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.

We celebrate the app anniversary with a three-day discount run.

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 Archive now supports image import via drag and drop and copy and paste, making it easier than ever to add visuals to your notes.

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.

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.

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.

How to make principles of roguelike RPGs and self-imposed constraints work for you when using a Zettelkasten.

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.

My goal is twofold: (1) I hope to motivate those who prefer paper-based thinking systems, and (2) I hope to present an alternative perspective for those who use digital Zettelkasten systems. I hope my perspective will add one or two valuable insights you can add to your Zettelkasten workflow (even a digital one).

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.

Austin Ha compared Folgezettel and structure notes using tools of cartography, providing replicable example notes (download at the bottom).

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

Last week, free and open source knowledge management package org-roam was updated to version 2. org-roam is an Emacs package (or “plug-in” as we normies would call it) that adds Zettelkasten features to connect small pieces of knowledge.

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.

Stephan Bogner (@st_phan in the forums) shared a neat and free web tool with the community the other day, a link preview generator. It creates image previews of a website from a link. The result is optimized to be embedded into your notes without taking up too much space.

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.

Luca Schultz created a superellipse app icon for The Archive and shares the result for free, eventhe .sketch source files. Enjoy!

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.

To celebrate the 3rd anniversary, everyone who bought the app can claim 1 additional free license!

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.

See how to use a webcam and image preview to connect the real world with your notes

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.

Here’s a highlight from the forum from recent days. User @zappino4 asked: I am trying to understand the relationship between literature notes and permanent notes. My doubts are the following:

Paul Ryley (@pryley on the forums) whipped up an amazing Alfred macro collection for The Archive. – Huuuuge thanks go out to Paul for taking the time to working with The Archive better for Alfred users!

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.

TextMate is a free, open-source macOS text editor that we mention on this site since forever. It is also damn good at navigating files in a big folder. So it’s a good alternative to dedicated Zettelkasten software.

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.

The dominating topic of this month is COVID-19. Nevertheless, The Archive is celebrating. We don’t let pessimism grip us and carry on. Last week, on March 15th, was The Archive’s 2nd anniversary. Just like we’re all supposed to not celebrate big birthday parties or gather for festivities in general, this year’s app anniversary is toned way down as well. Here’s to what has happened in the past year.

At the turn of the decade, David B. Clear wrote a summary about all things Zettelkasten, called “Zettelkasten — How One German Scholar Was So Freakishly Productive”.

@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.

Please welcome Gerrit Scholle, aka gescho from the forums! Gerrit kindly took the time to write up his recent thoughts as a self-contained blog post, with colored pencil drawings and all! Enjoy.

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.

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:

This day a year ago, The Archive became publicly available for sale! To celebrate, we chopped 50% off of the regular price for 5 days. You can now also purchase a license for a friend, colleague, family member, or your favorite pet by using the new Gift Purchase option in our store.

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.

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.

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.

nvALT’s Markdown preview uses a browser to display HTML output of your note. That enables you to include a lot of modern web technology in your note previews. Mermaid is such a thing: it’s a JavaScript library that renders flow charts from plain text graph definitions.

If you paid attention to the comments feed of the past couple of months, you will know Nick already. He’s tinkering with interesting plain text stuff – I won’t spoil anything right now; I hope Nick will some day show us the power of plumber, instead.

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.

I managed my writing ideas in a to-do list for years. Since I follow the principles of the Getting Things Done methodology, a book idea was the perfect candidate for a “someday/maybe” project. That’s a project which you can prepare with anything from the top of your head without much real planning. You don’t have to follow-up on it anytime soon if you don’t want and thus defer taking any action until later. You can have ideas now and execute them later, whenever you wish.

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.

Say you start with a fresh Zettelkasten or you learn more about an existing topic. You write your note and expand the text – and then you ask yourself this: should I create a new Zettel? Should I split this up? Can I attach this detail there?

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.

The Zettelkasten note archive is the storage of your knowledge. The Zettelkasten Method is an ideation tool, though. Using your Zettelkasten should help remember stuff and spark new ideas which will be stored as Zettel notes again. This process is fruitful and potentially never-ending. All that sounds nice, but naturally you have to start somewhere. How do you start working with your Zettelkasten? What’s the best first note?

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.

Today DutchPete, one of the most avid commenters on this blog, will help us fill the gap in software reviews for Windows by talking about OneNote as a Zettelkasten note archive. OneNote is part of the Microsoft Office family and thus available for a lot of different platforms, too, so this is not strictly speaking a PC-centered review. Now let’s see which conventions and techniques make DutchPete productive.

After the awesome discussion of Sascha’s latest blog post, I meditated about all the different kinds of ties between notes. Here’s what I came up with.

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

In the age of lightning fast full-text search, what are links in the archive of your notes good for? In short, search queries are deterministic means to get to Zettel notes: they produce the same results every time. Links are hand-picked references. The idea that makes you create a link is unique, and so is the resulting link. It’s much more personal and thus better suited to help you think.

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:

Erik Pfeiffer joins us today to write about his experience with the well-known Zettelkasten application by Daniel Lüdecke. Read the full article to get to know the good and the bad from Erik's point of view and why he switched to a plain text approach later.

Dan Sheffler, who you might know for his valuable comments on this site already, has an interesting workflow: first, he captures ideas in a study log while reading; then, he picks the gems and writes Zettel notes later.

When you start with a Zettelkasten, you may feel hindered by the plethora of options. Paper or computer? Which application should I choose? Which categories should I create? (Hint: none) How many archives do I need for my projects?

I’ve made a lot of progress using Evernote for my term paper. As announced, I want to share the progress with you so you can see how things develop. Turns out, Evernote doesn’t offer publicizing of notebooks any more. Bummer. So I want to do two things today: share the details of the progress and invite you to the notebook privately.

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!

I have picked up a habit which improves my well-being and helps me focus on the important parts in my life. It’s a daily review habit. I have tried to install this habit a few years ago already but failed miserably. A huge factor for my success in sticking to this habit is that I have a working morning ritual installed already. With the existing routine as a foundation, I simply had to attach this small habit and things were good.

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.

A blog post called “Designing a Personal Knowledgebase” caught my attention today. In it, Alex tells us how he’s struggling. In his worflow, he extracts information and stores it in his note archive, but he can’t seem to make much use of it.

I had a great idea this weekend: for the ongoing challenge I started last summer, I’ll take notes in a public Evernote notebook. Of course I will feed my real Zettelkasten note archive with everything I find, but additionally, I’ll put a translated note into Evernote. This way, I’ll end up with a project-focused Zettelkasten, as opposed to my all-encompassing private knowledge management archive, so we can discuss details of the workflow with that sample archive in the future.

A friend of mine recently asked for help with getting started. It was very hard for him to overcome initial uncertainty: how do you know you’re sufficiently prepared to start filling your note archive? Which categories should you prepare before you begin?

My MacBook isn’t going to recover, so I switched to an iPad for mobile writing and development. I found the one and ultimate application to access my Zettelkasten note archive on the go, while also being able to write long-form blog posts or proof-read texts from 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.

Manfred has left a comment on his blog about my criteria to review apps a while ago. This made me reflect on the importance of note connections and their role in being a successful learner, whatever that means.

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.

In search for the perfect software application to manage a Zettelkasten note archive, surprisingly, I have become the tool I was looking for. Here’s what you have to do once you settle for the important things and let go of false feature needs.

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.

I released a book two weeks ago. It’s called “Exploring Mac App Development Strategies” and it’s available for $9.99 on Leanpub. Today, I want to share with you the process of its creation.

Today we host our good friend Marko as he tells us of the basic note-taking capabilities of DEVONthink and its appliance to the Zettelkasten method. The Zettelkasten method propagates heavy use of the note archive, stuffed with your own interpretations of things you have learned. The user we have in mind usually is a student of humanities, reading a lot and writing a lot. DEVONthink is capable of doing far more than managing notes, though. It can also in part replace a reference manager. Or you may benefit from its ability to deal with large amounts of files when it comes to seeking similarities in original sources. This can become really interesting for historians, for example.

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.

It’s nice to have an idea index in your book’s front pages. Revisiting a text you read years ago and finding an index in the front is a great feeling. Cal Newport recently blogged about idea indexes. I think they are very useful for fiction and personal journals.

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.

The first week of National Novel Writing Month will soon pass. For aspiring writers, this month-long challenge has its difficulties: if you lack the routine more experienced writers undoubtedly employ, reaching 50.000 words by the end of the month will become a tough ride when you are fueled by excitement only.

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.

I’ve got a confession to make. Years ago, I was driven by fear: What if I don’t fully understand what the author of a text is saying? I needed to have a backup plan; I had the strong desire to hold on to 100% of the information in a text. I put original articles into my Zettelkasten, and I pasted pages of books into notes without much commentary. The rationale was, to simply store the original text would be the best way to achieve 100% coverage of the author’s intent. Makes sense, doesn’t it?

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.

An essential principle of a Zettelkasten is its flexibility. From there you can derive maxims like “you should avoid proprietary software”, and “you should use plain text notes to ensure longevity”. That’s why I don’t use a fancy application with lots of spectacular features but the simple nvALT instead. Here’s how I automate note creation to speed up my workflow.

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.

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.

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.

Since I recently released the Word Counter for Mac, I have given more thought to the process of writing itself, especially since your comments on writing vs editing started to pour in. I count my words to increase my productivity as a writer. “But!”, people exclaimed, “How do you account for rewrites, deletions, and correcting grammar?” By dividing composing from revising.

I plan to write a long term paper at University later this year. It’s going to be about the book Justice for Hedgehogs by Ronald Dworkin, and I’ll be able to mostly work with this single source exclusively. Consequently, there won’t be much additional research. How does the Knowledge Cycle apply if you read a book and don’t do research? I invite you to take the “Summer Knowledge Challenge” and find out with me.

It’s important to manage working time. Managing to-do lists is just one part of the equation to getting things done when it comes to immersive creative work where we need to make progress for a long time to complete the project. To ensure we make steady progress, we need to stay on track and handle interruptions and breaks well. A short Knowledge Cycle will help to get a full slice of work done multiple times a day, from research to writing. This will help staying afloat and not drown in tasks.

Brian Crain talked about increasing productivity by tracking progress. To have a continuous metric is both motivating and informative. I, too, buy into the saying that you can only improve what you measure. The corollary is: when you care about something, when you really commit to it, you have to do your best to track it and improve. Writing is one such skill. You become a writer by writing more, and you can shift your identity consciously to make this change stick.

There’s an interesting 8min talk by Brian Crain on optimizing productivity. Brian found tracking his progress useful: I learned that having a continuous metric is enormously motivating since it allows you to continually improve yourself. These small, continuous changes make a huge difference over time.

nvALT sports features which are not so well-known. You can make it work with an image repository to easily include images in your Zettel notes. I don’t make heavy use of the preview at all, but when I do, it’s mostly because I want to take a look at images. For this purpose, I decided to stick to a simple folder structure and customize the preview template to work with it.

Nowadays, I write all of my texts in outlines. This post is no exception. I found this to be a game-changer when it comes to writing, so I thought I’d share the process.

I am working hard on the “Building Blocks” chapter of the Zettelkasten book and I want to finish it first to show it to the public. It covers all parts of the toolkit. To sketch a structure and talk about its components, I need to get the requirements and implementation done before talking about workflow details. Today, I want to show you a birds-eye view of the overarching systems metaphor I’m using in the book.

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.

Here used to be a review about the macOS app “SlipBox”. Sascha and Christian don’t evaluate apps that compete with The Archive anymore for obvious reasons, so this review had to go the way of the dodo.

We finally finished moving into our new apartment. During the ten days it took to arrange the new place, I noticed how strong I’m bound to my routines, and what it means to lose all of them at once for a period of time.

I want to start this series of reviews with a software I’m fairly familiar with. While most things apply to the Notational Velocity base application, I will talk about nvALT exclusively in this review. nvALT is a fork by Brett Terpstra and David Halter of the original Notational Velocity, which was created by Zachary Schneirov, and a few modifications by yours truly. It’s Open Source, free, and very popular.

I’m going to take a close look at applications to find out which are suitable to implement the Zettelkasten note archive. I already talked about reference managers. While reference managers can be switched pretty easily, migrating a database of notes is far from being a trivial task, depending on the software you used in the past. Therefore, we have to chose how to implement the note archive with great care. Here you’ll find my criteria.

I am moving next month, and so I though about getting rid of stuff in my life. There are lots of books I’ve read, but from which I never processed all the notes.

I want to answer the question: Why are unique identifiers useful when you work with a Zettelkasten? The objective of a Zettelkasten note archive is to store notes and allow connections. Both are necessary to extend our mind and memory. As long as the software you use doesn’t provide any means to create links between notes, you have to come up with your own convention. Even if the software did provide such a mechanism, I’d suggest you think twice about relying on it: I want to evade vendor lock-in for my Zettelkasten, and I think you should, too. So let’s assume you don’t care about the software and create your own hyperlink scheme.

As a knowledge worker, you have to learn a lot in your field. The internet is full of information, and there’s the books you just have to know in and out. How do you speed up the process and learn efficiently?

In the last post, I detailed that collecting texts may become a tempting replacement for obtaining real knowledge, but also that collecting in itself doesn’t get us anywhere. I called this the “Collector’s Fallacy”. I think we need to conquer this lazy, stuff-hoarding part of ourselves with good knowledge management habits.

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.

There’s a tendency in all of us to gather useful stuff and feel good about it. To collect is a reward in itself. As knowledge workers, we’re inclined to look for the next groundbreaking thought, for intellectual stimulation: we pile up promising books and articles, and we store half the internet as bookmarks, just so we get the feeling of being on the cutting edge.

A Zettelkasten makes writing texts easy. It encourages you to prepare research and the most of your writing before you compile your first draft. This way you can focus on one task at a time and needn’t sweat about getting through. This works excruciatingly well with longer texts but it’s proven indispensable for any of my shorter writing projects, too.

A Zettelkasten is a device to extend your mind and memory so you can work with texts efficiently and never forget things again. Both permanent storage and interconnectedness are necessary to use the full potential of an archive for your notes. You need a permanent storage for your notes so they can give a cue for the things you want to remember. You also need to manually connect notes to create a web of notes which adjusts to the way your mind works.

How to enter literature references into your notes, and how to configure BibDesk for Mac to do the job in a minimal way.

As I said in my last post, my reading workflow consists of GTD-like phases: collect, process and write. While I wrote about collecting before, this post is about the three phases of processing notes. In the last section you’ll find a few example Zettels I wrote.

My reading workflow consists of phases similar to the phases in GTD: collect, process, write. This post is about collecting. To collect, it doesn’t help to paint your text in all colors of the rainbow. No matter how much you like to use highlighter pens: think about what you want to learn from the text first, and then decide whether marks are really the best tool for the job.