My Journey in Personal Knowledge Management, Part 2: Discovering the Zettelkasten

In the previous post, I talked about how there’s little discussion of concrete practices involved in lifelong learning—or how to engage in personal knowledge management—even as there’s so much talk about how important it is for all of us to continue learning even after graduation. In this post, I discuss how I started experimenting with personal knowledge management (PKM) approaches.

?Early Personal Knowledge Management System

?When I was in college, I would often put summarizing notes in the books that I owned, and for borrowed books, I would sometimes keep summaries on my computer files, which were organized based on classes. I eventually had hanging files on various subjects.

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I also kept extensive notes related to specific projects (such as research papers I was writing). After I completed a project, I would then file the individual contents in the proper folders.

?The problem with a typical filing system (physical or computer files), however, is that it reproduces the very silos that make schools so problematic for encouraging general personal knowledge management. An article or note in my political science folder might be related to one in my philosophy folder, but it may be difficult to register such a link (aside from copying the note for both files), and indeed the system itself doesn’t encourage such links.

?In the summer after I finished graduate school, I had some time on my hands and a backlog of tasks (such as things to do around the house) that I had been putting on hold while in the final stages of the program. I read David Allen’s Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity, implemented the system, and then tweaked it after watching the LinkedIn Learning series “Time Management Fundamentals,” by Dave Crenshaw. I later switched to using task boards for collaborative work after reading World Without Email, by Cal Newport. I had discovered an exciting conversation around productivity approaches, and I was amazed at how much my life changed for the better by implementing such systems.

?A major insight I took from the conversations around productivity and time management was that I needed to centralize my work. Rather than having scattered to do lists associated with various projects, notes to myself, reminders, etc., I needed to have a relatively small set of collection points (such as my email and processing trays), dedicated processing time to review unprocessed items, a list of current projects, notes to guide those projects, and so on. The very act of centralizing what had once been a relatively disorganized process was revolutionary for me.

?At the same time, I didn’t realize how much my newly centralized productivity system contrasted with my personal knowledge management (PKM) system, with its various notes scattered across books I’d read, articles stashed in hanging folders, folders dedicated to notes on ongoing projects on my bookshelf, and links to online articles I’d read in my computer folders.

?Discovering the Zettelkasten

?In the fall of 2021, however, I discovered a much better PKM system. I was catching up on podcasts and listened to the December 10, 2020, episode on the Teaching in Higher Ed podcast. Dave Stachowiak mentioned reading How to Take Smart Notes, by S?nke Ahrens, which had been published in 2017 and was beginning to catalyze a lot of discussion around PKM. I’ve always been interested in note taking, so I requested the book by interlibrary loan, not realizing that the book is very different than the kind of note taking conversations I’d encountered so far.

?How to Take Smart Notes introduces the Zettelkasten method, which is especially associated with Niklas Luhmann, a Sociologist who published prolifically in the second half of the 20th century. The basic idea of the Zettelkasten (which means “slip box” in German) is that one creates short, personal (i.e., usually not just copied and pasted) notes and links them to other notes within one centralized system.

When you create a note in the Zettelkasten, you force yourself to think through a topic, articulate it in your own words, and think through how it relates to other notes that are already present. This process of elaboration is one of the most important methods for learning, and the centralization of these notes and linking between them over time assists with creating a more coherent understanding of the world—a critical goal of lifelong learning.

?Many different Zettelkasten apps were cropping up when I first discovered?How to Take Smart Notes. I spent some time researching them before adopting one in November 2021 that used plain text documents that would still be available if I opted for a different app. I added notes to my digital Zettelkasten enthusiastically and participated in the Zettelkasten community online, especially at Reddit and Zettelkasten.de. I even gave a presentation on the Zettelkasten method at the Baylor graduate school one year later, in November 2022.

?Analog Zettelkasten

?By the time of my graduate school presentation in November 2022, I had already heard about the analog Zettelkasten movement, which started (as far as I can tell) with Scott Scheper, a writer and marketer with a background in business and entrepreneurship. I had even ordered Scheper’s book, Antinet Zettelkasten, but hadn’t read it yet. (Note that Scheper calls the analog Zettelkasten the “Antinet Zettelkasten.”)

In fact, I wasn’t able to read the book until the summer of 2023. I went in a critical eye. I had already invested significant time and energy in building out my digital Zettelkasten, and it seemed like there were significant hurdles for an analog system, especially in that physical notes were more vulnerable to the elements, not very portable, and not easily searchable. I had also been reading Scott Scheper’s emails for a while prior to reading the book, so I knew his writing style, which is much more casual and sometimes scattered than typical academic writing. (S?nke Ahrens, by contrast, is an academic.)

?Nevertheless, by the end of Antinet Zettelkasten, Scheper had convinced me to give the analog Zettelkasten a try. Niklas Luhmann’s system was, of course, analog, and I knew that writers like Ryan Holiday and Robert Greene used physical notecards in the long tradition of the commonplace book. Even A. G. Sertillanges, in his 1921 classic The Intellectual Life, gives instructions on how to create a physical notecard system.

?At any rate, I decided to try to the analog Zettelkasten as a one-year experiment. I ordered the supplies in the summer of 2023 and began moving my notes there. It’s now been almost a year and a half, and I plan to continue to use the analog version.

?In the next post, I’ll discuss in more depth what an analog Zettelkasten looks like, as I know it may be hard to visualize.