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💡 The Big Idea: Zettelkasten Isn’t Just for Nerds

The zettelkasten concept swept the PKM world by storm several years ago with the release of How to Take Smart Notes by Sönke Ahrens. This is where I first came across the story of Niklas Luhmann, who published over 70 books and 400 scholastic articles during the course of his career.

He credited his prolific output to his unique zettelkasten notes system, which consisted of a “slip box” where he kept index cards that contained his ideas.

As I thought about how to implement this analog idea in a digital world, I fell down a rabbit hole. I made things WAY too complicated, then dialed things way back as I crafted a PKM system that actually worked for me. Eventually, I completely left the idea of zettelkasten by the side of the road.

Recently, I realized I may have thrown the baby out with the bathwater. So I recently revisited the topic to see what (if any) elements of zettelkasten had real practical PKM value.

TL;DR - there’s some good stuff here. It’s easy to overcomplicate, but there are some powerful ideas here for people who want to make more of their notes and ideas.

So in this newsletter, want to share with you a few of the important ways I think the concept of zettelkasten can actually help you when you’re crafting your own PKM system.

Taking & Making Notes

There’s a very important difference between note-taking and note-making:

• Note-taking = capturing information into your PKM system
• Note-making = extracting value from that information by giving it context

A good PKM system will embrace both.

Note-taking is important for capturing what resonates. This gives you the mental Lego bricks you need to make something new.

But just capturing that information doesn’t translate to more or better ideas. Note-making is important because it helps you see how those pieces fit together to make something new.

Making Connections

One of the methods you can use when note-making is making connections with other notes. These bidirectional links are at the heart of connected notes apps like Obsidian & Tana. More than just a wikilink, these links can be followed from either direction and allow you to “browse” your notes and discover new connections between them.

The thing is, not all connections are created equal.

This is why I’m not a fan of automatically creating links in your notes. If you’re not careful, you can end up with a big digital ball of notes that is closer to a giant knot than it is to a connected web of ideas.

But as Bob Doto says in his book A System for Writing, relationships between your notes are what give them their value.

So how should you approach making connections?

With intention.

Make sure that each connection you make means something.

One of the ways that Bob recommends you do this is that you develop notes “in light of” and “in spite of” each other.

I like this approach a lot.

When you develop notes “in light of” other notes, you find ways that they link together as you construct your own thoughts on a topic. And connecting notes “in spite of” other notes helps you reinforce those connections by deciding where and why your thinking differs.

It reminds me a lot of the synotpical reading idea from How to Read a Book by Mortimer Adler, where he recommends considering the ideas from books you read in relation to one another.

Which leads to the idea of zettelkasten (and some very strong opinions being shared online).

Zettelkasten & Folgezettel

To be honest, I’ve never really cared for the idea of Zettelkasten much. After the initial excitement died down, it felt to me like a lot of unnecessary complexity. But Bob Doto is starting to kindle my interest in it again, and after seeing the examples that he used in his book, I think I understand now how this could be useful for me.

Basically, Bob keeps an outline of his notes based on note titles that alternate numbers and letters to keep related ideas together. For example, the note 2.1 Apples might have notes that follow like 2.1a McIntosh Apples or 2.1b Apple pie is delicious. These notes aren’t necessarily connected, other than both of them being located under the 2.1 Apples note.

The important thing here is that they are not in semantic order. And this is the thing that tripped me up before because my outline-trained brain wants them to be 😂 There’s supposed to be an element of chaos. A good PKM system will help you harness it, not eliminate it.

I’m not sure I’m sold on using this specific approach just yet. But there’s a related concept known as Folgezettel which refers to follow-up notes that I liked a lot.

Whenever Bob adds a note to his zettelkasten, he always adds a link to another note. This gives you some context when you come across the note again by helping you know “where do I go from here?” It takes a little more time when adding notes to your system, but I believe it primes the pump when you are working with your ideas.

I think this is pretty genius, and I want to start doing this myself. I can definitely see the value of adding forward facing links when I create my own atomic notes.

Do You REALLY Need a Zettelkasten?

It’s easy to read a book about zettelkasten and decide “this just isn’t for me.” I’ve personally done it several times 😂

And I never really understood why until Bob shared this line in his book:

In that one line, Bob nailed what I didn’t know I didn’t like about the zettelkasten conversation:

Good communication isn’t about how many words you can crank out. It’s about how well you can distill your ideas.

Quantity often leads to quality. Except when it doesn’t. And I think if you just try to use a zettelkasten to crank out a bunch of words, it won’t.

🔥 My hot take: Zettelkasten (like a lot of AI tools) can help significantly when you get started, but you still need a human touch to make something worthwhile.

Which is ultimately what I appreciate about Bob’s book so much. He’s a great writer, and you can tell he cares about the craft.

Ultimately, PKM is very personal. You have to craft your own system. What works for me (and what works for Bob) may not work for you.

But if you (like me) had kind of written off the whole idea of Zettelkasten because it seemed too prescriptive, I encourage you to think about it again and see if there are elements of it that might help your productivity and creativity workflows.

You don’t need to be a nerd to get value from the intentional connections between your notes and ideas.

😎 Something Cool: A Giphy Plugin for Obsidian​

I probably like gifs way too much. I’m always the one who ends up dropping one into a group message thread. I even occasionally include them in my email newsletters. But adding them is kind of a pain because I have to go to the Giphy website and search for the one I want, copy the right version, then go paste it in the right app.

So I was thrilled to see a Giphy plugin get released for Obsidian this week.

It’s a little bit of a pain to install it because you need a Giphy API key, but you can get one for free via the webiste. Just log in to your Giphy account and go to developers.giphy.com to create one.

If you, like me, think a gif is worth a thousand words, you should probably check out this plugin.

📚 Book Notes: A System for Writing by Bob Doto

This is the book that got me to take another look at zettelkasten. And unlike every other book I’ve read on the topic, I really enjoyed this one!

Bob Doto is someone I’ve known about for a while, but I wasn’t very familiar with his work. When the PKM world started buzzing about his new book, I started to dig a little deeper and watched some interviews Bob had done on YouTube. I liked the way Bob thought about PKM, and by the time his book came out I couldn’t wait to read it.

Spoiler Alert: I wasn’t disappointed. It’s really good. If you are looking for a zettelkasten primer that’s actually useful (gives tangible examples on how to use it), pick up this book.

And if you want to download my mind map book notes, click here.

— Mike

P.S. Done-For-You Vault Update: I had some back and forth with a Library member who helped me see another project management problem that a pre-configured vault could potentially solve. So, I’m currently working on building out a project template with Task & Dataview queries that can pull in all related project materials into a single project note. I’m pretty excited about this one 🙂 After this, I need to finish up a few of the accompanying course lessons, and it should be just about ready to go! I leave for London & the Relay 10th Anniversary Show TODAY (😱), so the plan is to launch this when I get back sometime in August. If you want to join the waitlist and be the first to know when it’s ready, click here.