what is this book about?
This book aims to change the note-taking techniques that were usually taught without much regard to the overall workflow or the big picture.
This technique and tools turned the son of a brewer into one of the most productive and revered social scientists of the 20th century. but more it describes how he implemented them into his workflow so he could say “I never force myself to do anything I don’t feel like. whenever I am stuck, I do something else.”
Good Structure Properties
A good structure and workflow allow you to move from one task to another - without threatening the whole arrangement or losing sight of the bigger picture. A good structure is something you can trust, as It should relieves you from the burden of remembering and keeping track of everything, if you can trust the system you can let go of the attempt to hold everything together in your head and you can start focusing on what is important (the content, the writing and the ideas) A good structure enables your flow -in my opinion, it’s deep work state-
Good Solution / Structure are Simple
There is no need to build a complex system and there is no need to reorganize everything that you already have you can start working and developing ideas immediately by taking smart notes. again it’s not about redoing what you have done before but about changing the way of working from now on.
we only need to combine two well-known and proven ideas.
- the technique of the simple zettelkasten and how it can be implemented in the everyday routine of knowledge workers
- the second idea is equally important and it’s important to understand that even the best tool can’t improve your understanding or productivity if you don’t change your daily routine As soon as you get used to taking smart notes, it will feel so much natural that you will wonder how you were able to get anything done before
If Niklas Luhmann Zettelkasten was so great and made him that productive why didn’t everyone use it.
- there was misunderstanding prevailed about how Luhmann actually worked, which led to disappointing results, the main misunderstanding stems from an isolated focus on the slip box and neglect the actual workflow in which it was embedded.
- almost everything that is published about this system was only in german which was almost exclusively discussed within a small group of deveoted socilogists who specilised in luhmanns theory of social system
- the most important reason is the very fact it is simple intutively most people didn’t expect much from simple ideas.
The Manual
how does the slip-box the hear of this system work?
Luhmann had two slip boxes
- a bibliographical one that contained the references and brief notes on the content of the literature.
- and the main one in which he collected and generated his ideas mainly in response to what he read. These notes were written on index cards and stored in wooden boxes.
whenever he read something he would write the bibliographic information on one side of a card and make a brief note about the content on the other side. in a second step shortly after he would look at his breif notes and thing about their relevance for his own thinking and writing he then would turn to the main slip box and write his ideas, comments and thoughts on new pieces of paper using only one for each idea and restricting himself to one side of the paper, to make it easier to read them later without having to take them out of the box. he usually kept them brief enough to make on idea fit on a single sheet, but would something add another note to extend a thought.
He usually wrote his notes with an eye towards already existing notes in the slip-box and while the notes on the literature were brief he wrote them with a great care, not much different from his style in the final manuescript. in full sentences and with explicit references to the literature from which he drew his material.
He did not copy ideas or quotes from the texts he read, but made a transition from one context to another it was very much like a translation where you use different words that fit a different context but strive to keep the original meaning.
The Trick is that he didn’t organize his notes by topics but in a rather abstract way by giving them fixed numbers. the numbers bore no meaning and were only there to identifiy each note permanently if a new note was relevant or directly referred to an already existing note such as a comment correction or addition he added it directly behind the previous note if the existing note had the number 22 the new note would become note number 23, if the 23 already existed the new note would become 22a by alternating numbers and letters with some slashes and commas in between he was able to breach out into as many strings of thought as he liked. whenever he added a new note he checked his slip-box for other relevant notes to make possible connections between them. adding a note directly behind another note is only one way of doing this another way is by adding a link on this or the other note, which be anywhere in the system. by adding connection or links between notes luhmann was able to add the same note to different contexts while other systems start with a preconceived order of topics, Luhmann developed topics bottom up he would then add another note to his slip-box on which he would sort a topic by sorting the links of the relevant other notes
his file system was an index from which he would refer to one or two notes that would serve as kind of entry point into line of thought or topic notes with sorted collection of links are of course good entry points.