Posts from 2026
Fuelling My Top 2% Podcast With 15 Years of Atomic Note-Taking
Dear Zettlers, Currently, I am building a podcast called “Das gute Leben in der Moderne” (“How to Live a Good Life in Modern Times”). When I hit a mere 9 episodes, I got mail (2026-01-13) from podstatus.com that I hit the following rankings on Apple Podcasts:
Rewriting Notes Is Thinking Work, Not Maintenance
I wrote a post that outlines rewriting as one element of how the Zettelkasten Method trains your mind. Rewriting is basically an externalisation of wrestling with an idea. u/UnderTheHole asked on Reddit two very good follow-up questions:
The Cultivation of Knowledge Is the Objective of Knowledge Work
Dear Zettlers, This sentence states perfectly the mechanics of the Zettelkasten as a tool and how to integrate it into one’s overall workflow: The cultivation of knowledge is the objective of knowledge work and productivity workflows facilitate this effort. (Source)
The Friction Fallacy
TL;DR: Friction that increases with system size is an existential threat. Any note-taking or knowledge system whose marginal cost per note rises as the system grows will eventually become unusable, regardless of how beneficial it feels early on. A Zettelkasten must be scale-indifferent. It should remain usable even if flooded with massive amounts of low-quality notes. The “one-million bad notes” thought experiment is a stress test for this requirement.