I’m currently reading Sönke Ahrens’ How to Take Smart Notes, a book that describes Niklas Luhmann’s method of taking, storing, and retrieving notes about ideas he thought could be useful later. Luhmann kept his notes on what amounted to index cards and stored them in a wooden box. The idea, Zettelkasten in German, is usually translated as “slip-box” in English. I first came across the idea in this review and summary of Ahrens’ book by Tiago Forte.
Implementing Luhmann’s idea with physical index cards is still possible, of course, but most of us would prefer to use digital methods. There’s a whole site, Zettelkasten, supporting the idea as well as commercial applications such as Roam to help you implement the system.
As soon as I heard about the idea, I thought it would be an ideal application for Emacs and Org-mode. That’s hardly an original insight, of course, and a quick search yielded two excellent posts that discuss it. The first, by Jethro Kuan, describes his note taking work flow using the org-roam package that he wrote as a way to replicate Roam with Org-mode. Most of the post is a sort of précis of the ideas presented in Ahrens’ book.
The other post, How to Make Yourself Into a Learning Machine, describes the system used by Simon Eskildsen, Director of Production Engineering at Shopify. Eskildsen doesn’t use Org—he’s a Vimer—but he’s built his own Zettelkasten. I liked his post because he gives examples of actual notes and how he links them together.
Kuan points to a nice video by Nat Eliason that shows how he uses his (Roam-based) Zettelkasten to pull together an outline for an article he’s writing. It’s very enlightening and shows the power of the Zettelkasten method. It’s 15 minutes, 12 seconds long and definitely worth watching if you’re interested in the Zettelkasten idea.
I’m waiting to finish Ahrens’ book before I try my hand at using the method. It seems pretty straightforward to implement in Org but Kuan found he needed more so I’ll take a closer look at org-roam before I commit any serious effort to the project.