Zettelkasten

On Developing a Deep Knowledge Work Practice (Comment on Nori’s Blog Post)

Context: Nori wrote an article about quitting the Zettelkasten Method. She clearly tried hard and wrote a thoughtful reflection on her journey. So, I decided to reach out to her and offer some help. We recorded the first session here: Nori’s Zettelkasten Journey and Why She Let It Go. My goal was not to bring her back to the only true way, but to apply general coaching methods.

I asked Nori to write an article reflecting on the changes she made after our coaching sessions.

Here it is: Thinking work play in an overstimulating world

Sketch by Nori Parelius, licensed under CC BY 4.0

There are some aspects that I want to highlight:

Atomicity is the principle of striving for clarity and trying to get to the core of the idea. It’s not about splitting up the ideas into the smallest possible particles. It’s a goal or a process, rather than a prerequisite. As a result, a note can totally start as a dumping ground of everything relevant, and be the space where the actual thinking happens.

This might be one of the major obstacles in fully grasping the power of the Zettelkasten Method. Atomicity wasn’t intentionally called a principle by Christian, but still, it is the correct term. A principle is different from its implementation. I went deeper in this article: Understanding Hierarchy by Translating Folgezettel and Structure Zettel

I have written a lengthy draft about atomicity being a principle already, and I will bring it to a publishable state soon.

Writing in your own words is not about making sure you understand the idea. Rather, it’s a challenge to think about the idea, to expand on it, to develop it, improve it, to add to it in some way.

I don’t think that there is a big difference between trying to understand an idea and thinking about it, expanding on it, developing it, improving it, and adding to it in some way. But I think Nori is on the right track with the implicit framework that is underlying the difference she is aiming at.

Understanding is thought to be a rather observatory type of engaging, while the rest of the verbs indicate an interactive relationship between the person and the idea. Already, I feel the temptation to make a false but nice allusion to the observer problem that many of us might have encountered as Schrödinger’s Cat. But I resist the temptation, while also resisting the temptation to delete this section.

I expanded a section on what “Putting ideas in your own words” means and what each level of “owneness” delivers epistemically in the English translation of the German Zettelkasten Method book for this very reason. There are levels of activity that are associated with the activity of writing in your own words.

My work is almost exclusively about expanding, developing, improving, and adding in some way or another. It is not a methodological trick that I do. It is rather something that I have to do for my work anyway (sneak peek here).

But these are resource-intensive actions. That means that your motivation has to be high enough to justify the expense. This is the reason why I made it a point to talk about the context and the reasons for Nori’s note-taking practice. The Zettelkasten is an engine; the Zettelkasten Method is the manual on how to get the most power out of the engine. But time, energy, and attention are the fuels needed to run the engine. If you don’t have fuel, the idea of putting an idea in your own words seems ridiculous. Your mind will naturally devalue this idea. Naturally, your attention will be attracted to more “efficient” approaches, either skipping the needed input or devaluing the method altogether.

As you can see, even this innocent-looking principle is deeply connected to the psychology of knowledge work. If we don’t look deep, we can’t figure out the why.

I know I just said that the Zettelkasten can be a lot of things, but I, personally, decided not to call my future note-taking a Zettelkasten. The word to me now is both too loose and too loaded. Loose because it can encompass so much, and loaded both with all that is being written about it out there, and my own unfortunate experience.

Nori points out something really difficult. The Zettelkasten Method is indeed both quite loose and quite loaded.

Some reasons for the loadedness:

  • Reductionist presentations. A lot of what you are seeing is the result of a reductionist trying to grasp the essence of the method. Some of these approaches are genuine attempts by people to evaluate the method. Some of these are disingenuous influencers who are exploiting trends in this domain to use content to gain attention and monetize it.
  • It’s too early in the process. Just take a look at the current state of what people are publishing about when it comes to knowledge work. It’s mostly stuff about the technical aspects. Just think about the principle of atomicity. You hear the term a lot, yet you never hear about what this atom thingy is.
  • Influencers have already infiltrated the discourse. I had one exchange with someone who claimed that you don’t need to know what an argument is to capture one. As I asked how, the reply was “Because I have been doing it for 20 years.” I was truly baffled. Yet, this person is talking about atomicity and “single ideas” with great confidence, without even knowing what that means.

Some reasons for the looseness:

  • Zettelkasten work is knowledge work, and knowledge work is diverse. I worked with knowledge professionals from entirely different fields. I advised a physicist on how to use an analogue Zettelkasten, a chemical engineer who worked as a translator between the engineering and marketing departments, a non-fiction author, a scrum master, and many more. I saw and worked on notes about chemical testing, math, fantasy world building, psychology, hard science, humanities, arts, self-development, and much, much more. If you don’t know the framework, you’d be challenged to point to a common method that goes beyond “taking linked notes”.
  • Thinking in principles is less clear-cut than thinking in implementations. I, myself, pointed this out: If the claim is that the Zettelkasten Method makes principles of working with knowledge work actionable, the definition and therefore the boundaries of what a Zettelkasten is and what not, becomes wide. Especially for beginners, this is a problem. Teaching the Zettelkasten Method based on the underlying principles inherits the complexity of the principles of working with knowledge.

To make it easier for my future self to make good decisions, even when she’s deep down some rabbit hole, I need a plan. Or rather, a system. A practice.

This is indeed a very important line of thinking. The Zettelkasten Method isn’t some isolated part that you put in your life. Rather, it is a piece of your overall approach to working with knowledge. You may review these articles to help you with this:

The first step in knowledge work is ingesting information and inputs from outside. While this part doesn’t directly happen inside my note system, it is what sets the tone for all that follows. I have been finding it difficult to deal with the constant, relentless influx of cool and interesting stuff that is the internet. And I doubt I am alone in that.

[…]

The only solution I can see right now to the information overload is to deliberately slow down the flow. I don’t think we have a realistic view of how much information we are able to absorb. Three or four “short” informational videos of 15–20 minutes, tightly edited and fast-paced, will easily hold more information than an average lecture. Regardless of whether the information is useful or important, it is still input that our brains need to process, evaluate and make decisions about.

The following is an excerpt from the English translation of the Zettelkasten Method, which goes in the exact direction:

The Zettelkasten’s active approach counters the problem of modern information inflation—the overwhelming abundance of low-value content.

Information availability is no longer the bottleneck; sense-making and understanding are. With information so abundant, the best use of our time is to identify high-quality sources and engage with them deeply. Rather than wasting time, energy, and attention on countless YouTube videos, blog posts, or superficial e-book skims, select a high-quality source and study it intensively. The most effective way to learn is through active engagement: asking questions, connecting new knowledge to what you already know, experimenting with applications, and integrating insights into your knowledge base. The Zettelkasten is the ideal tool for this.

Many people, however, have a toxic relationship with information overload. They allow themselves to be force-fed by their feeds and subscriptions, with their brains responding by devoting decreasing attention to each source. This reduction in focus is evident even in the short term. We all know the feeling of getting sucked into a social media feed: you start with something intriguing, but within minutes of scrolling, you stop reading and merely skim headlines. It feels awful. The more we expose ourselves to this toxic online environment, the more these bad habits spill into other areas of life, eroding our ability to focus on a book for hours or a topic for weeks.

Instead of addressing this toxic relationship, many seek note-taking systems to compensate for the overload. They gravitate toward tools promising effortless capture. The word “effortlessly” seems harmless, but it reveals a deeper issue: relying on coping mechanisms rather than confronting information overload directly. This avoidance fuels a downward spiral—skimming sources with less attention, jumping to the next, and fostering shallowness, emptiness, and anxiety.

Nori does the right thing by going to a preliminary step. She cleans up her information diet to give herself and her interests room to breathe.

I am finally considering energy while setting up my knowledge-work practice, and realising that it affects everything else. While all activities require energy, strictly speaking, some of them—the good ones—leave you feeling better afterwards than when you started. And I don’t mean the finally-got-that-done kind of better. Rephrasing ideas from books and frantically trying to get to the bottom of my inbox is not one of them. But what is?

There is an ever-present energy-dependent triage that we have to engage with. Do we increase the breadth of our knowledge by reading something new, or do we increase the depth of our knowledge by processing something already read?

Many people complain that they barely remember anything that they read. This is a completely normal by-product of information overload. If you put yourself in a situation of information overload, your mind disengages.

So, if you want to develop more depth, you should consider letting go of the hope to out-maneuver a meaning problem with a technical solution.

And don’t forget to read Nori’s article!

Update 2025-08-19: We are wrapping up three coaching sessions with Nori’s return to the Zettelkasten.