Join Scott Scheper and Sascha in this video as they discuss analog vs. digital Zettelkasten. Among other things, they talk about: Popular Zettelkasten videos and their odd focus on software demonstration.

On Friday, David Wilson of System Crafters hosted a 2 hour live-stream about Emacs org-roam to answer viewer questions after his previous org-roam v2 video demo and talk about the Zettelkasten Method in general.

Forum legend @Will showcased another Keyboard Maestro macro this week that does a particularly interesting thing: from anywhere you are in your web of notes, his macro ties a new Zettel into the web.

Someone recently reached out to us and sent us a Chinese translation of the Introduction to the Zettelkasten Method: This generous person is Zhixiang Cai, Ph.D in Oil and Gas Well Engineering. He is a programmer and loves knowledge management and did an amazing job translating the article. We happily publish the translation on our page, so check it out!

Wiki links are just clickable, saved searches. You can use them with Boolean operators to restore context.

Today, v1.5.7 of The Archive is available on the “Cutting Edge” update channel. It’ll become available on the regular, stable, “Release” channel in about a week.

Jooble, the job search portal, kindly reached out and offered to feature our site on their page. According to Wikipedia and their references, “Jooble is in the top 1000 most visited sites in the world” and “the second most visited job search site”.

The online course is getting real. We’re very far with the preparations for the first recordings, so now’s a good time to start telling you more about it. The first step is to prepare our course page, so there you go.

Ever wanted to quickly bounce off ideas, get to know the people from the Zettelkasten community better, and hang out with knowledge nerds? There’s now chat rooms for that!

In the forums, @mjknight shared a Marked 2 preprocessor script that you can use to transform non-standard [[wiki link]] to become regular Markdown links that you can click on.

If your app does not support link suggestions, you can emulate this with a few simple tricks to search for the link target without losing where you came from.

Use this script to add a list of backlinks to all of your notes, and update it in place to always have up-to-date results.

Bryan Kam wrote two posts about his embarking on a Zettelkasten journey in recent months. Especially if you’re getting started, posts like his can be a nice place to get inspiration and a feel for the early days.

The 5th chapter of Epstein's book sports many anecdoted, but the original sources I didn't find the time to process.

A very thorough link hierarchy is created from chapter 4, 'Learning, Fast and Slow', from Epstein's book 'Range'.

I process weird citations from Chapter 3 in Epstein's book Range.

I process new interesting topics in Chapter 2 Epstein's "Range". Many links, plus interesting visualizations!

In this episode, I process the few highlights from Chapter 1 of David Epstein's book "Range". I end up with many more links than last time already.

The episode is live! Please comment in the forums; we’d like to know what you think of the format. Sascha’s discussion starter, repeated here so you know the context when you comment below:

We’d like to introduce to you the latest update to The Archive. It comes with multiple tabs and windows! You can now search for different things in different windows without losing the context of your previous work.

Here’s today’s fun story. Sascha asks me if I remember the connection between an author (Heinrich von Kleist) and a concept (Maieutics). I hesitate a bit but then agree: yes, it’s his concept. The association feels just so familiar.

André Chaperon got in touch and told us how much he loves The Archive and the Zettelkasten Method – and then went on to summarize the gist of the method and app usage for his fellowship of small business owners. His process includes paper-based notes, which are taken in a leisurely manner, meant to be thrown away later manner, and ends with Tinderbox-based visualizations to get an overview. With all the “Getting Started” links and helpful details, this is a great resource to get started. Read “How to create Idea Babies: A Knowledge Processing System for Marketers, Creators, and Knowledge Workers”.

Dr. Christopher Foley is a piano teacher based in Toronto, Canada. He set up The Archive to write, send, and curate lesson notes for his piano students. Read “How I Use The Archive and My Music Staff to Create Engaging Lesson Notes”.

Lorenzo wrote an article about how to use iA Writer for macOS as your Zettelkasten note archive. Apparently, iA Writer has a sufficiently quick search for large archives (10,000 notes big, in fact), which surprises me.

Jai of The Appademic wrote a blog post about The Archive and the Zettelkasten Method in combination, how The Archive superseded nvALT for him, and how he found the Zettelkasten Method to go with minimalism and portability of data.

Beck Tench recorded 45min worth of inspiring “Literature Review” video showing her current workflow with a Bullet Journal and the app Tinderbox for Mac to implement the Zettelkasten Method.

When people ask me, “Christian, what’s the best Zettelkasten Method-compatible app on iPads and iPhones?”, I always tell them about 1Writer. Its search is good. It syncs files with a ton of services. It handles #hashtags.

In the nearby town of Paderborn, there’s a community-organized meetup called “MacMittwoch” (literal translation: “MacWednesday” – guess when they meet :)). These fine folks produce a podcast, too, and their Farid Mésbahi and Gordon Möller visited Sascha and me in Bielefeld for a very nice chat. The result is Episode 15: Der Zettelkasten.

We were invited to join Patrick Welker of rocketink.net and Andreas Zeitler aka Zettt of the German Podcast Der Ubercast to introduce our Zettelkasten Method to their audience and talk a bit about The Archive. Sascha explains a lot of the thinking behind IDs, structure, and why plain text is just the best. Thanks for having us, folks!

The definitive note-taking app for heroic authors and prolific writers is here. Download and enjoy.

I just noticed that the developers of JabRef released version 4 in October. JabRef is still our go-to recommendation when it comes to cross-platform reference management. The BibTeX support is great, and with BibTeX + MultiMarkdown you have an open source publishing toolchain at your fingertips. (On macOS, BibDesk is still our favorite, but JabRef is a close second even there.) Note that JabRef requires Java 1.8+ to run.

Rene from the forums did publish a Sublime Text 3 Zettelkasten plugin for better note-taking with Sublime. (See the discussion there.) The plugin features:

Sascha created a short video (sub 4min) about the usefulness of a little feature: clicking on stuff to change the search. Once you design your workflow to center around search terms, search shortcuts become super powerful.

Forum user Chris wrote a blog post with a dozen assorted things, including cool features that make Sublime Text a good fit for the Zettelkasten Method. I did not know you cannot print from Sublime, that sure came as a surprise.

Folks, the time has come to open the private forum to the public! We were using it during the beta of The Archive until today and it seems to work. I’m still experimenting with the design, but it’s a start. There still is a hidden sub-forum for us to work on The Archive behind the curtains, but now we’ve added more useful categories and opened up registration.

I finished reading and commenting Sascha’s manuscript for the 2nd version of the Zettelkasten Method book. Here’re a few first impressions and why I’m excited to get a hold on the next draft.

Today, Sascha talks about his workflow of processing books. The demonstration is supposed to highlight the power of a useful search – in opposition to overly fancy software features. At about minute 22:00, Sascha also demonstrates using The Archive for this in all its buggy glory.

In this video, Sascha talks about the “nv-Core” – that’s our secret name for the kind of interaction facilitated by famous Notational Velocity, and made even more accessible thanks to the nvALT variant we are raving about for years on this blog.

Sascha is preparing a video series showcasing the unique features of our app The Archive. Here’s the intro: Remember that we follow a “software-agnostic approach”. That means our app will be great, but it will still be replaceable. Because we don’t want to lock people in with things they couldn’t do by any other means. The workflow and the method are important, not the tools!

I spent a few minutes importing a copy of my archive into Bear, a note-taking app for macOS. Bear seems to be popular at least because of its clean look. This is by no means a review, just a first glance at the app.

I screwed up with my schedule and put a “Beta Invitation” video entry in our Zettelkasten Live calendar. Sorry, folks, that’ll not take place today! Instead, we’ll upload a not-live video in the upcoming days.

Been sifting through my blog subscriptions today for a while an found a few articles I ended up liking: “How I self-published a book, sold 180,000 copies & 2X’d revenue” – I don’t like the character of “imitate this formula and double/triple/… your income”; the numbers in the post title are easily revealed to be click baits. But the article is huge, and it has some real-world numbers about self-publishing with a team of professional editors, designers, etc. Worth the read, but don’t you get lost in dreaming!

Folks, the time has come to reveal THE ARCHIVE – our very own app for knowledge work. It’s not just another note-taking app; you can get note-taking solutions anywhere. It’s an app for productive knowledge work, built with a software-agnostic approach in mind.

In this week’s episode, Sascha pulled out the digital pen and visualizes the notes from the archive that grew over the past couple of episodes. You’ll see how local structures turn into entry points of new topics and how note sequences (“Folgezettel”) can be created from a messy start.

Reader Kekeli reached out via e-mail a while ago and told us about an interesting problem: how do you organize, annotate, and file audio files? This must be a problem similar to organizing video footage. In other words, it must be a problem that’s been solved at least once over the years for DJs.

In this week’s episode … lots of things have happened. There was no clear outline this time, but we further talked about the dangers of automatization and how clever apps can dumb you down.

In this week’s episode we talked about the dangers of automatization. In short, the computer may help you find stuff, but if you rely on its power 100%, you will end up with a homogenous mush of notes. That’s when we also mentioned Nassim Taleb’s notion of the “barbell method” to antifragilize your life .

In today’s episode we used our crappy English (I don’t know what went wrong today) to talk about misconceptions when using the Zettelkasten: you cannot automate yourself away. The archive always needs an intelligent (!) user to help generate ideas, and you need to take note of them for later retrieval.

I’ve updated this website a bit. Apart from minor visual tweaks (icons!), the highlights include: The navigation now includes other cornerstone pages!

In today’s episode we had a lot of interaction with you, dear readers and listeners and watchers. Thanks for being great! Here are some show highlights:

We’ll be on air today – Thursday, January 12th, 3:00 p.m. UTC. Go to our live stream page on YouTube to see the countdown and localized times. I have to get this “Live” page up here, soon, so all of you can see the calendar with ease.

In this episode, we respond to Peter’s question: What do we not put into our archives? Here are a few links for stuff we discussed in the video. Christian’s inspiration for note meta-categories back in the day made him include diary entries. Now they’re out.

Sujith Abraham asks on YouTube: Why did you choose nvALT, where you have to create manual links so that you can search and find which other notes ‘backlinks’ to other notes, instead of a wiki (like DokuWiki, Tiddlywiki) where this would be provided automatically along with the benefit of plain-text writing/storage.

Sorry, folks, but this week’s episode recording didn’t take place. On Wednesday night I was struck hard by spontaneous and annoying bowel-emptying and I still couldn’t think straight when the scheduled recording would have taken place. I’m feeling a lot better already and we’ll try again next Thursday, Dec. 15th, same time: 16:00 UTC+01.

We’ll be on air this Thursday, 3:00 p.m. UTC. Go to our live stream page on YouTube to see the countdown and localized times. You’re all welcome to chat with us there on Thursday or leave questions here in advance if you can’t make it.

Hello dear friends of knowledge work and knowledge management! – Today we’re thrilled to tell you that our video experiments did bear fruit. We hereby announce the Zettelkasten Live channel.

After the scriptogr.am shutdown a while ago, Manfred Kuehn’s translations of Luhmann’s essays on note-taking and reading were gone. Today I found out that “Communicating with Slip Boxes” (which is about a Zettelkasten) and “Learning how to Read” can be found online again at http://luhmann.surge.sh.

I fixed a few broken links on this site, both outgoing and between blog posts. To that end I re-read a few of the older pieces on this site. Check out these goldies:

I noticed that none of the tag indexes did show articles. Today I fixed this, so you can browse all tags like you should.

With the help of intentions and promises, he maintains the honest impression that he is moving toward the good, yet all the while he moves farther and farther away from it. —Søren Kierkegaard

Last week I completed a script to help automate the process of compiling a first draft from an outline and Zettel notes. You can find it on GitHub or install it as a gem from the terminal: gem install zettel_outline. Learn more about the format it supports and how you can adopt it to your Zettelkasten note archive.

Ever wanted to get a feeling for a paper-based Zettelkasten? Here’s a quote or two of Robert Pirsig’s novel Lila, discovered thanks to Eurobubba: Because he didn’t pre-judge the fittingness of new ideas or try to put them in order but just let them flow in, these ideas sometimes came in so fat he couldn’t write them down quickly enough. The subject matter, a whole metaphysics, was so enormous the flow had turned into an avalanche.

After Sascha’s great release of the Zettelkasten book, here’s a short e-book from yours truly. It’s a pragmatic guide to get to know the really essential tools for any writer. It’s called Minimal Writing on the Mac.

In response to Sascha’s post about Folgezettel, Daniel published a reaction which was intended to clarify some misunderstandings. Turns out that even after that post and 52 comments, it’s not quite clear where all of us seem to disagree.

Who would’ve thought Sascha finishes the German edition before I get the English manuscript done? Now there it is, available on amazon. I’ve added a little announcement at the top of the page already. Here’s the text, in case you missed it:

These are very sound principles, a selection of the ones by Micah Joel: Don’t throw anything away. Focus on making it easy to store things. Let emergence happen.

Found this nice piece on Farnam Street on Schopenhauer and writing. In it, Shane cites Schopenhauer thusly: When we read, another person thinks for us: we merely repeat his mental process. It is the same as the pupil, in learning to write, following with his pen the lines that have been pencilled by the teacher. Accordingly, in reading, the work of thinking is, for the greater part, done for us.

Welcome to the bright side of blogging: being part of a discourse! Dan took some time to write about his workflow, how to get from reading to Zettel notes. (I posted about his setup earlier this week.)

Update 2020-10-27: If you’re new to the whole Zettelkasten thing, check out our Introduction to the Zettelkasten Method! With today’s post on how many Zettelkästen you should have, I have started to collect posts specifically made to get started with the method.

I a recent radio interview, psychology graduate student Pam Mueller told the audience that taking notes of meetings or during class on your computer is a bad idea. You forget the things faster.

Dominique Renauld remembers when he was a student and worked exclusively with paper notes. He was fond of Roland Barthes and grew even fonder of Arno Schmidt – both avid Zettelkasten users.

We’ve covered DEVONthink (Mac) already, and some of you may also be familiar with the very popular app for Mac and Windows, Scrivener. These, among other writing and knowledge management apps, are currently at a 25% discount.

Here’s a reminder why making marks in books alone isn’t such a good idea: they are hard to interpret. Margins are too narrow for notes. So write reading notes on index cards or in notebooks.

I forgot to share my repeating maintenance tasks with you! Yesterday, I wrote about my morning routine. It helps me clear my mind and to surface my anxieties. I feel a lot better afterwards – less clouded, less sub-consciously driven.

Recently, I wrote about the awesome iPhone and iPad writing app 1Writer. I use it to browse my Zettelkasten when I’m not at home. I also mentioned a few things I missed: recent file access and either a full-text search or quickly jumping to a heading in longer documents.

Among the items I wanted to process for a while was Patrick Welker’s “How I Handle my RSS Queue on the Mac and iOS”. He automatted away a lot of the steps you’d usually need to perform when you skim through your list of RSS subscription items and want to file away some of the posts you find interesting.

What if you could publish iteratively, bit by bit, at each step gathering feedback from your readers and refining the text. Would our writing be better? Iteration in public is a principle of nearly all good product design; you release a version, then see how people use it, then revise and release again. […] The faster the release cycle, the more opportunities for revision—and, often, the better the product itself. —“Deploy” by Mandy Brown

Finally, after being in print for 38 years in other languages, How to Write a Thesis by Umberto Eco is now available in English! I have mentioned the German translation of Eco’s book in the past already (in “Collector’s Fallacy” and “Making Proper Marks in Books”). From his book did I learn that not all Zettel are created equal. If you worked solely with index cards in the 70s, all this mattered a lot.

Have a look at the post archive: I moved 28 Zettelkasten-related posts from my personal domain to this blog, dating back to as far as 2013! The comments have moved as well, of course, so you can still participate in the discussion. I even enabled comments on older posts which previously had not, like the very first post.

Last week, I found out how large my backlog of unassimilated information really is. (Spoiler: it is huge.) Sascha and I share a small apartment and recently re-arranged some furniture. Both of us had to empty our bookshelves so we could move the furniture around. Only a week later did I finish actually reordering the books and using my bookshelf again.

Paul J. Miller wrote an extensive review of ConnectedText you might want to have a look at if you’re running Windows and are still looking for a note-taking application which does more than store notes.

The blog is live for four months now. For us, a lot has changed in the meantime. Personally, but also professionally. We have new projects in the making, and we’ve created and prepared new stuff to share on this platform.

Curio is a popular all-purpose digital notebook application for Mac. Currently, it’s 30% off, so it’s for sale for $34.99 instead of $69.99 until Dec 28th.

Just now, a few days after publishing Marko’s article on DEVONthink as a Zettelkasten archive, did I stumble upon Christopher Mayo’s excellent collection of DEVONthink resources.

Recently, I found some Evernote related posts which seem to be the Universe’s hint that I should please finally install Evernote and try to make a Zettelkasten from it.

How do I deal with reading and research projects for University? I plan and prepare the work. This is the second post of the Summer Knowledge Challenge: here, I tell you about the first step, extracting reading notes from Justice for Hedgehogs and preparing the project. The procedure I describe applies to other University assignments and writing projects as well.

Editorially will shut down on May 30. I used Editorially for some time now and me and my collaborators were getting accustomed to the platform. It was more convenient to use Editorially than sharing plain text files in Dropbox, especially when multiple people were involved.

Recently, I took a look at my Zettelkasten to see which Zettel notes would make a good next post in the series. I re-discovered plenty of material, no doubt. Still, it occurred to me that there’s a lot of important things which don’t fit well in short blog posts and which neither do well when split into a series of posts.

Assuming you’re a writer or a thinker, why should you care about the way you take notes? If you want to think creatively and write original articles and books, you need to form associations in your mind effectively. Notes can help you with that if you adhere to a few basic principles.