we tend to think that a big transformation have to start with an equally big idea. but more often than not. it is the simplicity of an idea that makes it so powerful, see how McLean invented a ship container which is just a box.
many students and academic writers handle their ideas and findings in a way that makes immediate sense: if they read an interesting sentence they underline it if they have a comment to make, they write it into the margins if they have an idea they write it into their notebook, and if an article seems to be important enough they make the effort and write an excerpt or quotes
working like this will leave you with a lot of different notes in many different places. writing then will mean relying heavily on your brain to remember where and when these notes were written down. A text must then be conceptualized independently from these notes, which explains why so many resort to brainstorming to arrange the resources afterward according to this preconceived idea.
In this workflow, it indeed does not make much sense to rewrite these notes and put them into a box only to take them out again and alter them when a certain quote or reference is needed
in the old system the question is under which topic do I store this note, in the new system the question is in which context will I want to stumble upon it again? most students sort their material by topic or seminars for the perspective of someone who writes that makes as much sense as sorting your errands by purchase date and the store they were bought from.
the zettelkasten is the shipping container of the academic world. instead of having different storage for different ideas, everything goes into the same slip-box and is standardized into the same format. instead of focusing on the in-between steps and trying to make ascience out of underlining systems, reading techniques or excerpt writing, everything is streamlined towards one thing only: insight that can be published
the biggest advantage compared to a top-down storage system organised by topic is that zettelkasten becomes more and more valuable the more it grows instead of getting messy and confusing. if you sort by topic you are faced with the dilemma of either adding more and more topics and subtopics to it which only shifts the mess to another level. The zettelkasten is designed to present you with ideas you have already forgotten allowing your brain to focus on thinking instead of remembering.
even though zettelkasten being organized bottom-up, does not face the trade-off problem between too many or too few topics it too can lose its value when notes are added to it indiscriminately it can play out its strength when we aim for a critical mass, which depends not only on the number of notes but also their quality and the way they are handled.