Zettelkasten Explained

I’ve finished reading Sönke Ahrens’ How to Take Smart Notes and, as promised, I’ve started exploring Jethro Kuan’s Org-roam as a way of implementing my own Zettelkasten. I’ve downloaded and installed Org-roam and am currently going over the documentation.

In the mean time, I’ve been doing some further reading on the Kettelkasten concept. I’m really excited about the idea and am looking forward to starting my own Zettelkasten. If you think the concept may be helpful in your own work or would like to find out, David B. Clear has an excellent article that explains the Zettelkasten idea and compares it to other ways of taking notes. He even shows you how to implement an index-card-based Zettelkasten similar to Luhmann’s original.

I don’t want to deep dive into the details of a Zettelkasten in this post but the idea that makes it work is the idea of linking notes that are somehow related. Rather than keeping the notes in some sort of hierarchy, they’re kept in a flat store and linked together by concept. Thus a given note might be linked to several other notes and the links might represent different concepts. The closest familiar idea is probably tags, which the Zettelkasten idea also supports, but tags are too coarse a discriminator. The goal is to start with an idea and be able to find all the notes that are relevant to that idea. You can think of the result as a graph where the notes are the nodes and edges are concepts.

That’s a simplified version, of course, so you should really take a look at Clear’s article if you want a more substantial explanation.

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