(2013-06-20) Tietze Create A Zettelkasten For Your Notes To Improve Thinking And Writing

Christian Tietze: Create a Zettelkasten for your Notes to Improve Thinking and Writing • Zettelkasten Method

Who is this for? People who want to improve their writing and coherent thinking, who are invested in so-called knowledge work and who connect ideas. This suits academics, authors and writers, journalists, but also programmers who organize their knowledge.

If you want to think creatively and write original articles and books, you need to form associations in your mind effectively

You can emulate communication processes with your own notes if you structure them in a certain manner. Notes can and should stimulate new associations and foster your creativity just like a good talk does

Inspired by Scholarly Techniques

Think personal wiki

Storing stuff in small-ish notes is the fundamental principle in creating a device called “Zettelkasten” (German for “slip box”, or “card index”).

Doing it right, you can move way beyond input/output-based note-taking. You can interact with and communicate with your system of notes

In upcoming posts

Improve Thinking by Writing: Why You Should Take Notes

Whenever you want to think to some purpose, you should consider writing it down

if you take notes and write a lot, it’s only rational to do it in a way that trains your system of notes to become a partner in communication with you.

Create Notes to Converse With

Both partners have to be surprised in some way to say communication takes place.

“surprise” means you stumble upon notes which you hadn’t expected. Your system of notes, on the other hand, receives a new note from you which wasn’t there before. (It’s properly called “serendipity”.)

your partner needs to be sufficiently autonomous

Autonomy is promoted by growing inner complexity of the system

the number of notes and their relationships with each other

when you let notes point to each other using some kind of reference, you’re creating hypertext

Loose Filing and Interconnectedness are Key

Do not sort your stuff. Don’t waste time making up categories; this hampers organic growth.

Every note should have an ID

There’s two ways to connect notes: let them point to each other directly or form keyword-based collections.

See my post on weak and strong ties for further discussion of connections.

Conclusion and Implementation

Next, I’ll show you how to implement a Zettelkasten on your computer