The Life-Changing Magic of Zettelkasten
I never thought a change in my note-taking system could ever impact my life in the way it has. It’s only been a year and a half, but I can’t ever see myself going back. Taking notes has always been an important part of my daily life. I’ve always had a note-taking app open, constantly recording things that I wanted to reference in the future or didn’t want to forget. In this traditional note-taking system, every note had to be created or immediately filed away into a single notebook.
Notes I would take would often have a short shelf-life in their usefulness. Usually, in less than a couple of weeks, each note would complete its inevitable transformation into clutter. I would have databases with thousands of notes, but I probably only cared about the 10 most recent notes at any given time. I was used to treating notes the way I learned in school. I had notebooks for certain classes or projects, and any note I added was associated with a specific test or project coming up in the near future. Once that event passed, all of the associated notes lost the majority of their value.
I was introduced to a new philosophy of note-taking by Sonke Ahrens, in his book How to Take Smart Notes. Sonke opened my eyes to the Zettelkasten method, which flipped traditional note-taking on its head.
The moment I realized that the Zettelkasten method had a huge impact on my life was after I consulted my Life Tracker spreadsheet, which was inspired by Jim Collins’ spreadsheet he described during his interview on the Tim Ferriss Show. I used this tracker every day for 8 months. I tracked the number of hours I read or wrote, the number of notes I created in my Zettelkasten, my WHOOP recovery score (how much stress my body was prepared to manage), my strain for that day (how much stress I accumulated in my body), a description of what I did that day, and then my rating for the day on a scale from 1 - 5 (5 being the best).
I began to notice that all of my highest rated days fell into one of two buckets: spending quality time (more than just surface-level chit chat) with close relationships (more than just an acquaintance), and days where I wrote more notes. I grouped my days by the number of notes I wrote and saw a clear relationship between the number of notes and my rating for the day.
0 - 2 notes: 3.6 avg rating
3 - 6 notes: 3.8 avg rating
7 - 10 notes: 4.0 avg rating
11+ notes: 4.6 avg rating
Out of all of the habits and practices that I've incorporated into my life, I believe contributing to and maintaining my Zettelkasten has given me the greatest return out of all of them.
What is Zettelkasten?
Zettelkasten is a note-taking system created by Niklas Luhmann, who was a prolific German sociologist. He wrote more than 70 books and nearly 400 scholarly articles across varied subjects: law, economy, politics, art, religion, ecology, mass media, and love.
The key to the system is that each idea or thought is limited to a self-contained note. Luhmann limited himself to the space of an actual 3x5 notecard. I have a digital system in place but keep to a similar philosophy of shorter self-contained notes.
The biggest differentiator for this system versus other knowledge management systems is that each note acts as a single node that can be referenced, linked, and tagged, thereby giving it a relationship to other notes. Notes can exist off on their own, can continue a line of thinking from a previous note, or can branch off to explore another idea that’s tangentially related. The note lives in all places and contexts at the same time - a single node in a web of interconnectedness.
Unlike traditional note-taking methods where each additional note makes the system even more unwieldy, in Zettelkasten every note added has a positive compounding rate of return due to the deep interconnectedness of the system.
The world is full of artificial silos of knowledge. We grow up being taught different subjects like math, physics, biology, chemistry, art, etc. And through all of this, we're never told how these different domains of knowledge relate to one another. But the real world isn't divided into these different domains, there's just a single reality. We create various domains to help us organize our knowledge and make it easier to teach and learn. But as each of these domains matures, they become hostage to their own ideology and further disconnected from other domains.
Traditional hierarchical note-taking systems feed into this world view, where an individual note must live in a single place, within a specific notebook or tag, even if you know it fits perfectly well in three other spots. This closes off the door to the serendipitous nature of how our minds naturally think.
The Zettelkasten method allows you to create a network of notes that constantly bridges gaps between domains of knowledge that were previously siloed. Finding and establishing relationships between notes can be more valuable than the contents of the individual notes themselves.
I primarily utilize four different kinds of relationships in my notes:
I include as many tags as I deem appropriate within the header of each note. Tags describe topics, categories, keywords, or any kind of breadcrumb I can come up with to increase the chances I stumble upon this note again when my future self would find it most relevant.
If I’m creating a note that drills deeper into an idea of a pre-existing note, I create a formal parent/child relationship between these two.
If a note reminds me of any number of existing notes, I will add links to them as “related.”
While composing a note, I might refer to the title of an existing note (each note has a unique title) as shorthand to refer to the full idea. In this way I can continually build more complex lines of thinking by building atop of previous ideas without having to rehash them. Some notes might mention a dozen other notes.
With all of these different relationships established, I can quickly identify my most often cited tags, which can tell me the kinds of topics I’m gravitating towards. It allows me to see the notes I’m linking to most often, thereby showing me which of my ideas are playing an outsized role in my personal web of knowledge. And it enables me to exclude all “child” notes to see my top level ideas, whereas filtering for only “child” notes gives me quick access to my deepest thinking.
This emergent layer of value that's created through the relationships of your notes is a fantastic property of the Zettelkasten. This layer of value is inherent to networks and something that typical note-taking systems simply cannot replicate.
For example, in this image of my Zettelkasten's graph overview (I currently use Roam Research for my Zettelkasten), I can see all of the tags and notes I link to most often and explore any tag or note’s relationship with the rest of the database by selecting it:
Our Personal Innovation Lab
A recent study by McKinsey found that in 1958, the average life-span for companies listed in the S&P 500 was 61 years. Today, that figure has dropped to just 18 years. McKinsey believes that by 2027, 75% of the companies currently listed in the S&P 500 will no longer be there.
Businesses live and die by their ability to innovate. In order to combat this, many businesses end up creating an innovation lab disconnected from the main business, which has the autonomy to do and try things that may not even be related to the main business. Innovation arises from a combination of insights across domains. What seems like a truly novel product is usually nothing more than the combination and iteration of existing technologies and ideas.
I believe this is also the case for our personal knowledge. The only way we can drive personal innovation in our thoughts and ideas is by giving ourselves a specific place conducive to discovering interesting connections between what we may even categorize as trivial or mundane. Our Zettelkasten is the perfect place for this work to occur.
This cross-pollination of ideas can give rise to our most potent and valuable ideas. And this in turn powers a reinforcing loop that allows us to take this new powerful idea and cross-pollinate it again with our pre-existing notes. It feels a lot like magic, where you throw in a new idea, shake the box, and out comes two more ideas even better than the first.
There are so many new and exciting ideas that can be generated from seemingly old and stale ones. I think we can all benefit from incorporating the Zettelkasten method as our own personal innovation lab.
Helps Resist Over-Consumption
We've all had the experience where we've just read a large complex book like Thinking Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman, we're proud and we're happy to share with others about our accomplishment. But as soon as they ask, "What was the book about?" All we can recall are vague lessons that we'd be able to grab from the book jacket or the book's description on Amazon.
Most people assume that just by reading they're learning, but if you just passively read something, there is a very low probability that you'll actually be able to recall or integrate that material into your life. I don't think we're capable of learning passively, much like how we can't achieve physical fitness by passively watching others workout.
I've come to the realization that if something really matters to me, then I should put it in my Zettelkasten. If it's not worth the effort to process it and make a note, then it probably wasn’t even worth reading in the first place. My intuition has become much more finely tuned to know whether something I’m reading will lead to a new note, and if not, I can save myself time by not finishing. While the effort required to add to your Zettelkasten might seem like an unnecessary barrier, I think that in order to learn, you can’t just consume the information, but you must process it and make use of it.
In utilizing our Zettelkasten as a filter to determine what we consume, we shield ourselves from the dangers of overconsumption. It’s become ridiculously easy to engage in overconsumption in the information age when there’s an unlimited amount of content wherever we look. If we’re not careful, we can end up reducing our capacity to think for ourselves. This is a great quote from Arthur Schopenhauer on overconsumption, that has stuck with me ever since:
“And so it happens that the person who reads a great deal — that is to say, almost the whole day, and recreates himself by spending the intervals in thoughtless diversion, gradually loses the ability to think for himself; just as a man who is always riding at last forgets how to walk. Such, however, is the case with many men of learning: they have read themselves stupid. For to read in every spare moment, and to read constantly, is more paralysing to the mind than constant manual work, which, at any rate, allows one to follow one’s own thoughts.
Just as a spring, through the continual pressure of a foreign body, at last loses its elasticity, so does the mind if it has another person’s thoughts continually forced upon it. And just as one spoils the stomach by overfeeding and thereby impairs the whole body, so can one overload and choke the mind by giving it too much nourishment.”
Writing as a tool for thinking
I believe writing is the most powerful tool we have for sharpening our thinking. Our minds are pretty terrible at long term storage of information and equally bad at short term storage. If we were to use a computer that consistently lost 90% of whatever we saved, could only work with 5-7 pieces of information at a time before each new piece overwrote an existing piece, and on the odd occasion when it was able to retrieve a saved document it was always slightly different, it would be the worst computer ever. There's no way we could ever work through complex problems on such a machine, yet that's what most people try to do by relying purely on their internal thoughts.
Writing helps you think in a way that no other medium can because once you've externalized your thoughts in writing, you can begin to edit, refine, iterate, copy, expand upon, and rearrange them. You can manipulate each word, sentence, and paragraph as if it were a lego block until you find the perfect configuration. Or even if you can't find the right configuration, your work is saved and you can pick up right from where you left off any time in the future.
Thoughts often sound much more eloquent and convincing when they’re stuck to the dark confines of our inner dialogue, but forcing them to the page lets you see them in the clear light of day. Much like when the lights of a theater turn on after the movie is over, we’re abruptly re-acquainted with reality and no longer living in a fantasy. Writing forces us to achieve a clarity of thought that would be impossible through just internal ruminations.
A long-term investment in our intellectual future
We know that investing in our financial future is one of the best things we can do for ourselves. There’s plenty of great advice, advisors, and services we can leverage to secure our finances. But how do we secure our intellectual future? With our actions today, how can we guarantee we'll be more intelligent in the future?
By adding notes to our Zettelkasten, finding connections between notes, and continuously feeding interesting information we capture from the variety of sources we consume, we're investing in our future intelligence. We can build a growing body of knowledge that contains the best information we come across and the best ideas we have. We don't have to start from scratch every time we want to think deeper about that recurring problem that won't leave us alone.
This is our own personal repository of knowledge that eventually resembles a second brain. A second brain that is great at all of the things our first brain struggles with. It never forgets, never misremembers - it's a distillation of all of our best thoughts and ideas, and it’s never distracted. Eventually, it will go from feeling like you're working on your Zettelkasten, to feeling like you're collaborating with your Zettelkasten. You will be able to ask questions of it, like "what are all of the ideas I had related to the book Stubborn Attachments?", "show me everything I have on imposter syndrome", "have I thought about or come across anything related to negotiation?" I’m always surprised by the answers I receive.
One of the greatest benefits of the Zettelkasten is that it allows us to have conversations with our past selves. Each note I write has the date it was created attached to it. This allows me to pick up on threads of thought that I had one year ago that I completely forgot about. If I browse my notes by date, it shows me exactly what I found important in life during that particular time. I can see the months where I was obsessed with mental models with nearly every note including that tag, or the following weeks about systems thinking.
Being able to interact with, read over, and expand upon ideas I've had 1.5 years ago already feels like a superpower - I look forward to the future when I have tens of thousands of notes across decades of living. Perhaps I'll come back across this piece of writing in 20 years and thank myself for having the foresight to invest in my future self.
Embrace the magic
I honestly believe that I’ve only just exposed the tip of the iceberg. I continue to find new ways to squeeze even more value out of my Zettelkasten all the time. I’m especially excited about what the future may hold when it comes to collaborating across multiple people’s digital Zettelkasten. I would love to be able to explore my favorite thinkers database of notes, essentially taking a trip through their most sprawling and deepest thoughts.
It shouldn’t be surprising, but the first draft of this article you’re reading came from my Zettelkasten.
I'll be covering my particular setup and how I use my Zettelkasten in future posts. And, if this is something that really interests you, I highly recommend picking up How to Take Smart Notes by Sonke Ahrens.
I hope I've given you some new ideas to chew on if you're on the fence about starting a Zettelkasten.
