The notes in a Zettelkasten are linked together, so that you can make connections between and across different topics and stumble upon new ideas on the fly. To make this collection as big as possible, it is important to have a neutral collection of notes. You should not fall for confirmation bias and only create notes that support your ideals. You should always keep an open mind and add all kinds of concepts, regardless of your personal opinion. Contrasting ideas make great links and give room for discussion.

However, the Zettelkasten is more than just a collection of notes. It is a workflow. You write your notes on the go whenever ideas come up, or you consume media. You then work through these notes regularly to work the good ideas into permanent notes, that help you to develop these ideas and be able to know hat they were about easily.

The Zettelkasten method uses different types of notes. If you want to learn how the method works, you should learn more about it here.

The workflow encourages you to do your thinking while you write and focuses on working with your ideas. This helps you to remember your knowledge and makes it a lot easier to write with these ideas later, because it avoids the problem of starting with a blank page.