If you don't write, you don't think. How to take notes productively with the Zettelkasten method

2024 Author: Malcolm Clapton | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 03:44

Take short notes at every opportunity and form your personal "Wikipedia" out of them.

There was such a wildly productive German scientist - Nicholas Luhmann, he wrote 77 books and much more. He explained his incredible fertility by the Zettelkasten method (translated from German - "card index"). He did all this on ordinary cards and in handwritten notebooks, and now the same can be done using notes on the phone. Here is a brief essence of the method, as I understand it and even apply it a little.

1. Take short notes on your iPhone for all occasions. I read an interesting article - wrote my own short synopsis. Bad mood - wrote how bad life is. A funny rhyme came to mind - wrote down a quatrain. Met with friends - wrote how it went. Someone immediately dumps it on Twitter, someone just adds it to notes and does not show it to anyone.

2. It is imperative to write consistently, concisely, simply and in your own words.

Powerful thought Luhmann talks about: we only think when we formulate words.

Our main brain is not in the head, but outside - in the language and culture that we have all been creating for thousands of years. I can confirm this. In short, those who do not write do not think.

3. Hence a simple recipe for how to grow smarter: constantly write notes. They say that "you need to think with your hands." Yes, any worthwhile thought is created on paper or somewhere outside, in the process of its “alienation” and discussion, and not at all in the head, as everyone thinks.

4. Further, these notes need to be marked with tags and links to other notes. This can be done in the evening, for example. This creates a network of notes. Your personal Wikipedia.

5. Any new concept or note should somehow fit in with those that already exist, otherwise why is it? For example, you are studying economics and you have come across a new concept of contribution margin. What is this animal, how to remember and apply it?

As the Losers do: they just cram a new concept and then forget it and cannot apply it.

As the excellent students do: they weave a new concept into the network of old concepts, explain the new to themselves through the old. They ask themselves questions like "How does this differ from the usual margin?", "What if so?" Thus, the new concept receives a couple of dozen hyperlinks to the old, already familiar, and also becomes familiar.

6. So, each note is a complete short thought with two or three tags and a couple of links to similar notes in meaning.

7. When several dozen such notes accumulate, you can also add headings or combine them into some general topic, article, note or post. Or combine it into a book.

8. Another interesting thought from Luhmann: nothing is created from scratch.

Any article or book is dozens of accumulated notes that you collected and structured at a certain moment.

If you look at the work of Mayakovsky, many writers or scientists, you can see that they collected their works in exactly the same way, from dozens of notes and drafts, sometimes very short, banal and ordinary.

9. If a beginner tries to sit down and write a book, he is in for a complete failure, because he tries to come up with a complex top-down structure from his head, then by force of will to write something on each item, which is difficult and requires incredible discipline.

At the same time, it is very easy to write using the “bottom-up” method of short notes: there is no structure, you can jump from topic to topic, write only what you are interested in here and now. But if all this is tied into a network (to make a personal "Wikipedia"), then over time you can easily collect several books. So Lumen, in fact, wrote as many as 77 pieces.

10. From a useful toolkit: notes on your phone plus a free application for your computer. Notion is also great. There are also a few specialized tools: Roam Research, DEVONthink.