Zettelkasten Principles, Methods, & Examples Book Review + Concepts
Note: This is the second book in my productivity guru series. To read the first, Building A Second Brain, the article is linked here.
Book Review
David Kadavy comes through with another book for all the people who want to be productivity gurus. This one is less wordy, cutting down on all of the stories that appeared in Building a Second Brain, but also does often leave things a little open-ended. I was expecting a book on how to make a digital zettelkasten but instead found myself reading a book on how to generally improve your experience with productivity once you already have a zettelkasten. As someone in that position, who has one but was feeling like something needed to change to make it fun and approachable, this was useful. To people who are looking into ideas for taking better notes, you might want a different starting place. That being said, it's worth coming back to and will help once you have a start.
The book was an incredibly easy read, only taking me a couple of days. It was entertaining, light, and chapters were kept short, which helped me feel like I was consistently progressing through the ideas without any of them requiring too large a time commitment. You could power read it as I did, or spend 10 minutes a day casually reading, and either way, the book progresses naturally. This is probably its biggest stylistic strength and is something that many authors could use some help replicating, especially in the modern day.
Core Concepts
The book does talk a bit about making a zettelkasten here and there. The idea of keeping notes small and concise. The different types of notes: fleeting, literature, and permanent. The workflow of processing ideas. But the strength of the book lies in its flaw: it doesn't dwell on it much. He gives some ideas of the core values, but acknowledges that you can find in any Youtube video that is guaranteed to tell you about how the word zettelkasten comes from German for slip box and how Niklas Luhmann used it and was productive and cool. Instead, most of the book is talking around your zettelkasten.
So what does around your zettelkasten mean? Kadavy knows you can set up a zettelkasten with more up-to-date information on what applications are available on Youtube, so he decides to talk about the longer term aspect: your interaction with productivity and how that relates to your zettelkasten.
In my opinion, this is the most important aspect of the book. Burning out is the death of productivity. It must be avoided at all costs, including short-term productivity. No strategy will work if it doesn't accommodate periods of particularly low energy or if it instantly consumes periods of particularly high energy. If you want to be productive long-term, you need to have a strategy that is mentally sustainable for you and not too rigid to allow variation based on internal or external changes in day-to-day life.
This relates to the zettelkasten because, if you design it to be, it is a long-term sustainable note-taking style. Given a book, you can decide to not take notes (read it purely for fun), take a few notes, take notes but only as pertains to a specific topic, or take full notes. Each note taken in this system is tiny. As you read, you can highlight the parts you find noteworthy, then you add your interpretation or turn it into your own words, give it a name, and you're done. The note can now freely connect to anything you want it to, and you have a pre-digested idea that you can put into any project if it ever comes up. It requires no further organization or maintenance, you can just move on. Furthering this, in one chapter, he even breaks down body position and how he likes to read in certain positions, make notes in others, and think in others. From lounging to lying down, to sitting up, to exercising, each one means a different step in the creative process to help create mental associations with those positions to break it up. You don't have to do it all at once, you can do different steps based on what kind of mood you're in. If you have a setup that works for you, you'll get to it eventually, and the result will be atomized long-term notes ready when you need them.
My Setup
Here comes the part of the article where I talk about myself a bit. I use a zettelkasten for my notes, and it took me a while to get it working. Here's where I'm at right now.
First, I decide whether or not I'm taking notes on something. If it's audio, I generally don't. Maybe a note or 2 here and there but it just takes me out of it too much. If it's a book, I chuck it into my e-reader so I can highlight it and make notes. Then I decide how much I want to learn from it. This book? I said a couple of ideas. Golden Gulag? I want a lot of information. In cases where I expect to take a lot of notes, I generally listen to it as an audiobook without taking notes first. This is for my enjoyment as well as to get a sense as to what the book is about, and what the overarching themes are across the chapters, helping me identify what is fluff or talked about more later. I generally don't rewind when I listen like this, I just go with the flow since I'll read it later (unless I think something is fascinating or I connect it to a specific project, in which case I jot it down in my notes, which I'll process into becoming a Zettel note later).
As I read it in my e-reader, I might find something interesting or cool. If that's the case, I highlight it, then in the highlight write why I think it's cool or what the idea connects to. Whenever I have time and feel like it, I import all of those notes, then leave them in a long list to process into a 'Zettel notes.'
Each Zettel note has the following template, and gets thrown into a big folder called Zettelkasten, which you can see in my previous article:
Note Title
>[!quote]
>
>>[!note]
>>
---
## Backlink:
## Topic tags:
## Contextual phrases:
## Timestamp: {{date:YYYYMMDD}}{{time:HHmm}}
Now I will show you a filled-out note that uses this exact template, then tell you how I fill it out in order: – In Obsidian, I have a hotkey that allows me to make a note with the blank template to fill out nearly instantly. This drastically speeds up the process.
Travel For Activism Costly For Poor
>[!quote]
>prisoners’ mothers taking an unpaid day off work and contributing from their slim wages toward the $1,000 charter cost.
>>[!note]
>>Extremely hard to afford activism or even just support loved ones for the working poor
---
## Backlink: [[Golden Gulag]]
## Topic tags: [[Activism]][[Poverty]][[Transportation]]
## Contextual phrases:
## Timestamp: 202303112206
I make highlights and write something about each highlight as I read it in my e-book reader. The highlighted part goes into the quote section. This is not absolutely necessary, but for academic writing, I like to have a direct quote. This also means that later, I can change it or make another note on the same quote. It also means I can quickly find it in the book if I want a citation.
Note: could be an insight or a rephrase. This helps retain information, and also helps me recognise what I was thinking was useful about it when I read the note. I generally only write down my immediate thoughts from when I read the quote, but sometimes I can revisit it if I think there is more meaning to be found.
This is the entire note. 2 sentences, both incomplete. There can be more, if I find something particularly inspiring, it might get a couple of sentences. If it gets longer than that, it can almost always be made into smaller notes, but sometimes I even get up to a very specific small paragraph.
The back-link is simply a link to the page I have dedicated to the book. That page will generally just have a short high-level summary of the book in case I need a quick 2-second summary to jog my brain.
Then the tags. This is optional. Since it talks about activism and poverty, I chucked a tag on to connect it to those. I remember quickly thinking 'travel costs are the barrier here', so I chucked a transportation tag on it. Who knows, maybe at one point I might write about how activism is difficult or issues of not having cheap long-distance transportation lines. If I ever do, I'll be able to find this note connected to those topics. If you aren't sure, you can also find this note using the search features on whatever app you use. I put about 10 seconds into this step. If I think too much, I just move on.
Timestamps are auto-generated just to put a date to it. Contextual phrases are almost always empty, but if I can immediately think of another way to phrase the title to help with searchability in another context that I'm writing about, I put it here.
After this, I think of a title. The title is generally just a trimmed-down version of the quote or the note. I put just enough information that if I were to read it, I could decide in a second whether that note may contain useful information on whatever project I may be working on or not.
Once I am done reading the book, I delete the page that has all of the quotes and notes, since they are now all turned into Zettel notes, so I don't need them anymore. I am left with a page that has the book's name, who wrote it, and a summary, as well as a ton of little ideas connected to it. I have all the information I want to take out of the book, and it's in my second brain, so I can just move on without having to worry about missing anything.
That's my process.
Additional note: You do not need tags or contextual phrases at all. I just have them because it gives me a second to try to connect them to other ideas, which I find fun, which makes it more mentally sustainable for me. You can have a different format. You don't need to have a quote attached. Maybe you want a different section, you can add it. I just find this template is so lean that making new notes is not daunting, which is how I make my note-taking more mentally sustainable. Make it work for you.
I'll be lampin on Lamphere Standin on the curb With some very close friends
Oncle Spencer