Tomas Vik has a very nice post introducing the Zettelkasten concept. He says that rather than spending hours researching the Zettelkasten idea, you can just read his post and get a good introduction. I especially liked his section on the slip-box method.
The TL;DR for the slip-box method is:
- Make notes as you read: The most important point here is to write the notes in your own words. Doing that forces you to understand the material
- Write atomic, self-contained, concise, permanent notes
- Link the notes together
- Tag the notes: The important thing here is to use tags that capture the concept that you think you will want to retrieve the note by.
The other useful aspect to Vik’s post is his software recommendation. He says that the best bet for most people is Zettlr. It uses Markdown for recording notes and stores them in separate files. It’s open source and works on Linux, macOS, and Windows. If you’re not an Emacs user, Zettlr seems like a good solution.
If you are an Emacser, there’s Org-roam, which is getting very good reviews. As I said before, I’ve installed it but still haven’t found time to configure it or move my (very few) notes over to it. The nice things about the Zettelkasten idea is that you can implement it in many different ways, including the original method of writing the notes on index cards and storing them in a box. That’s where the term “slip-box” came from. Slip-box, in turn, is a translation of the original German term, “Zettelkasten.”
If you’re at all interested in Zettelkastens, Vik’s post is definitely worth your time.