Making sense of Zettelkasten
When I first came across the concept of a Zettelkasten I waved it away as a fad. Actually, no. I didn’t just wave it away. I waded into the deep end, read extensively, joined the community and eventually came to these conclusions:
The emphasis on constantly curating, pruning and connecting notes seemed like too much work. Better suited to academics or researchers who naturally live in their notes.
The emphasis on atomic notes that stick to one idea for each note seemed excessive. Supporting ideas provide context. Should they not occupy the same space?
Finally, the digital version of Zettelkasten felt like old wine in a new bottle. Like I’m rereading Ward Cunningham’s idea of a Wiki or NV’s advice on maintaining one fact per note. At that point I was already using some of the ideas that practitioners of Zettelkasten propose such as unique identifiers, or a single folder for all notes, and it felt like the system was not offering me anything new.
So I stopped there. I already had a decent wiki, and a collection of notes that I could easily surface using search. I didn’t need yet another system, although there was one major difference - The notes in my collection were not all written by me. Most of them I clipped from interesting articles I came across. A zettelkasten is meant to contain ideas in my own words.
A decade has passed since then. I recently became aware of the Zettelkasten again, but this time and it makes sense. Maybe the time away from it has clarified my thinking.
At the time, I misunderstood the nature of a Zettelkasten. I approached it as a note-taking system, which led me to compare it with my existing system. While it technically is a way to take notes, calling it a note-taking system obscures the essential point of a Zettelkasten, which is that the action of regularly working on your notes is the physical equivalent of sorting through your thoughts and refining them.
So anyway, here I am, revisiting my conclusions.
Why spend so much time in it
I realise now that a zettelkasten does not replace my existing collection of notes. It is a different animal altogether. My usual notes are for reference. I only look at my notes when I need to find something that I know is in there. These notes can go untouched or unseen for months.
A zettelkasten on the other hand is a system that requires my complete attention and constant touching. Every new idea added in there has the potential to change, replace, support augment, contradict existing ideas. This means that nothing in there is ever static, you’re constantly rearticulating ideas, redefining statements and so on.
Say I have a note on the German word - Schwerpunkt, which I understand translates to ‘focal point’. A few days later, I realise it is not just a focal point, in the sense of a point that draws your attention, but also means the point at which one concentrates effort. I’d have to go in and clarify what I was trying to say, and update my understanding of the subject.
Moreover, the moment a new idea enters the system, it begs to be connected to pre-existing ones. Why? Because the note is ‘atomic’, which I’ll get to in a moment.
Why keep notes in the same folder
Folders provide a cheap and easy way to create categories. Categories make sense because it lets us lump things that we think belong together, which on the surface of it sounds logical, but it also affects the way I think.
An example.
Notan is a technique used in art that reduces the values (shades of light and dark) in an artwork to just two - black and white. Creating a Notan forces you to think about how readable an image is when it is stripped of mid-tones which provides elements with 3D form and volume.
My entry on Notan left me thinking about another concept buried somewhere in my notes that had a ‘similar flavour’, but I wasn’t sure exactly what it was.
I found it eventually. I was thinking about a theory called Collapsing Choice (CCT), which argues that our brains find it difficult to make a reasonable choice when there are too many options. So it collapses the number of choices into simpler, binary buckets. This makes decisions easier.
What does Notan have to do with CCT? I think I saw Notan as an analogy to CCT because they both involve collapsing choices for controlled decision making. I’m not sure if this connection is meaningful to anyone else but me, but I think it improves my understanding of both ideas.
I think having these notes in one folder promotes this kind of cross-category thinking, even at the risk of category errors.
Why are notes atomic?
The notes are atomic to make them modular. If an idea is modular, it means that I can use it as building material to define other ideas.
So if I have a single atomic entry such as
“Patternicity is a human tendency to find meaningful patterns in random data.”
This idea can become a building block that can fit into a number of different ideas from across disciplines.
I could use it to discuss Leonardo Da Vinci’s advice to artists[^1] to study stains on a wall, and see in them landscapes and faces and animals. Or in a note about Pareidolia as an evolutionary mechanism for survival, or in information theory: patterns as a way to compress information.
The brevity of such notes requires them to hang on a scaffold or a mesh (but not a tree), alongside other notes because they become more meaningful when seen alongside a similar or contrasting note.
Links between notes is what creates this scaffolding. A note can have as many links as it needs. So you start with a note and then follow the link through a series of notes, and depending on the number of links, the pathway can be different each time. It is hard to appreciate the non-linearity of this sort of ’link walking’, until you see your notes as a graph.
The denser collections at the centre are index pages that contain more links that regular notes.
This sort of non-linearity lets me make connections between seemingly unrelated ideas, and lets the strict boundaries between subjects and disciplines, fuzzy.
Building a Zettelkasten
Building a Zettelkasten is not so hard. The most basic implementation of it only requires a text editor, although adding a text expansion software will make it a little easier to generate the unique identifier which is basically the date and time prepended to the file name.
Unlike my regular note-taking method which relies on speed, working on a Zettelkasten is a much more sedate and thoughtful process, and one that can actually benefit from slowing down.
Here is a folder containing my notes. I am using the file explorer to search through them and a text editor to open and edit a note.
While this sort of manual maintenance of the Zettelkasten is possible, there are ways to automate a lot of the mundane organisational and maintenance tasks by using freely available tools such as Logseq, Tiddlywiki or Obsidian. I use Emacs because I’ve grown used to it..
What I’ve learnt so far is that writing in the Zettelkasten requires me to commit to it. It isn’t a fire and forget system like my other note taking system, which now lives in nervous proximity to my newly created Zettelkasten folder.
This commitment is reflected in how much longer it takes to create a note now. Mostly because I write and then rewite until I think I am being articulate enough for future me. It takes effort, and it is also oddly, fun.
I’ll write again in a year or so and let you know if it stuck.