Introduction to ZettleKasten - Your Personal Knowledge Management System
In this post, I would provide a detailed introduction to ZettleKasten method, which I have been applying since I read the book How to take smart notes.
A quick overview - What is ZettleKasten?
ZettleKasten is a note taking and personal knowledge management system, consists of basic component called 'Zettle'.
Zettel is the German word for a small piece of paper or a note. It can also refer to a brief written summary or an outline of a topic. It is often used in the context of taking notes, making lists, or organizing ideas. Suggestions about how to write structure and content for a Zettle is included in the third section.
This system, first adopted by the German sociologist and philosopher Luhmann, is centered on the idea of constructing a web of notes (also named Zettles) as a way to promote more flexible interdisciplinary thinking.
This note-taking method is widely applied in different scenarios: academic research, writing, personal productivity improvement and creative work.
Advantages of ZettleKasten
Organizing notes in files + folders can lead to a rigid note structure that makes it difficult to keep track of the interrelationships between knowledge points.
Organizing notes in tabbed form (tags) is less practical with limited content to see at one time.
A better way to organize notes and thoughts -- use a mesh structure to organize (as emphasized in ZettleKasten), relying not only on tags, but also on links to different Zettles.
More advantages are listed below:
Better preservation and recall of information and knowledge with a unified structure.
Access to information and links between different topics, enough to quickly find and use the knowledge and ideas contained in Zettle.
Increase productivity and creativity by easily organizing and accessing their knowledge and ideas, enabling flexible, dynamic thinking.
Can be integrated with other productivity tools, such as task management or time tracking software (Detail would be discussed in another post coming soon)
Accumulating Zettles with similar structures could realize the Compound Interest effect for your personal knowledge.
Features of ZettleKasten
Zettle (card) is smallest unit of the system.
- These Zettle include small ideas, notes that can be easily created, organized, and linked.
Each Zettle uses a unique identifier that can help with the organization and access of notes.
- Unique identifiers can use ID-like numbers + characters or be the keywords/summary of the note's topic based on your choice.
Emphasis is placed on creating links between notes and creating a web-like structure.
Review and update Zettle regularly to
prevent ZettleKasten from progressing to linear structures
guide the study/research to fill the gap/missing concept in your system
spot links between different topics
How to implement - principles and discussions
Choice of Software
There are a bunch of note taking apps which supports wiki-links or bi-directional links. Discussing the pros and cons of each of the listed software is beyond the scope of this post. If you are interested in a detailed comparison of these apps, please leave a comment.
Typical Tools that are made for ZettleKasten:
I personally recommend Obsidian, with its highly customizable plugins, rich forum and active community. If you prefer to work in a outline mode (like WorkFlowy), then LogSeq / Roam Research may serve you well.
How to write Zettle?
As the basic component of ZettleKasten system, it is crucial to follow a uniform format and some principles when keeping Zettles for later note connection.
Principles
Generally, A Zettle is a concept with a name that is as short and recognizable as possible.Take bricks as example, good zettle should play the same role as bricks when building your knowledge palace.
The Zettles should be:
Spliceable - single block, one thing/concept at a time
- To achieve this, a good way is to check if you could find a concise title to summarise your zettle.
- According to How to take smart notes, context is important when understanding a concept. It is therefore a good practice to include (either by text or links to relevant zettles) sufficient background information to explain this zettle’s concept.
Reusable - complete block, contain sufficient information to understand the concept itself
This is complementary to the former principle, where self-explainable Zettles allows you to create more complex system.
In practice, achieving this is often linked with
formatting your notes’ meta data, containing the tags, creation, alias of your zettle.
naming your notes with recallable and distinguishable keywords could also be helpful.
Tractable - record the source of notes
- This means that you don't need to copy and paste the original content; if you forget anything, you can go back to the source of knowledge and review it.
Different Types of Zettles
To help organizing and accessing notes, together with later understanding and exploration of different concepts, Zettles could be categorized into 3 main types (as suggested in How to take smart notes):
Flash Notes
- Where you kept your ephemeral thoughts and review them on a daily basis and merge them into your ZettleKasten where the below two types of notes belong.
Literature Notes
- Where you kept your summary/paraphrase of the literature together with link to original source. This is the bridge of external source/knowledge with your own ZettleKasten/Knowledge system.
Permanent Notes
- Where you kept your thoughts, your understanding of certain concepts in your interested field.
There could be auxiliary type of notes called:
Index Notes (Map Of Content, MOC)
- Where you keep track of a collection of note links on a topic or an area to help you view the big picture.
The type of notes is not exclusive, you could use any numebr of types as you like as long as it serves well for organizing and accessing zettles in your ZettleKasten system.
In mainstream double-linked note-taking Apps, metadata editing in the
form of Frontmatter, etc. is supported. Categorization is possible by
adding custom category entries, or by using different
tag.
Creating links between zettles
This is a crucial step when constructing your ZettleKasten System. It is the mesh structure between Zettles that make ZettleKasten method stands out among other note taking/organizing methods.
Following the Splicable principle, you could easily create links like in Wikipedia. Empty links (suggesting unknown concepts, unread literatures, etc.) could also be created to guide your further research.
Following the Reusable principle, you could split long notes into smaller chunks. The ways of splitting notes varies, you could either create a new note and attach the link to the original long note, or simply use different headings to parse the note and refer to the block link (supported by most apps) later on. There are no strict rules for how long a zettle should be, as long as it is recallable for you.
Regular review
Review your notes on a regular basis is a fantastic way to keep you improve. It is well studied that spaced repetition could help you remember things longer and clearer. Besides, review your note could also allow the discover of links between different zettles, and guide your later research or study.
As for spaced repetition, it is better used with Anki, which also takes in the format of zettles, and has built in algorithm to help you review.
Workflow
ZettleKasten System could be integrated with multiple systems, include Task Management, Note taking and Writing. There are corresponding workflows for each.
- Integrate with Task Management
- Usually the tasks embeds in your Flash Notes, where something triggered your intention for something.
- It is recommended to have a regular review process to capture all
your tasks into your task management system.
- Or you could simply use features from task management apps to capture them in a separate inbox.
- Integrate with Note taking
- Basically your notes will be generated from processing different source of input information. Though you may encounter different mediums, the basic principle is similar.
- I have come up with the following workflow for processing
literatures and notes.
- Highlight key points while reading
- Transfer all highlights (together with link to the original source)
to a note.
- This feature could be achieved easily in Logseq without much configuration.
- Create a literature note, paraphrasing highlights. Remember to include context to make it self-explainable.
- If possible, split the literature note into smaller Zettles with
atomic concepts.
- For example, in a paper CDL: Curriculum Dual Learning for Emotion-Controllable Response Generation which I read recently, I created notes on concept Curriculum Learning, Dual Learning and Reinforcement Learning from the original literature note.
- Link them with current permanent notes if meaningful links exist.
- I have already created notes about different Natural Language Generation metrics like BLEU, so I would link these two notes. With more papers read, important concepts would arise naturally.
- Review important cards on a regular basis using spaced repetition.
- Integrate with Writing
- Writing is the time where you utilise your atomic notes to build a comprehensive view over some topic.
- For more advices on how to integrate ZettleKasten System with writing, please check the Book - How to take smart notes - Sönke Ahrens
Further reference resources
- Blog Post
Zettelkasten-concerns - Public voiT
- The author presents a detailed comparison between org-mode and ZettleKasten method, proposing some difficulties faced when using ZettleKasten methods. You could find some valuable insights about which area is not ZettleKasten appropriate for.
- Book
- How to take smart notes - Sönke Ahrens
- Besides providing introdution of ZettleKasten methods, this book provide detailed explaination on how to integrate the ZettleKasten methods with academic writing.