
Luhmann's Zettelkasten - marvinblum
https://emvi.com/blog/luhmanns-zettelkasten-a-productivity-tool-that-works-like-your-brain-N9Gd2G4aPv
======
darkpicnic
Zettelkasten has to be the least explained concept I've discovered online.
Sure, they'll explain the _technique_ of it, but I've almost never seen any
solid examples of it in _use_. I was so excited when I first heard of it, but
I'm a person that learns by seeing examples and I couldn't find any good ones
anywhere.

Does anyone have any good examples they've seen?

~~~
chrisweekly
I've had precisely your reaction, and am stoked to share my enthusiasm for
Roam ([https://roamresearch.com](https://roamresearch.com)) -- a graph-based
system for codex / memex / personal knowledge-base / zettelkasten++

~~~
chris_st
I'm trying to like it, but I keep running into bugs... and I haven't been able
to find a point of contact on their web page to describe them.

But, yeah, when it works it's very nice indeed.

~~~
chrisweekly
yeah it's super-early-days; they won't even take my money yet. import and
export and mobile (and hopefully encryption at rest) are all coming

------
coolswan
How to take Smart Notes is a very good book that explains this technique well.
Highly recommend.

[https://www.amazon.com/How-Take-Smart-Notes-
Nonfiction/dp/15...](https://www.amazon.com/How-Take-Smart-Notes-
Nonfiction/dp/1542866502)

~~~
smartmic
Also from me a clear recommendation. I have read the original in German, it is
very good to read, entertaining and yet has depth. Suitable for all those who
want to structure their work or thoughts better.

Btw, there is an own homepage of the book:
[https://takesmartnotes.com/](https://takesmartnotes.com/)

------
lethologica
I've tried to keep a Zettleksaten several times now with no real luck. My most
recent try was using TiddlyWiki, with each Tiddler being an entry, usually
containing a single piece of information. Perhaps it's the way TiddlyWiki is
laid out, but I didn't particularly find the filing system to be of any real
benefit to me. After my 30 day experiment I had nearly 1,000 Tiddlers and the
majority were interlinked. When I would click through the hyperlinks I
wouldn't necessarily have any particular 'a-ha' moments that these articles on
Zettlekastens typically try to convince you will happen when you use this
filing system.

Perhaps I went about it all wrong, but I loved the theory but didn't find the
particular application useful. I also found absolutely no examples of a real
life Zettelkasten online anywhere. None. I couldn't even compare to see if I
was doing it wrong because it seems to be the sort of thing that everyone
writes about but no one practices.

More so, I absolutely wouldn't want to use a new third party app for my
knowledge repository. Who knows wether or not it'll still be in development or
even supported in a year.

~~~
kiwicopple
I used Trello with relatively good results. The process was:

1\. Create a board with a single “Dump” column

2\. Create cards in the Dump column (or “share” to the column whenever I read
something online)

3\. Every week, categorise the card into new columns. Each column was a broad
category like “Philosophy” and “Startup ideas”

4\. When the board became unwieldy, with too many columns, I created a new
board (Philosophy) and split the categories/columns again (Stoicism and
Nihilism)

The act of reorganising the board was super useful for remembering everything,
a bit like spaced repitition

------
neonate
[https://web.archive.org/web/20200118180355/https://emvi.com/...](https://web.archive.org/web/20200118180355/https://emvi.com/blog/luhmanns-
zettelkasten-a-productivity-tool-that-works-like-your-brain-N9Gd2G4aPv)

------
gpanders
I implemented my own Zettelkasten tool as a simple bash script. I use the
shell as my interface into my notes (create a new note, list notes, open a
note, etc.), Vim to write new notes, and grep to search contents and tags. If,
for any reason, I want to view a note in the browser, I use pandoc to convert
into HTML.

The things I like about the Zettelkasten method is the concept of atomicity
(notes are short and simple and are about just one thing) and then linking
related notes together. Keeping notes plaintext also makes them easy to use
with other tools (such as grep). I then just sync my notes in a Nextcloud
instance across all of my different devices. Out of the many different note
management methods I've tried this one is so far my favorite.

------
ThouYS
Cool, reminds me of "Roam Research" which calls itself a tool for "networked
thought" [1]

[1] [https://roamresearch.com/](https://roamresearch.com/)

~~~
dangirsh
+1 For Roam. I'm a long-time Org Mode user, but was always waiting for
something like Roam to take its place. Roam is a great example of how getting
a few key features right can launch a tool into a league of its own.

Implementing the Zettelkasten is an explicit use-case for Roam, as documented
here:
[https://roamresearch.com/#/v8/help/page/VURQiVZQR](https://roamresearch.com/#/v8/help/page/VURQiVZQR)

------
lkrubner
Prior art against Google’s Page Rank:

“ By connecting lose dots of information you create interconnected clusters of
knowledge which emphasize the importance of an information based on the number
of connections”

~~~
kmill
Though PageRank has the innovation of weighting the connections based on how
important the information is.

(Just for fun, here's one linear-algebra-free way to understand classic
PageRank: imagine starting from a random page on the internet and then
randomly clicking links. If you continue clicking for long enough, then the
probability that you end up on any given page is, more or less, its PageRank.
If your access patterns with Zettelkasten are random-ish and you keep track of
how many times you look at each card, then these counts are a crude
approximation of the PageRank of your cards.)

------
dredmorbius
Zettelkasten are one of a set of related tools for knowledge management,
information tracking, and creativity facilitation.

They've been submitted several times on HN, though usually to little
discussion:
[https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...](https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=Zettelkasten&sort=byDate&type=story)

Among the more active mentions, a submission of mine a couple of months ago:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21208196](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21208196)

I'd also recommend "How to organize personal knowledge", an "Ask HN" with 220
replies:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17892731](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17892731)

There are also index cards generally:
[https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...](https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=index%20cards&sort=byPopularity&type=story)

And Pile of Index Cards (POIC):
[https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...](https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=poic&sort=byPopularity&type=story)

And of course, the digital version, Hypercard:
[https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...](https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=hypercard&sort=byPopularity&type=story)

I've recently discovered Paul Otlet's work -- among his creations was the
notion of "documentation", a term he invented ~1925. He'd also compiled a
collection of over 15 million index cards, the Mundaenium. Recent submission
of mine:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22043441](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22043441)

I'd count bullet journals as closely related:

[https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...](https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=bullet%20journal&sort=byPopularity&type=story)

See:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11856987](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11856987)
and
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18769286](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18769286)
especially.

I've been wrestling with how to make use of a research journal of sorts,
adopting some of the concepts from a bullet journal, but also the flexibility
of index cards, while leveraging the benefits and capabilities of a bound
paper codex. I'm calling this a BOTI Journal, for "best of the interval"
(week, month, year...). It's something of a collection of paper-based round-
robin databases (a ring or circular buffer), where I note the most significant
elements enountered in a period of time, and periodically roll these up to a
longer-term aggregate. This gives time-ordering but also an aggregation
function.

Things tracked include various documents (expansively defined as per Otlet as
articles, books, Web pages, audio and video recordings, images, etc.),
authors, concepts, journals, etc.

After a year, or several years, I should have a well curated set of most-
useful / most insightful references over the period, a notion I've been
frustrated in my inability to track over the past few years.

More generally, the notion of a rotating database file seems hugely useful,
see the 43 folders "tickler file" method from _Getting Things Done_ :
[https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...](https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=tickler%20file&sort=byPopularity&type=story)

(Searching "43 folders" itself tends to capture many distantly-related links
to the website of the same name.) I've newly embarked on this, and am
interested to see how it goes.

There are also other pages interspersed, concepts, ideas, themes, outlines of
cataloguing systems (Dewey, LoCCS, Otlet's Decimal Notation, etc.)

I'm discovering that my recent thought that a circular file format ought to
exist and be used by ToDo / scheduling systems ... has been proposed by
others:

[https://medium.com/@criticalmind/gtd-todo-tickler-
proposal-f...](https://medium.com/@criticalmind/gtd-todo-tickler-proposal-
fe18ab324bca)

~~~
Schiphol
This is fantastic, thanks a lot

------
soedirgo
I found this [1] series of posts to be incredible for implementing
Zettelkasten using org-mode in Emacs.

I don't use Zettelkasten myself, but maybe I'll have the time to get around to
it...

[1]:
[https://blog.jethro.dev/posts/org_mode_workflow_preview/](https://blog.jethro.dev/posts/org_mode_workflow_preview/)

~~~
jquip
Thanks for this! org-mode and zettelkasten is nice!

------
wortelefant
After trying several formats, I now keep my zettelasten-structured notes in
[https://Notion.so](https://Notion.so). you can use webclipper, search and
internal links etc, previews can be seen as cards. This approach is well
documented with many examples in the Zettelkasten forum, in this post
[https://forum.zettelkasten.de/discussion/404/moving-
on](https://forum.zettelkasten.de/discussion/404/moving-on)

I found that the value of these systems for me is highly dependent on the
amount of engagement I put into it in practice - if I engage eith the 'cards'
often, updating them or reordering them, the content and the links of the card
are much more present in my mind and generate new ideas. Compared to this
factor, the system used for linked notes is of secondary importance.

------
tunesmith
It's unclear whether being able to insert a new identifier within an existing
list of identifiers is a feature. That might just be a byproduct of needing to
put the new card into a related area.

The Zettelkasten.de software appears to be pushing concepts that would have
been impossible in Luhmann's system.

Ultimately it seems that all these information systems are just different
implementations of nodes, edges, and containers.

Node: Do you want it to support formatted text and/or media? Do you want to be
able to visually explore this node's edge relationships to other nodes?
(Software often chooses one or the other; both would be nice.)

Edge: Do you want directed edges? Do you want to support Graphs and not just
Trees? Do you want your edges to have configurable meaning beyond "this
relates to that"?

Containers: Do you want to be able to collect multiple nodes together? Do you
want a node to optionally _be_ a container, meaning do you want to allow an
edge to link a node to a container? Do you want to support non-hierarchical
(Venn) containers, aka tags?

Outliners, Todo list software are almost always directed trees instead of
directed graphs. Even with mindmapping / bubble graph software - it's weird
how many of them are just undirected trees instead of undirected graphs. Even
orgmode is at best a directed tree with tags - it's not a DAG unless you use
something like org-brain, which has its own limitations. Wikis usually don't
have the visual exploration tools - imagine being able to zoom out of a wiki
and just draw edges and containers to put the nodes (articles) in.

Zettelkasten supported (somewhat) formatted text. Not really able to visually
explore edge relationships without taking stuff apart. Undirected graph,
generic edge meaning. Links probably often one-way and not self-healing
(removing a card wouldn't remove links of all linking cards). Supported
heirarchical containers, and a card could conceptually link to a container by
having "2" link to "2a" which might include 2a1, 2a2, 2a3, etc. Supported
tags, sort of, although there wasn't a way to search for all cards that had a
particular tag.

Ultimately you find that different thinking styles require different
combinations of these concepts, so there isn't a one-size-fits-all, and there
isn't "one system" that works like how the brain does, at least not until we
have a system that allows us to easily mix these concepts together into a
custom implementation.

~~~
no_identd
Luhmann just intuitively came up with the same addressing concept as
represented by a Xanadu Tumbler, essentially it relies on (implicitly)
transfinite numbers:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tumbler_%28Project_Xanadu%29](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tumbler_%28Project_Xanadu%29)

Only, he realized that using letters for every other number makes the dot
number dot sequence as a separating character redundant, thereby shortening
the address length tremendously, and he didn't need versioning in the way the
Xanadu devs thought it would need.

------
blumomo
While the authors promote their own software solution for building your
Zettelkasten, I am happy a user of (and not affiliated with)
[https://bear.app](https://bear.app) which I use on my iPhone and Mac for
organizing my plenty notes for software engineering, meetings, management
notes, my Psychology study notes and anything private as well.

In analogy to Zettelkasten I put my notes into different (nestable) boxes what
they call hashes. The app eco system is quite hacker friendly as they publicly
document the underlying SQLite database. I don't that possibility because
their apps help me organizing my notes well enough til this point.

------
zerof1l
Great article. However, I don't like the idea of using online platform for
this. Maybe if it was offline app I would try it. I haven't found a perfect
app for this. So far, just simple text file worked the best. Effortless,
easily searchable, open in any app. I'm considering upgrading to using very
plain HTML files (so that I could embed media) and folders. IMO that's all you
need.

------
void_nill
I used the Zkn3[1] software for a while, but unfortunately it is not updated
anymore. Also the software quickly reaches its performance limits with many
entries. Nevertheless it is worth a look, if you want to see the concept as
software.

[1]:
[http://zettelkasten.danielluedecke.de/en/download.php](http://zettelkasten.danielluedecke.de/en/download.php)

------
pzumk
I’m from Lüneburg, Germany and have never heard about Niklas Luhmann nor have
I seen any Zettelkästen.

I unfortunately have nothing else to add to the topic of Zettelkasten, but if
anyone is in Hamburg or near Lüneburg and wants a little tour through our
lovely town, let me know!

~~~
jaynetics
If you have any interest whatsoever in liberal arts ( Geisteswissenschaften),
you should really have a look at Luhmann. Maybe peek into "Einführung in die
Systemtheorie". I found him to be one of the most insightful sociologists of
recent times.

~~~
pzumk
Thanks!

------
metaodi
Nice explaination of the concept, I really didn't know about that. All those
links between cards remind me of Linked Data. Should be fairly easy to
integrate that in WikiBase/Wikidata.

------
mirimir
Back in DOS, I used IZE and then Agenda. IZE was closer to Zettelkasten, I
think. But Agenda was more flexible, albeit harder to learn.

I was rooting for Chandler, but so it goes.

------
colordrops
Surprised there are no mentions here of org mode yet.

~~~
yagurastation
You haven't looked properly ;-)
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22086716](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22086716)

------
smartmic
Also a good resource to learn more [PDF]:
[https://strengejacke.files.wordpress.com/2015/10/introductio...](https://strengejacke.files.wordpress.com/2015/10/introduction-
into-luhmanns-zettelkasten-thinking.pdf)

The author of those slides is Daniel Lüdecke, who created Zkn3.

------
stewbrew
Well, all these suggestions are nice and this also looks like a nice finger
exercise but you really want to start something like this only with software
that's still useable somehow in 50+ yrs. So just ignore this proprietary stuff
and use plain text files + grep (or something similar).

~~~
kungtotte
You can still use a nice frontend to the data. Vimwiki, tiddlywiki, zim wiki,
etc. all store their data in plain text but let's you create these connections
trivially that Zettelkasten is all about.

~~~
stewbrew
Yes but most web-based solutions and most other propositions in this thread
are not. I don't think you can build a business around plain text.

Tiddlywiki isn't really plain text btw. You'd have to parse JavaScript in
order to extract the data. Also, I once lost all my data in tiddlywiki.

------
jdkee
Robert Pirsig alludes to his use of this technique in his novel, Lila, but
never names it.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lila:_An_Inquiry_into_Morals](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lila:_An_Inquiry_into_Morals)

~~~
no_identd
I'd speculate he might have picked it up from Umberto Eco's Come si fa una
tesi di laurea (1977 - English translation: How to Write a Thesis, 2015)

------
tjchear
This immediately brings to my mind workflowy. You can insert new bullets under
existing bullets, and link bullets using hashtags. If you expand the bullets,
then it'd look like you have linearized them.

------
discreteevent
I tried various things (wiki, outline) but the thing with the most value for
the least work has been a mind map. You can make a mess and then easily
structure it later.

------
idclip
Its how many students, especially the industrious ones learn here in germany.

~~~
IfOnlyYouKnew
You are thinking of methods like "spaced repetition", which are neither the
same as Luhmann's method, nor specific to Germany.

~~~
idclip
Could be, i know some girls that keep drawrs tho, but it may very well be a
case of over applying spaced rep.

