(2019-10-19) Kam Zettelkasten

Brian Kam on Zettelkasten?. Despite the sound of the word, I’m finding it a surprisingly good tool for tracking information and thinking.

Hang on, isn’t that just a wiki? But no, it’s more than a wiki — though it can be implemented in one.

Most of the writing about him and his system remains in German. The primary English resource is Sönke Ahrens’ book How to Take Smart Notes (2017). It describes the Zettelkasten system as being akin to GTD, but better suited to knowledge work.

The book views academic/knowledge work as exploratory, in contrast to business, to which GTD is better suited because of business’ tendency towards pre-defined objectives. In that sense, you might say that Zettelkasten is to a wiki what GTD is to a todo list. Both are different ways of thinking about a rather flexible (potentially misused?) underlying tool.

Here’s how it differs from typical wiki usage:

Each “zettel” (aka note) can only contain a single thought. For index cards, that’s a limitation of its physical size.

Massive interlinking

It’s intended to work similarly to your brain, and therefore Luhmann himself viewed using it as more like having a conversation with another consciousness than tool use. There’s a strong emphasis on serendipity of connections.

All this facilitates and encourages thinking directly in writing, so that the thought can be dropped totally, and resumed exactly as it was, picking up the thread from whatever zettel you left it in, regardless of how far you have developed the thinking.

There is a strong focus on spatially arranging the zettels in order to write papers or books.

Zettelkasten! (1mo later)

My current process is to take notes on paper

For reading, I paraphrase every idea I encounter in the text

During conversations, and while listening to podcasts or audiobooks, I also take notes on paper

I then take these paper notes and process (i.e., organise and type) them into a bullet-point list, usually in Zotero. This is equivalent to Luhmann’s literature notes and basically amount to “X says Y in chapter Z

Finally, I go through that list of bullets, and think through how it is connected to what is already in the Zettelkasten, creating new notes and links in the system as I think. This usually involves a third paraphrase and stripping down of the material. The experience really is more like thinking in writing than it is like writing or transcribing.

Since I am using the excellent Gollum, this can be done in any web browser. At the start, I mainly edited through its interface. Lately, however, I have been editing the Markdown text directly

Thirty days in, I have 802 notes

quite frequently I make notes that are basically just bulletpoint links to several related thoughts

I disobediently wrote another script to make an SVG image of it (WikiGraph) using GraphViz.

The biggest benefit seems to be that a wider variety of thinking is closer to the surface of my mind at all times

A second benefit is the serendipity that Luhmann and Ahrens predict. I often find notes that I’d forgotten about, either by a search or by realising that one note connects to another, then finding more links on that note. This produces novel and insightful connections.

Venkatesh Rao (of Ribbonfarm) raised a more serious concern in this 2016 podcast with Shane Parrish (of Farnam Street). He warns against the seduction of densely interconnecting ideas across domains, because it can create mental models so complex that they obscure reality and discourage reality-testing.