Cal Newport thinks the Zettelkasten method is complicated and overrated. This is wrong.

Habitats of the mind: Your Zettelkasten is a thinking environment.

Habitats of the Mind: Actively shape the thinking environments of your life. Your mind will thank you.

Those who do not master the exploitive reading method waste a lot of time and energy. Not every book should be processed in the same way.

A book to show the power of the Zettelkasten, to change the perception what kind of books are even possible, and change the way we think about habits.

The realisation that linked notes are more useful than unlinked notes should be the start of your journey into the depths.

First, ask yourself what the source requires of you. The individual in “individualising the way of working” is the source you are processing, not you.

The brain's analytical way of breaking complex things down into atomic parts is important. But it is far from all that is needed.

Learn what “Building a Second Brain” is, how it relates to the Zettelkasten Method, and how to perfectly combine both methods.

The benefits of your Zettelkasten highly depend on the longevity of each note. Since the Zettelkasten as life-long companion and comrade in the battle for and against knowledge is a long-term endeavor, it is crucial that you create notes and structures that will last a long time. The minimum goal should be that they last a lifetime, so they are optimally designed for yourself. Ideally, they last forever, so future generations can benefit from your work as well.

A while ago, I offered free feedback on individual notes to seven people. I did this to showcase the importance of putting effort into individual notes.

English translation of Niklas Luhmann's 1981 German text, “Kommunikation mit Zettelkästen”.

Create tools within your Zettelkasten for various purposes to aid you in your work.

You can become brilliant. You just have to be smart and work hard. You asked me if an ordinary person by studying hard would get be able to imagine these things like I imagine. Of course! I was an ordinary person who studied hard. Source

A detailed exploration of Luhmann's ZK note number 9/8,3 and what the notion of the 'ghost in the box' could mean.

Faithful English translation of Niklas Luhmann's original notes on Zettelkasten.

Truth, relevance, usefulness, beauty, simplicity: the 5 aspects of an idea.

Does the Zettelkasten feel like extra work? This doesn't have to be so.

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.

Evaluate how much trust you have in a claim as you process the information. Introducing the Lindy Filter and the Zettelkasten Method Evidence Scale as tools to do this. Your future self will thank you for better backed statements.

The Zettelkasten Method will support your goals relating to both consuming and producing fiction texts. It is designed to create a thinking machine out of your notes you are already making that supports all of your thinking.

When you process a book into your Zettelkasten you should prepare both the book and your Zettelkasten. I set clear expectations and why I am reading a book; I review the table of content to generate a mental map; I review the table of content to generate a mental map; I plan what I will use the book for within my Zettelkasten.

This is an improved version of the diagram on the flow of value creation. Three comments on that: It goes from bottom to top because this direction reflects the increase of value better.

Let's see what real links and their contexts in my Zettelkasten look like, and how they hold up compared to Folgezettel. All examples are direct translations from my own Zettelkasten.

This is a little flow diagram that illustrates the Zettelkasten Process with the help of one of the principles of the Zettelkasten Method, "Creating Pre-Products".

Creating Fiction is the same as creating non-fiction. It is about creating a linearly readable text with *some* cross-referencing.

Creating examples for writing tools to write fiction, especially character sheets. These tools live in your Zettelkasten, too.

Know what you are trying to process when you process fiction, and be skilled in handling these pieces.

The source does not have an influence on the nature of the knowledge you process. I demonstrate this by processing quotes from 'The Godfather'.

The things you own, end up owning you -- here's a teaser for the introduction to the upcoming book release

Jared Gorski wrote a response to my article “Backlinks are bad links”. Since it’s a short and concise response, a re-response is warranted. He summarised my point fairly and sufficiently, so I don’t need to repeat myself here. If you are not familiar, please read the article linked above. I’ll reply to Jared’s post point by point.

Don't just work blindly. Figure out how you can measure your definition of success and then track your progress, and if there is any at all.

I am not an investment professional. I do invest in stock and some other assets to create passive income through dividends and to build a safety net. I don’t make the time-commitment for in-depth research. I merely want to avoid dumb decisions.

Lists of backlinks, manually made or automatically generated, don't reveal the context. That's terrible for a growing archive.

Learn how the Zettelkasten works as a system, what a Zettel is made of, and how to grow an organic web of knowledge.

The Zettelkasten Method seems to get more and more popular. With popularity of methods there always comes a problem: Overzealous Orthodoxy. Some people, for various reasons, try to state what a Zettelkasten is and what not.

If you have a blog, you can use it to get fast feedback for your long form writing through Zettelkasten notes.

Folgezettel and Structure Zettel use the form of hierarchy: Folgezettel use a single one, Structure Zettel use multiple. Folgezettel can lure you into collector's fallacy, though, when you postpone making connections meaningful.

@diogenes, a student of philosophy, psychology and history in Vienna, asked some questions on the forum. I’d like to elaborate a bit on that. There will be specific use cases for the Zettelkasten Method. The method itself is a meta method of knowledge work. It translates what we understand of knowledge acquisition into basic actions that can be incorporated into any (knowledge work) workflow. Here, I will show a couple of applications to a more specific case.

In a Zettelkasten – if done correctly – there will emerge layers of evidence. These layers represent the necessary processing steps from data to knowledge. It is very rare that raw data is put into the archive. You can do it. But normally, you will process the data outside your archive. So I will ignore this possibility. The three layers are:

When I search in my archive for the tag #diet I get really annoying results. I don’t only get notes on diet. I get notes on carbohydrates, insulin sensitivity and many other. “Why is that a problem?”, you might ask. “All the above topics are relevant for diet, aren’t they?” No, and here is why.

Our reading habit is one of the corner stones of our knowledge work habits. Reading is the most efficient way to create an influx of information that can transform into knowledge. Therefore, we should devote some thought and energy in the optimization of our reading habits.

A Zettelkasten is neither a neatly structured filing system for notes easy to access nor a turmoil deep sea generating ideas out of the ununderstandable chaos. There are three layers in my archive which emerged from the years of working with the Zettelkasten Method. I didn’t plan them in advance. It rather was an organic process.

A buffer note is a note that is like a specific container of notes that you will use later. They buffer the gap between note production and assignment of notes to projects. I came up with these kind of notes when I had written a couple of books but still wrote more about the same topic and was sure that I would be making a second edition.

Hello dear knowledge workers, I just want to announce another win for the Zettelkasten Method. I successfully published a new book, called Lebenswandel: Reflexion und Analyse. In English, it should be translated to “Way of Living: Reflection and Analysis”. It is a very comprehensive overview on designing and thinking properly about one’s lifestyle. Here is a rough translation of the blurb:

Fiddling with the details of IDs, and discussions about Folgezettel and whether they are an integral part of the method or just a compensatory solution for a physical Zettelkasten is fun and part of the constant improvement.

I am a huge proponent of not having any overview. The reason for that is the self-selective nature of the need for an overview. The need for a reasonable amount of overview can become a fetish which not only is not only unnecessary but even harmful for your productivity and creativity.

In my opinion, Nassim Taleb’s most important idea is the concept of Antifragility. Here is his three-concept-model: Fragile means that something doesn’t like volatility and variability. In short: It doesn’t like to be touched. If you send something fragile via mail you write fragile on it so to say: Do as little as possible with it.

If you work with the Zettelkasten Method you have to deal with a lot of reading. It is obvious that it is often not very obvious what to include into your archive and what not.

If you are familiar with the latest research on Luhmann’s original Zettelkasten you already know that his first Zettelkasten is not lost. That’s right: he had two archives over the years. Somehow, a rumor did arise that he lost his first Zettelkasten. It was said that he had to start a new one because of that.

I follow a principle that Ido Portal put nicely into words: Principles are higher than techniques. Principles produce techniques in an instant. —Ido Portal

Let’s go really basic: What is a Zettel? A Zettel is a note that is part of the archive of your Zettelkasten. You create it to contain knowledge for later use. The answer to “How do I compose a Zettel?” is simple:

Christian told you how a morning routine can improve your productivity already. Now, it is my turn to show you my morning routine. I begin with its development but will end with the connection to productivity and the Zettelkasten Method. So, hang on!

Some of you guys asked for more practical articles about the Zettelkasten Method. So here we go. I use two different tags: some are in the header and some are right in the text body. Here is an example Zettel about the problematic implications of a materialistic view on the human mind.

Hi folks, I am happy to announce that I finished the first draft of the Zettelkasten Method Book in German. It turned out to be shorter than I thought. At this moment, I have no clue what the word count is, but did turn out not to be the behemoth I expected it to be.

Considering the tech-heavy approach to knowledge work most people advocate nowadays, the imperative to use a real notebook may sound a little bit strange.

If you not only take notes but also edit them before you put them into you archive (hopefully a Zettelkasten), you will save energy and time, and preserve sanity. It will also enhance the clarity of your writing in general.

A proper Zettelkasten should be like a second mind, almost a person on its own. I am not there, yet. My buddy, the Zettelkasten, surprises me a lot but he needs to be filled with a couple thousand more Zettels.

In this post I try to dig into the nature of a Zettel. When philosophers speak about the nature of something they refer to its most basic qualities. If you substract one of those you would have something different.

In my last post A Life-Long Writing Project on Writing – and My Anxiety I said that I wrote a (small) book on writing while researching it. In this post I’ll present the method which led to this book.

The first “first draft” I ever finished was a short-ish ebook about writing. I tend to be very heavy on research with my projects. As I realized that my Zettelkasten archive already contains content worth several books, I started to research on how to write a book.

Time is the most important asset we have. That is one of the core principles of my approach to productivity. At the same time I am a bad investors when it comes to time.

Call me Ishmael. This is my first post on Zettelkasten.de, and which quote would be more appropriate to introduce myself? My real name is Sascha Fast by the way.

So you are a knowledge worker? This means 90% of your work is about dealing with words. Blogger, writer, journalists – the biggest chunk of work is writing. “Writing” is just a short term for producing words.