For this year’s anniversary of our app, The Archive, we want to show our gratitude to our amazing community by rolling out exclusive discounts for a limited time. Mark your calendars and don’t miss out on these fantastic deals: Day 1: Enjoy a whopping 75% discount on Friday, March 15th UTC+1

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Dear Zettlers, we are happy to announce the LIVE workshop: Unlock your Integrated Thinking Environment with the Zettelkasten Method! By mastering the Zettelkasten Method, you’ll gain the most powerful tool to tackle modern knowledge problems. Whether you aim to become a lifelong learner, produce high-quality content, develop innovative solutions, or stay ahead as an early adopter, this workshop is for you!

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We’re excited to announce that The Archive now supports image import, making it easier than ever to add visuals to your notes. Check out this video to see our new image management features in action:

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The Archive is ready for Apple’s latest version of macOS, available since the start of this week. We recommend you wait with upgrading to macOS 13 Ventura until 13.1 comes out, if you haven’t already, because the initial .0 releases often ship with annoyances or bugs that get sorted out in minor updates a couple of weeks later.

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"The things you own end up owning you." (Fight Club) -- The following is taken from the introduction to the second edition of the German book on the Zettelkasten Method.

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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. Check out the GIF teaser for Will’s 10-minute YouTube demo: Wills’ demonstration basically goes like this:

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@lucaschultz on the forums shared an alternative icon for The Archive for free for everyone to use. This came out of nowhere and was a pleasant surprise: It’s really cool that Luca poured in the time and work to create “fan art” for our app! Luca even published the .sketch source files, so you can generate and tweak the icon further! The icon set is published under a CC-BY-4.0 license, so you can do what you want with it, provided you mention the original author.

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This week marks 3rd year of The Archive being available in public. In March 2018 we published the final release. To celebrate this anniversary, we have a special treat for you to share the joy with friends! We asked ourselves what there is that we could give back to show our appreciation of the community. What is even better than receiving a gift from someone? Well, giving a gift!

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Since this week, The Archive v1.6.0 is available. The coolest feature addition is our new image preview. It works with tons of image formats out of the box. It shows a preview of a PDF’s title page if you use a PDF file path instead of an image file path.

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This little snippet is from the section One Sentence Summary in the chapter How to Write Good Notes. You will read from other sources that a Zettelkasten is idiosyncratic. It can hardly be understood by another person. The reasoning is that you write in your own Zettelkasten in such a way that only you can really understand. But the thought of the future self does not allow such a weak position: You are not yet who you will become. The future self is someone other than oneself. Technically, we always write for someone other than ourselves. It is difficult to be understood – even by yourself. If you write in such a way that you can be understood by as many other people as possible, there is a high probability that you will understand yourself later, too. In the span of two decades we all (hopefully) develop considerably. We are not just a little bit different. We are (hopefully) a completely different person. Arrange your Zettelkasten in such a way that anyone could operate it.

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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. Most notably, you can now hold the Cmd key when you click on links to open them in a new tab, just like in a web browser. And a lot of you mouse-less nerds will enjoy the ability to jump between links in a note with a shortcut (Ctrl-Tab by default), and open the link under the cursor (Ctrl-L). This can speed up navigation within your archive a lot!

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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”.

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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. Multiple windows were an oft-requested feature since the early beta. The benefit is obvious: you can write a note, then search for a note to link to in a new tab without losing the context of the note you were writing.

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We’re proud to announce the latest big update to The Archive! It adds browser-like navigation, so you can get back to the results of an old search quickly. This will be super useful in your workflow, especially when you often get lost in a rabbit hole. When you’re done following links, hit the back button to get to your starting point. No need to remember what exactly you did search for; no need to keep note IDs in the clipboard to get back to the start.

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We plan to release The Archive on Thursday, March 15th, early in the day in UTC. So if you wake up anywhere in the U.S. that day and the sun is up, it should be online.

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Hi folks,

I just want to announce that the first rough draft of the second edition of the book is ready. I wrote it completely from scratch and added a lot of learned lessons by myself and through the communication with other knowledge workers.

It is still in German but fear not: Its content will be the basis for an online course which takes you step by step through all the content. And … it will be in English! (And polished, too, so you don’t have to suffer from my pathetic English.)

Big advancements are coming you way.

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.

Not much more to add, I guess! You probably know how discussion forum software works, so please remember to be as polite as you always are on these grounds, and feel free to ask questions and tell us about what you do!

http://forum.zettelkasten.de/

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. Until then, you are, as always, very welcome to join the beta list: http://zettelkasten.de/beta/

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I’ve updated this website a bit. Apart from minor visual tweaks (icons!), the highlights include:

• The navigation now includes other cornerstone pages!
• There is a new Zettelkasten Live overview with the calendar and important links to watch us talk.
• I finally added a list of guest posts to highlight the amazing community contributions! The blog archive now also highlights them. This was long overdue, sorry!

Oh, and Sascha and I scheduled the next Zettelkasten Live episode to upcoming Thursday, Feb. 16th, 4:00 p.m. UTC+1! We collected a ton of questions and I don’t know where we’ll start, yet. Thanks for sending your questions to us!

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:

• Create a Zettelkasten for your Notes to Improve Thinking and Writing
• The Collector’s Fallacy
• Building Blocks of a Zettelkasten
• The 2 Forms of a Zettel Note

Sascha’s next post is in our extensive review loop already, by the way, so stay tuned.

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

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.

You can buy the book on various locations:

• iBooks Store
• Kindle Store
• PDF, ePub, and kindle files directly from me

Also take a look at the Productive Writer’s Bundle where I participate with the Word Counter for Mac this November.

Since I’m trying to make a living of my work, it’d be awesome if you shared this with friends and on social media to support me and my writing.

Who would’ve thought Sascha finishes the German edition before I get the English manuscript done?¹ 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:

Staying on top is key to manage knowledge and information. It’s important to be quick and have a flexible process you can trust to achieve this.

The Zettelkasten Method is that flexible technique to deal with knowledge in an individual way. You can realize the principles with a few keystrokes without having to learn complex or expensive software.

The Zettelkasten Method is second to none in its power and simplicity. Your Zettelkasten will become the almost invisible helper throughout your day and life.

Buy on amazon.de (German)
Buy on amazon.com (International)

So that’s the reason we’ve been so quiet lately. Sascha was busy writing the book, while I was proof-reading and doing other stuff. There’s a lot of cool stuff prepared for the blog already, but we just didn’t come about finishing it as of late.

For those of you who can’t read German, peek through our overview to get started with the Zettelkasten method today.

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.

The overview now contains a dedicated section on that.

So far we have:

• How many Zettelkästen should I have? The answer is, most likely, only one for the duration of your life. But there are exceptions to this rule.
• Don’t use categories. Use tags instead.
• “What should my first note be?” – it doesn’t matter. Just get started.
• Set links between notes. Full-text search on its own provides not enough information. Connections will do, especially in the long run.
• “When should I start a new note?”
  • Also read “Trust the process”, an essay.
• You have to interpret your sources and then rely on your own thoughts henceforth to get the maximum benefit. Collecting information does not increase your knowledge.
• Use outlines to start with the first draft of your writing project.
• Then ease into writing by adding Zettel notes to the outline, pasting their contents in.

Please tell us in the comments what you always wanted to know, where you struggle, or what you think a beginner should know.

Hi folks,

I am very happy to announce that the second draft of the German Zettelkasten Method book is ready to get revised by Christian. I included extensive advice on productivity as a last chapter.

Now it is Christian’s turn to revise. Then, after a last checkup, I will be able to publish the German Version! At that point, it will be the third publication of mine. So I hope that there will be very few reasons to delay the release.

If you missed the first post, have a look, you can find a table of contents there.

– Sascha

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. Here is the preliminary table of contents (translated):

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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.

With this move, the list of tags has grown tremendously overnight. And I hope the tags became more useful to you, since now there’s much more content available.

I hope you enjoy rediscovering the stuff I wrote years ago. Now it should be easier for all of us (including me) to find out where to look for Zettelkasten-related posts. It’s here.

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. We quietly modified our site navigation: instead of “book”, it now reads “products”. That’s because our scope has widened. As of yet, there’s not a lot to see below that heading. You can expect this to change before spring.

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Hi, I’m Christian, and I’m prone to forget things. To deal with my forgetfulness, I have learned to install useful habits and techniques into my life. I believe you have to have a working task management in place which watches your back while you do hard work, like researching and writing. Task management is there to keep real life at bay. You need both to succeed. My journey as a knowledge worker and writer began when I finally got stuff done.

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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. I am, first and foremost, a practicing philosopher. That means that I try to put everything I believe into practice.

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Today, I’m thrilled to announce the next step in the Zettelkasten platform. I offer two exciting ways to contribute to the overall project: a central tools collection, and river of news. This way, we can create a unified base where the online discussion is aggregated so that everyone can follow easily. It will be a useful resource for anyone who wants to find out more about knowledge management and implementing the Zettelkasten method.

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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.

I talked to my pal Sascha about my concerns who has plenty of experience as a writer. He’s running a thriving German blog about nutrition and healthy lifestyle called ImprovedEating which I can only recommend because of the genuine research he’s providing. His blog is a platform to get feedback for the vast amount of research material for the upcoming book he’s writing for about a year now.

The point is: Sascha is a blogger, a book author and a Zettelkasten user. Without a Zettelkasten, he wouldn’t be able to manage all the material he’s researched so far. Of course I wanted him to give me some feedback.

We considered the vast amount of notes on maintaining a Zettelkasten both of us collected through the years. In the end, we decided to create an information product together, that is: a book.

Thanks to our efficient note-taking method, the book will be available soon for feedback from early adopters. I’m pretty excited about this project and I’ll definitely keep you in the loop!