“The Zettelkasten Method is so labor-intensive. I don’t have time to also maintain a Zettelkasten.” – This, or something like it, is a regular concern when people engage with the Zettelkasten Method. And with good reason, because on the forums and Reddit you can see that care and maintenance seems to be a big part of the Zettelkasten Method. That’s a problem of the implementation.
The first question we need to ask ourselves is: What is value? I propose a simple answer to this question: Valuable is what is useful to us. Let’s look into knowledge on nutrition as an example: Knowing how to eat healthy is not very useful to a lot of people because this knowledge is not put into practice. Most of the time this knowledge is not what is needed. Eating healthy is rather about building habits. Then again, knowledge on healthy nutrition becomes useful when those healthy habits are built.
This is a guest post by Jeannel King (@jeannelking on our forums), a follow up to her Zettelkasten use in class from 2 years ago. Enjoy! Update now that I’m three years in to my PhD program and am about to start on my lit reviews and dissertation research…
Join Scott Scheper and Sascha in this video as they discuss analog vs. digital Zettelkasten.
Among other things, they talk about:
We all are guilty of the following: We think we know something in spite of very weak evidence. Our Zettelkasten will reflect this behavior with no mercy. This will become a problem because the game of evidence is a game of trust. This trust game in the arena of creative knowledge work will be played between your present self and two other selves: Your past and your future self.