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The system
Ideas-management method/system, optimised for learning and recall.
Zettelkast = notebox
It's a filecard-based hypertext system, createded by Niklas Luhmann, for connecting ideas together. Note the emphasis on the importance of the connection between ideas, at least as much as the atomic ideas themselves.
Features
- The
Zettel is the atomic unit of the Zettelkast.
- A note whose UID is the one-line summary, and whose body is the complete thought, including hyperlinks to references.
- Contains a single thought.
- Should be linked to as many other things as are relevant, especially other Zettels.
- A
Hub Zettel is an organising Zettel, which makes for a useful jumping-off point for a topic.
- A
Structure Zettel describes the relationship between a few other Zettels, making higher-level connections visible.
Claimed benefits
- Improved connectivity of thoughts.
- Productivity improvement.
- Partly through decreased friction.
- Reduce wasted effort.
- Makes it easier to find the stored information in future.
- Increases the complexity of tasks you can tackle.
- Scales better than regular note-taking.
- A growing pile of notes is harder to find your way around.
- Makes your writing easier, smoother, more coherent and more convincing.
- To a degree, it involves pre-cooking your lines of thought.
Notes on the system
- It's crucial to state (or restate) each idea in your own words, even if it makes most sense to include a verbatim quote in the body text.
- This improves both comprehension and retention.
- It seems best to have an intermediate step between capturing an idea, and recording it in the Zettelkast. If that includes a long enough period of time to properly digest the idea (but not so long that it loses clarity) then so much the better.
- It underscores the importance of having reference resourcetypes, e.g.
Books for making bibliographic references.
- It's important to hyperlink to references from within the body text, in addition to any RG relationships to those resources, to provide context and meaning for the relationship between the things.
- Remember that the relationship between two things is not inherently symmetrical.
Potential Webcat implementation
Zettels resourcetype
- The UID is the one-liner for the thought itself.
- The body-text contains the full thought, and hyperlinks to other things - especially to other Zettels.
- Relationships to other resourcetypes:
BUILDS_ON and SUPPORTS other Notes- ?
CONNECTS_TO other Notes
- What relationships to other resourcetypes?
The conceptual difference between Zettels and Wikipages is that a zettel contains a single idea (a conceptual atom) whereas a wikipage is more of a narrative connecting several things together and/or giving broader or more detailed coverage of a topic.
RG's relationships mean there's no need for a separate References section in a Zettel.
RG's existing Tags will be valuable for organising Zettels.
Things to look up
- BibTeX format for recording/representing bibliographic references in plain-text format.
References and resources
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