Forget Forgetting. Build a Zettelkasten.

Hi all! Dan here. Today’s Member’s Only post is written by superorganizer-extaordinaire Adam Keesling. I served as the editor. I’m super excited to have Adam helping out around here, and I think you’ll love what he wrote. Make sure you say hi to him in the comments!

Forgetting what you read?

If you’re anything like me, you’ve experienced a progression of reading that looks something like this. 

After experiencing the joy of learning for the first time — when I learned something on my own — I got addicted to knowledge. I read a bunch of books. Everything I could get my hands on. 

After several weeks and several books, I looked back on the first one I read. What was it about again? I couldn’t remember anything other than the title and one or two central ideas. 

“Sapiens? I loved that book. Great history of, uh, humans. Agricultural revolution was 12,000 years ago and it changed everything. I know, I know —it’s crazy.”

What to do about this? My first solution was active reading.

Active Reading

Active reading allows you to engage with the material you’re consuming at a higher level. A few common techniques: 

• Annotate in the margin to summarize points or raise questions
• Highlight or underline important passages
• Compare what the author is saying to other ideas

There’s a difference between knowing about something and actually knowing something, and active reading encourages the latter. Playing with the material like this not only improves retention, but it also helps you evaluate claims better.

As Superorganizers readers, many of you already participate in some form of active reading. And you might even go one step further by keeping all of the notes you take in a database like Evernote or Notion. 

This is great! But I want to challenge you: could your note-taking system be even better? 

If you’re anything like me, Notion and Evernote leave something to be desired. They aren’t ineffective, but they don’t feel magical either. 

First, it’s hard to find what you are looking for. Thoughts in our brain are associative and it can be hard to find what you are looking for with a keyword search. Search engines aren’t advanced enough yet to detect intention, so we have to make connections on our own. 

Additionally, Notion or Evernote archives become littered with clutter pretty quickly. While writing everything down does improve your thinking, you probably don’t want to keep every miscellaneous note and clarification in your long-term notes.

Finally, it’s just hard to make connections between notes. Searching in Evernote and Notion might return all the articles that mention the word “decision making”, but that’s only partially useful. What else were you thinking about when you read that article from two years ago? Do concepts from that article connect to a different article you read a year ago? How do you nurture those connections?

Enter: Zettelkasten.

What is a Zettelkasten?

The Zettelkasten method is a better way to take notes. The basic idea is this: take notes on cards, review them, then link them together. That’s it. It’s not a complicated system, but it is powerful. 

Over time, this builds an intricate network of your best ideas. As the database gets larger, it even starts to mimic a conversation partner.

The method was developed in the 1960’s by Niklas Luhmann, a prolific German sociologist. 

And prolific he was.

During his lifetime Luhmann produced over 70 books and 400 research articles using over 90,000 notes that interweaved sociology with topics like biology, theology, systems theory, computer science and many others. (You can read more about his work here.)

What made the method so effective?

What Makes the Zettelkasten Method Effective 

The Zettelkasten method makes two things super easy: finding an entry point to vast database of notes, and making surprising connections between notes. You always have somewhere to start and you never know where you will end up. 

The Zettelkasten has an index that lists out all of your tags (and cards associated with each tag.) So if you don’t begin your research with a note in mind, you can glance at your index to find inspiration. You don’t have to brainstorm ideas from scratch and can instead depend on your previous work. 

The other notable feature is that notes in the Zettelkasten are single ideas connected to each other though direct links and tags. Once you get started on a thread, the system will naturally guide you to new territory.

Creating a Zettelkasten is like creating an intellectual time machine. You enter in your current mental state and the machine carries you across time to talk to yourself in the past and future. 

With this method, you can summon ideas on-demand. You actually use your notes because they are both accessible and permanent. 

Instead of relying on your human brain or struggling to dig out a page from your Notion graveyard, build your own Zettelkasten. 

How the Zettelkasten is Structured