Organic Notes and the Zettelkasten Method
This article is the third installment in a series on working outside your brain. The first article in the series introduced the concept of the extended mind; writing as the driving force behind the development of our modern sense of the self; and the note as the atomic unit of creative thought. The second installment explored the role the note plays in personal productivity systems. It also introduced “The Garden” and “The Stream” as metaphors for the two very different ways we experience and engage with information on the web.
I haven’t mentioned any specific note-taking tools or systems for organizing your personal notes in this series. That’s because your tools and organizational model are secondary. While it’s tempting (and fun) to dive into the pros and cons of various note-taking tools and systems, you can’t make an informed decision about which tools and organizational models make sense for you until you clarify your intentions for the system you want to build. A system designed to boost your productivity at work differs from a system designed to nurture your ideas, cultivate connections, and produce finished creative work. Sure, there’s overlap, but systems are designed to produce specific results. Your intentions matter.
Organic Notes: A Bottom-Up Approach to Creativity
Broadly, the field of personal knowledge management (PKM) is focused on capturing, organizing, and using information that’s of interest, importance, and use to you. Unlike the information you capture, organize, and use when you’re working in a group setting, the information and system you use for your personal knowledge should reflect and integrate your goals, not someone else’s goals or vision of how your thoughts should be structured. The system has to work for you.
When you’re working in a system that’s focused on promoting group productivity, you’re following a workflow designed to facilitate collaboration, which means it emphasizes standardization, transparency, and accountability. These attributes aren’t bad, but they aren’t the attributes you’d probably focus on in a system designed to facilitate your personal work, especially your personal creative work.
A system designed to support your creative work must make it easy to capture your fleeting ideas, your reading notes, and your thoughts as they develop. It also has to make it easy to link ideas and create clusters of notes as your connected notes grow into larger, more complex ideas.
Your perfect knowledge management system is discovered, not planned. When starting out, prioritize simplicity and flexibility at all costs. Only formalize a system when it's absolutely necessary. In other words, pavement follows dirt.
—Tim Connors, “A Builder’s Guide to Note-Taking”
As you work in your note-taking system, you’ll constantly be remixing, reordering, and refining your ideas as you explore the connections between your ideas that dictate the flow of your thoughts. Unlike a traditional hierarchically structured outline, you’re not focused on validating an assertion; you’re focused on exploration. You’re listening for what your material is telling you. This approach to developing ideas has a name—not surprisingly, it’s called “organic form,” an approach that was first articulated by the English poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834) in a lecture on Shakespeare:
The organic form … is innate, it shapes as it develops itself from within, and the fullness of its development is one and the same with the perfection of its outward Form. Such is the Life, such is the form. Nature, the prime genial artist, inexhaustible in diverse powers, is equally inexhaustible in forms.
The traditional approach to writing (especially academic, scientific, and technical writing) is the top-down approach. You start with “the big idea,” the question you are exploring and the argument you will eventually prove. You then outline the structure of the argument, your claims, reasons, and evidence. The structure is hierarchical, and the writing process is linear. This approach assumes the information you need to prove your argument is “out there,” somewhere… Your job is to find it and integrate it into the structure of your outline. To be clear, the top-down approach works, but its strength is also its weakness. Outlines reduce complexity by designating some ideas as key organizing concepts and others as subordinate thoughts. It’s a good way of developing ideas and insights you already have in hand, but not as effective if you’re still exploring and forming your thoughts. Outlining too early in the ideation process can limit your thinking. Once a form is imposed on content, ideas that don’t align with the stipulations of the form can’t find their way into the argument.
The bottom-up method assumes your “big idea” is waiting to be discovered in your collection of notes and ideas, along with the best way of expressing the idea. The content development process is focused on listening for emerging connections—the faint signals of possibility that suggest an interesting, previously unknown connection exists between two ideas. Your job is to amplify those signals and draw out compelling ways of expressing the connections and the big idea. The load-bearing concepts and structure for communicating your ideas are derived from the content. Bottom-up systems focus on discoverability, connections, and ad hoc forms of organization, like linking and tags. The form of the content takes time to develop. It continues to evolve as new ideas are added to the system and new connections are formed. It is in this sense that it’s an “organic” system.
Niklas Luhmann’s Zettelkasten Note-Taking Method
The top-down and bottom-up methods both begin with notes. But a note is not just a note—there are different kinds of notes. Just as we have a vocabulary for the various types of information we create and manage in our productivity systems (project notes, tasks, appointments, contacts, and so forth), we need a vocabulary for the different types of notes that we create, develop, and refine in our creative note-taking system.
If you’ve searched the web for articles on note-taking or PKM, there’s a good chance you’ve come across the Zettelkasten method. It’s the name given to the note-taking system the German sociologist Niklas Luhmann (1927–1998) developed and used to write over 70 books and 400 scholarly articles. Luhmann was a highly regarded thinker in systems theory, so it’s fitting that in addition to his theories on communication within social systems, his legacy includes his note-taking system which he described as a system “communication partner,” a tool for interactive thinking in partnership with your ideas. He wrote:
Without those cards, just by contemplating, these ideas would never have occurred to me. Of course, my mind is needed to note down the idea, but they cannot be attributed to it alone.
—Niklas Luhmann, as quoted in Forgetting Machines: Knowledge Management Evolution in Early Modern Europe
The German word “zettel” means note, card, or slip (as in a slip of paper.) “Kasten” means crate or box. Luhmann’s “notebox” system predates personal computing, so he captured all his notes on index cards—over 90,000 of them—and stored them in six small filing cabinets with card-sized drawers, the kind you used to find in libraries.
Luhmann wasn’t interested in classifying his notes. He didn’t file them using a pre-existing list of topics (such as the Dewey Decimal system). Instead, he developed a unique numbering system that enabled him to create and follow links between the atomic ideas in each note.
The value of Luhmann’s notebox wasn’t the number of topics it covered or number of notes it held—it was the system’s ability to surprise. A link was only valuable if it led to a surprising new idea that built on (not merely combined) the linked notes.
The numbering system Luhmann developed to link his notes was very effective, but at first glance seems complex. Fortunately, many aspects of his methodology are easily handled in today’s digital note-taking tools using keywords, tags, links, and other types of searchable metadata. A key feature of his numbering system was the ability to work his way forward through the network of links he made over time and work back from a given note to the ideas and notes that initiated his exploratory thinking. This ability to traverse links forwards and backwards is what we call “bi-directional linking,” or more commonly, “linking” and “backlinking.”
It turns out that Luhmann’s ideas on note-taking align nicely with the workflows and features found in many popular digital note-taking applications (such as Obsidian, Roam, and Notion to name just a few). Influential developers, such as Connor White-Sullivan (the creator of Roam) cite Luhmann’s work as a driving force behind their thinking about the design and feature-set of their applications.
Luhmann’s ideas also inform many of the PKM systems that are gaining popularity, including Tiago Forte’s Building A Second Brain (BASB), Nick Milo’s Linking Your Thinking, and August Bradley’s Notion Life Design. (Full disclosure: I am an instructor in Tiago Forte’s Building a Second Brain course.)
What follows is not a tutorial on implementing the Zettelkasten method. It’s an introduction to Luhmann’s ideas on notes and working with notes designed to help you to develop your own thinking about how you use notes and develop ideas. Luhmann’s ideas help us build a vocabulary for notes, note-taking, and working with notes that make it easier to discuss and develop our own ideas on this topic.
The remainder of this article is focused on the different types of notes that Luhmann used in his Zettelkasten system.
Luhmann’s Notes: A Taxonomy
Luhmann’s note-taking model includes three categories of notes: content-focused notes, reference notes (also known as structure notes), and project notes.
Content-focused notes
Content notes are the heart of the note-taking system. Luhmann identified three types of content notes:
Fleeting Notes - These are the quick notes you take to capture an idea, thought, feeling, task, reference, or anything else you may want to refer to later. Fleeting notes are temporary. By design, they are casual. They don’t need to be consistently structured or grammatically correct. However, it’s important to process fleeting notes within a few days, before they lose their meaning. Once you’ve acted on a fleeting note, you can discard it.
If it turns out that your fleeting note may have long term value, add your additional thoughts on why to the note so you can return to it and develop later.
The key to capturing and using fleeting notes is consistency. Try to always use the same capture tool so you know where to find your fleeting notes.
Literature Notes - These are the notes you take while you’re reading, engaged with other types of media (films, television shows, videos, music, podcasts, audiobooks), or perhaps attending live events (concerts, theater, museum exhibits, and so forth).
Literature notes are more than highlighted passages and quotes. They are meant to capture your thoughts, your point of view on the content you’re engaged with. Luhmann was adamant that each note should be focused on one idea. His rule makes sense when you think of a note as an atomic unit of thought. Each idea is an atom that you’ll eventually link to other ideas. Limiting each note to one idea increases the number and diversity of possible links.
Your Literature Notes should have some structure—enough so you can return to the inspiration for the note if you need to review the content again in its original context. That means basic bibliographic data and a link to the source if possible.
Permanent Notes - Your permanent notes are your fully developed expressions of your ideas. They are often derived from your literature notes, but are fully developed, meaning that you’ve expressed the idea in the words and style that clearly communicates your intentions. Permanent notes should be annotated with at least some metadata to aid with discovery, including the subject of the note, its source or sources, and other notes it’s related to. The way that you intend to use your notes may require you to include more metadata, particularly for citation in professional publications. Permanent notes are the only type of notes that are stored in the physical or digital notebox.
Everything in your note-taking workflow should contribute to the development of your permanent notes. They are the durable expressions of your idea that you will build on.
Reference (or Structure) Notes
Keyword Index (or Index Note) - Lumann’s Keyword Index was a collection of what we now call tags. He used keywords sparingly. Just one or two per note as pointers to the trailhead of the key ideas that anchored his threads of linked notes. He stored his keyword index notes outside of the notebox and used them whenever he wanted to start a new exploration or continue following an existing line of thinking.
Research Note (or Hub Note) - A research note gathers the various lines of thinking on a particular topic. It contains a brief summary of your thinking on the topic and links to the relevant notes. Like a keyword index note, it provides an entry point to your thinking, but it’s the entry point for a single topic.
Project Notes
Project Notes - Project Notes are only relevant to a particular project. They are usually stored in a project-specific folder outside the notebox and are discarded (or archived) once the project is finished. In a digital PKM system, project notes are often stored in a dedicated project management tool/system that includes task management capabilities.
Luhmann did not use his Zettelkasten system to archive source material or even his literature notes. The notebox is a thinking tool: It only includes ideas you’ve expressed in your own words. Everything else is stored outside of the physical or digital notebox. This creates a clear distinction between the ideas and work of others and your own ideas and work. Even if you include a quote in a permanent note, if you also include your thoughts on the quote and why it’s relevant, you’re taking the first steps away from the embodiment of the idea in someone else’s words toward expressing it in your own words. The work you then develop with your notes will reflect your thinking in your words.
The best book on the Zettelkasten Method is How to Take Smart Notes by Sönke Ahrens. While Ahern’s primary audience is students and researchers, it’s also a valuable introduction to Luhmann’s ideas for creatives. Why? Because the essence of creativity is self-directed, exploratory thinking. Research and learning in the service of art.
“Paintings are but research and experiment. I never do a painting as a work of art. All of them are researches. I search constantly and there is a logical sequence in all this research.”
—Pablo Picasso
The Zettelkasten method doesn’t appeal to everyone. Even if you don’t implement the system, understanding the different types of notes that Luhmann identified, and the way notes evolve as they flow through his system will give you new insights into your own system. I hope it will also give you some ideas on how you can further refine your note-taking system to enhance the ongoing conversations you have with your ideas.