Photo by Pete Birkinshaw from Manchester, UK – Data Storage Device, CC BY 2.0, LinkI stumbled across the zettelkasten note taking process while watching Beck Tench’s helpful Tinderbox series. Beck uses Tinderbox software to create a hyper-organized system of notes for her Ph.D. studies in contemplative practice and information science. Her method of managing these notes is based on the zettelkasten concept developed by Niklas Luhmann.
Yes, zettelkasten sounds like a complicated German philosophical concept but it simply means “box of notes.” When all is said and done, it doesn’t get much more complicated than that.
You don’t need any fancy hardware or software to build a zettelkasten. You can create an intelligent knowledge base with just a handful of note cards and a pencil. Niklas Luhmann, a social scientist who researched and wrote over 70 books, used half-sheets of paper because they were large enough to be useful and compact enough to store easily.
What even is a Zettel?
It’s hard to know if zettelkasten is what helped Luhmann become such a prolific and influential writer, or if it is simply a result of his own peculiar thought process. All I know is that I’ve been experimenting with Luhmann’s ideas for about two or three weeks and already it is starting to pay off.
There are several requirements that make Luhmann’s zettelkasten method work.
1) Notes are atomic – Each note should hold a single bit of information. It could be a paragraph or a couple of sentences. The point is to have, as nearly as possible, just one thought per note.
2) Each Note Has a Home Every note has a distinct home in the filing system so that you can easily find it when you need it. Luhmann didn’t believe in arranging his notes topically because that could limit a note’s usefulness. A guinea pig – is it a pet, an experiment or food? Once you start thinking of a guinea pig in one context it’s hard to see it in any other.
3) Each Note Has a Name – In order to locate the note in its home, the note must have a unique ID. Luhmann used numbers starting at 1 and going on to infinity. He had an elaborate theory of branching, creating sub-sections with letters such as 1a, 1a1 etc. but it seems like he may have walked away from that concept after a while. Followers of the zettelkasten approach use a combination of date and time to create unique IDs because it is guaranteed to be unique and it is easy to remember.
4) Notes Link to Other Notes – Using the ID number of a note it is possible to link two notes together. For example a note about a science experiment could link to a note about guinea pigs. In this respect Luhmann’s note taking system resembled modern hypertext.
5) Cross Reference Keywords – Luhmann kept a cross-reference guide to important keywords from each of his notes. This way if he wanted to find information about “pets” he could look at the reference sheet and find IDs for all his notes that related to pets.
And that’s about it. Practitioners of the zettelkasten method have developed a lot of hacks and refinements of the method, but it doesn’t get much more complicated than this.
The trick is what you do with your notes.
Collect, Link, Use
Why is zettelkasten important for writers of all stripes to consider? Luhmann saw thinking and writing as inextricably linked. He thought of any type of research, study or deep thought as a form of writing. Taking comprehensive notes, organizing them and relating them to other notes was a form of writing and contemplation.
In much the same way that David Allen’s Getting Things Done method of productivity can be boiled down to five simple actions – Capture, Clarify, Organize, Reflect and Engage – the zettelkasten method can be summed up in a handful of activities. I’d call these Collect, Process, Cross-Reference and Use.
Getting Things Done aims to help you get things off your mind and into a trusted system of reminders. The goal is to achieve a ninja-like state of mindfulness that Allen calls “mind like water.”
Zettelkasten aims to create a kind of external intelligence that you can converse with and get surprisingly useful answers in return.
As a result of extensive work with this technique a kind of secondary memory will arise, an alter ego with who we can constantly communicate. It proves to be similar to our own memory in that it does not have a thoroughly constructed order of its entirety, not hierarchy, and most certainly no linear structure like a book. Just because of this, it gets its own life, independent of its author.
— Niklas Luhmann
For more on the zettelkasten approach see Shawn Lawson’s blog for a curated reading list.
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