Hi guys and welcome back to Brain-Friendly Thinking.
A couple of weeks ago I did a video on Niklas Luhmann and how he used the zettelkasten to
be more creative and more productive.
Many of you enjoyed the video and said they would like to see more about the zettelkasten.
So today we gonna do a deep dive into my own setup for the zettelkasten.
In a zettelkasten you take information and you break them down into atomic chunks.
Then you start working with that information by linking individual zettels to one another
and summarising the content of several zettels in hub notes.
If you never heard the term zettelkasten before, you might like to watch my other video where
I talk about how Luhmann used the zettelkasten to be highly creative and productive.
But how do you go about setting up your own zettelkasten?
For many people when they want to setup their own zettelkasten, it is either their first
knowledge management system they set up or they want to replace an existing method with
a new one.
In my case I already got a method, it works, it works well for me, but it could work better.
What I got at the moment works very much with ABC-active, CaWas, playing with words, diagrams
and sketching.
However, I feel that I drop many important and interesting ideas which I could continue
to work on and expand on.
Or what I worked on two or three years ago could enrich what I’m doing right now much
more than it currently is.
So why I want to implement the zettelkasten is to organise the ideas I had before and
to be better able to integrate my old ideas with my new ideas.
If you set up your own zettelkasten, there are three main considerations you need to
take into account.
First, which platform do you want to use for your zettelkasten?
Secondly, how do you write the zettels, make the links, combine the information?
And thirdly, how can you integrate this into your daily life?
The first decision I had to take is: Do I want a paper-based zettelkasten or do I want
to go with a digital solution?
And most people these days, they go for the digital solution, obviously.
However, there is much to say for a paper-based zettelkasten.
For instance, I find it much easier if you have real, physical zettels that you can arrange
spatially in front of you and move backwards and forwards.
It is much easier for me to see the connections.
It feels much nicer to work with them.
On the downside, however, a paper-based zettelkasten is much harder to search.
And if you’re not careful and you put a zettel in the wrong position, it’s basically
lost.
In the end I decided for the digital solution.
However, it was not a simple decision.
And if you want to set up your own zettelkasten, I would advise giving this point some careful
thought.
After I decide it should be a digital zettelkasten, then: what digital platform should I use?
To be honest, I did not give that much thought into which platform I should use.
Because for me I thought it is more important to get started and to get a feeling for how
the zettelkasten works, rather than getting the perfect platform.
So at the end I went with Daniel Luedecke’s Zkn3 software.
Because it seemed to do the job, it’s comparatively simple, you can also easily export your zettels
and, and this is just a personal preference, I actually think it looks comparatively good.
And with that let’s look how my zettelkasten looks like.
As you can see, here is my zettelkasten in Zkn3.
On the right side you see the list of all my zettels.
Currently I only got 62 zettels so far, it’s a baby zettelkasten.
I only started it on the 18th of September.
However, let’s look at a couple of zettels to see what I’m actually doing.
And there are different types of zettels.
What you can see here on the left side is a zettel which I extract from reading scientific
papers.
These summarise of the findings from scientific papers is what will form the backbone of my
zettelkasten.
So for every scientific paper you have certain experiments and you have certain findings.
I’m trying to respect the principle of atomicity by converting every finding into one zettel.
So how does such a settle… zettel look like?
At first of course we have a headline, a title, that summarises what the zettel is about.
Then we have one sentence to maximum two sentence summary of what you can see in the zettel.
And then I have several subjects… sub-sections.
First I have the experiment subsection.
Here I summarise what the researchers have done.
And I don’t just copy what they say in the paper, but I actually summarise it in my own
words.
I usually write it in the form of a recipe.
Next sub-section is the result subsection.
And here again I summarise, I don’t just copy from the authors, but I summarise what
were their findings?
Now for the same experiment there might be several different findings, as I said I will
branch them off into different zettels.
However, in that case I will copy and paste the experiment description for each of those
finding zettels.
And finally I got the number of participants and what type of participants were they, because
right now as I’m doing my PhD in psychology, a lot depends on what type of patients or
what type of people you’re testing.
And then finally I’ve got the citation, where does the zettel actually come from?
This is one type of zettel.
A second type of zettel, this one is again goes back to something I’m reading.
But in this case it’s not an experimental finding; it’s a definition from what I’m
reading.
In this case I don’t have a summary at the top, because it is only a very small zettel.
But I simply start with the definition, then comes examples of the definition.
And these are examples actually provided in the text.
And in this specific case, the definition of function optimisation is contrasted with
the definition of pattern transition.
So already in the text I say ok contrast this with pattern transition and I link to the
zettel that talks about pattern transition.
To understand function optimisation it is also important to understand other concepts
like exploitation and best practice.
Later on there will be zettels for this to which I want to link, but right now I haven’t
created the zettels yet, so I put in a placeholder in the form of curly brackets.
Later if I read this zettel again, I know I wanted to put a link there.
Or I could even search for all the zettels with curly brackets and then I see, ok I still
need to work on them.
Now the next zettel is a zettel which I create for myself.
So this would be an example of a hub note.
Locognosia this is the ability to know where we have been touched on our body without looking
and I am starting to create an index based on the papers I read and specifically based
on the findings which I turned into zettels.
So right now I have different keywords here and for each keyword I have a number of zettels
that relate to this keyword.
And then finally the last one I would like to show to you is…
So this one is a zettel that captures ideas which I had in relation to another zettel.
And now I say this zettel refers to another zettel.
And here is the number of that zettel.
So, if I click here in this case it’s another zettel which I created from my reading.
So this zettel refers to the quote.
Then comes my first comment, my first thoughts about this quote.
And again here I just had some ideas, some brainstorming, but these idea need to be fleshed
out further.
So I put my curly brackets as a reminder that I want to do extra work.
So, I need to read more papers then I will probably summarise that in another hub note
and then I will link here to the summarised hub note and based on all of this reading
then at some point there will be a conclusion as well.
Well, so far for a couple of examples of how my zettelkasten look like and how I use it.
Now let’s look at how do I integrate that into my overall structure of working with
knowledge.
If you’ve seen any of my other videos you know that I use ABC-active for most of my
note-taking.
And then after I finished reading I take the words which I’ve written down and I continue
to play with them in the form of CaWas, categorisation or similar things.
Now, how do we get from here to the zettels?
After I plaid around with the words for some time, I have a feeling of which of the words
are the most essential to the text.
These are prime candidates to be transformed into zettels.
Either one or several zettels per keyword.
Secondly, as I’m reading it happens that I get further ideas, I can think of further
examples or I disagree with the author.
In these cases I make a note of that.
Not only in the ABC-active, but I gonna write down one to five sentences that summarise
my points so that I can later remember.
I take these little snippets of notes and I transform them into zettels into their own
right.
I also already shared with you the strategy lottery and how I use it to keep my focus
topics active in my mind.
As I said back in that video, as I’m playing with the core concepts, it happens comparatively
often, again, that I get further ideas.
I write them down and later I convert them into zettels.
Our ability to develop creative ideas depends a lot on how do we process that information?
Why this is the case?
Well, for that you can watch the video right here.
Or otherwise, if you’re interested in more thinking tools you can try out, you can click
on this playlist right here.
Otherwise, I hope you found this video useful.
If you did, please don’t forget to give the like button a high-five.
Consider subscribing if you haven’t already.
And until next time: keep thinking!