⚟ Digital Zettelkasten

Book by David Kadavy

If you have a few minutes in the waiting room at the dentist, which are you going to choose: dig into a big project such as reading a dense book, or kill time with social media? When you have a digital Zettelkasten, there’s a third option: do small things with small notes, straight from your phone.

There are a variety of reasons my writing suddenly got better, such as meditation – as this reader observed.

Instead of using my brain power to try to remember things, I’m using it to write better articles, newsletters, and books. I finally found a bicycle for my mind.

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 – much like today’s internet, but in paper form.

  • Great overall description of Zettelkasten here. Seems worth making a Zettelkasten note and including this.

You only write down the important things: Things that are interesting, relevant to your work, or that you otherwise want to retain.

There’s little in this world more frightening than the blank page, and re-writing something in your own words is much easier than filling that blank page. It’s not so easy it’s boring, and it’s not so hard it’s a slog. It’s just enough of a challenge to keep you engaged. Something about the act of writing with little effort trains your brain to feel less intimidated in other situations when you are, in fact, starting from scratch.

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

Yes, you want to know that Scottish naval surgeon James Lind ran what is believed to be the first clinical trial by giving lemon juice to sailors, and thus preventing scurvy, in 1747. But that’s not all you want to know. In your notes, maybe you’ve connected that to the fact the British Navy didn’t start issuing lemon juice to its sailors for another forty years, meanwhile losing to scurvy 30–50 percent of each ship’s crew. Maybe you’ve also noticed that Lind himself questioned his own findings. Maybe you connect that to the skepticism Ignaz Semmelweiss faced when he found that fewer women died after childbirth if, before delivering babies, they washed their hands.

  • Good example of the power of specific context of notes, and benefits of making notes associative.

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.

  • Powerful final line

The traditional Zettelkasten consists of three main types of notes (I’ll break these down, with examples, in a bit). 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.

Podcasts: While listening to a podcast, I hear a great quote. In a notes app on my phone, I jot down a rough timecode, and a two-word description of what the quote is about. I later re-listen to that part of the conversation, and capture the exact quote in a permanent note.

  • Example of journey from fleeting note, to literature note, to permanent note.

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.

You can record fleeting notes in any way that is comfortable for you. The one thing you’re trying to accomplish is to record the thought in a place where you feel confident you’ll get a chance to think about it more. Then, you can get back to what you were doing.

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

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.