This blog post is a brief summary of the book titled “Digital Zettelkasten” written by David Kadavy

Context

This is one of the books that I should have read much earlier in my life. Reminds me of the time when I first started experiencing joy with emacs. Emacs like reading book falls in the category of stuff that I wish I got exposed it much earlier in life. This book talks about a specific form of note taking called Zettelkasten. I have managed to read this book experimenting with the principles mentioned in the book via org-roam package in emacs and am amazed at the power of CODE (collecting, organizing, distilling and expressing) information using Zettelkasten. While the general principles behind the CODE are mentioned in the book “Second Brain” by Tiago Forte, this short book is perfect for someone looking to implement CODE via Zettelkasten. BASB(Building a Second Brain) can be accomplished by several means like Evernote, Obsidian, Roam Research, Logseq etc

I was slightly confused on the way to combine PARA method mentioned by Tiago Forte and the principles behind Zettelkasten. Around the same time, I came across ACE method popularized by Nick Milo. Went through a few blog posts from Nick Milo, read a few books by Tiago Forte and watched a few videos on Zettelkasten before zeroing in on a folder structure that captured most of the elements that fit my workflow. By doing a crash course immersion on all Zettelkasten, ACE and Tiago Forte’s ideas, I iterated a few times. My folder structure that combines ACE, PARA and Zettelkasten looks as follows:

efforts : this is the project folder of the PARA method and is also the E in the ACE method
atlas : this is the A of the ACE method
- fleeting : This captures the fleeting notes of the Zettelkasten method
- literature : This captures the literature notes of the Zettelkasten method
- permanent: This captures the permanent notes of the Zettelkasten method
- MOC: This captures the Maps of Content, a way to capturing the map of notes popularized by Nick Milo
- assets: This contains any assets such as images,style sheets or for that matter anything that relates to atlas
chronicle: this is the C in the ACE method. Even though it needs to stand for calendar, I have tweaked it to call it Calendar. Any time bound or recurring activity that I do falls in here
- time oriented notes like daily, monthly and yearly reflections
- project trackers
resources - This is the resources folder of the PARA method
archives - This is the archives folder of the PARA method

I did not pay too much attention about the way I managed information on my hard disk, cloud drive. Till date, I have mostly organized info based on folders. One day I stumbled on to this fantastic video by Folders or Links? The key to both is A.C.C.E.S.S. Even though I thought the folder structure was a bit overwhelming, the video resonated with me in many ways. I had never organized the information in such as way that helped me to CODE. Subsequently, I went in to a rabbit hole and learned about various softwares such Obsidian, logseq, Roam Research and others similar to such tools. I read a ton of stuff around all the principles behind the software, listened to all people who were talking about roam, their reasons for using roam from academic researchers to freelancers. Everyone was going gaga about the system. Thought I give it a try.

Finally it was emacs, org-mode and org-roam that had all the functionality that I was looking for. So, why did I read this book after spending time in understanding Zettelkasten and already experimented with note taking system ? Well,for one thing I wasn’t clear on a few things about Zettelkasten. This book was perfect for me. The fact that I had already experimented with a few note taking systems made it easy to understand the principles mentioned in the book .

There is no prerequisite to reading the book except having a decent level of curiosity to see why such a notetaking system is popular. But I think it will be immensely useful reading this book after you have experimented with a rough idea of Zettelkasten and after incorporating a few principles that Nick Milo and Tiago Forte talks about.

Summary

The book begins with the author citing Steve Jobs who used the phrase “bicycle to our mind”, to describe a computer, as it increases human efficiency. . The analogy of computers to “Bumper cars for the mind” is perhaps a bit apt when you consider the amount of distraction mechanisms that are built into modern digital tools. Open a browser and you are swamped with distractions. Open a company laptop for working - There are a ton of teams notifications and slack notifications that make us less productive as our attention is fractured. In such a workflow, Zettelkasten has a different philosophy. “Digital Zettelkasten” is a way to pause, take a note of the main points in a literature note and then possibly atomize it in to a permanent note.

If you start using Zettelkasten even for a few weeks, you will be inclined to agree with the author. Digital Zettelkasten can be likened to the true bicycle to our mind as it helps to

Collect your knowledge from disparate sources
Organize your knowledge
Distill your knowledge
Express your knowledge

Firstly, what is Zettelkasten ?

Zettelkasten is German for “slip box” (Plural: Zettelkästen). In analog form, a Zettelkasten is literally a box filled with slips of paper, each slip with a note on it, as well as metadata used to organize those notes. The Zettelkasten method is a way of organizing paper in a non-hierarchical way. Instead of being restricted to keeping a note only under one category, or having to make multiple copies of the same note to put in various places, notes are organized so that you can arrive at one individual note through various routes, and that note can lead you to various other notes – much like today’s internet, but in paper form.

The author mentions the following benefits of Zettelkasten:

Retain what you read: No more forgetting what a book was about the moment you finish reading it. The Zettelkasten method helps break reading down into a series of engaging rituals that repeatedly expose you to the most interesting things you’ve read – thus helping you retain what you read.
Retrieve it quickly: No more fumbling through pages to try to find that passage you want to reference. With your digital Zettelkasten, you can copy and paste the exact quote in seconds – along with bibliographic information, if you choose to record it.
Know what to read next: Your Zettelkasten helps you follow your curiosity in a productive way. If you’re looking for something to read, you can look in your Zettelkasten to see what sparks your interest. Whatever you choose, exploring that topic will drive your writing projects forward.
Develop your ideas: Instead of starting each writing project with a blank page, you already have written short passages you can stitch together to create an instant first draft.
Have ideas: Because your Zettelkasten frees your mental energy from having to remember and retrieve things you read or wrote long ago, you have more mental energy available to think about new ideas. The act of organizing your notes is just enough a challenge to spark new ideas without burning yourself out.

I think one of the main advantages of using Zettelkasten is that it makes the note-taking process more fun, interactive

The author also highlights a few misconception about notetaking such as:

Note-taking does not take the pleasure away from reading
Note-taking is not mindlessly writing down everything you read
Note-taking is not boring
Google is not a substitute for notes

I think the very fact that you are summarizing the highlights in your own words, tagging them, placing them in the relevant folder, connecting to the existing ideas makes it a pleasurable activity. In a sense note-taking using a combination of methods such as PARA, org-roam and ACE methods can move you in and out of various thinking modes

With Zettelkasten, you’re not stuck in a single mode of reading or writing. You cycle between:

Reading mode (absorbing)

Distillation mode (summarizing/highlighting)

Synthesis mode (making new connections)

Creative mode (writing original ideas)

This variation keeps you from getting fatigued. You are still working with ideas, but in different ways, which helps maintain energy and focus longer.

There is a chapter where the author contrasts implementing Zettelkasten using digital tools vs. paper. For me, I quickly read this chapter as I don’t think I will move away from emacs and orgmode. I have tried getting a trial account of Roam Research and then I gave up as the capabilities of any editor is difficult to impress you once you are used to emacs for a few years. I did manage to sign up for Roam Research just to understand the functionality offered by Roam Research. Most of the functionality without the eye candy is present in emacs and that works for me. I have tried doing what I do in emacs in the Roam Research interface and felt it too clunky. My main motivation of going through Roam Research was to understand block referencing and also go through the various videos that Roam Cult members have put out. The videos and the points that Roam Research enthusiasts make are priceless. It is just that all those can be implemented in emacs and then you can forget about the Roam Research interface. Once you hear and listen and see how people are using backlinks, dailies, calendar, graph functionality in Roam Research, you will appreciate the principles behind linking your notes.

I did spend quite amount of time in going through the videos and understanding the various ideas behind notetaking tools and ideas. Here are a bunch of links that I went through

The outcome of this massive immersion in to a rabbit hole is that I have more or less iterated through many times to get my system up and running that matches my workflow.

Now coming back to this book, the author also gives a list of apps that can be used. This is useful for someone wanting to start with digital Zettelkasten. For me, I had already decided to use emacs and hence did not find the content relevant for my use case.

I think the most important chapter in the book is the one where the author gives a bird’s overview of his workflow

I have tweaked the above workflow so that it suits my workflow

I have my “someday” as an org file in Chronicle and have “Raw” in my “Resources” folder. As one I can see I have tried adding PARA and ACE methods in to the above folder structure and linking structure. It is working for me now and I will definitely tweak the above stuff as I go along. Bound to happen. It is emacs after all and the learning curve is forever, even for the expert emacs users

While I was immersed in understanding this whole structure of fleeting-literature-permanent note structure, it struck me that this pattern of thinking gave me a good way to organize my thoughts and connect my thoughts. Of course I did not understand all at once. By tweaking it bit by bit, I have now some sort of workflow for various kinds of activities that I do. Let’s take reading a book. The following comprises the broad set of activities that accompanies reading a book

Start a project folder with “writing book review for Book XYZ”
Start reading the book either using emacs(nov mode or pdf-tools mode) or on iPad or any of the other places where I can read books. If the reading happens with in emacs, then the highlights are already available in an org file and I store these highlights in resources folder. If the highlights are on iPad, then I sync it with readwise and then pull it in to an org file.
Use the raw highlights file and create a literature note for the book where I reference all the highlights
Use the literature note and see if I can crystallize any permanent notes out of it. Use Progressive summarization to take highlights and convert in to a literature note
Use the literature note and create any permanent notes
Write an org file in the projects folder that contains the contents of the blog post
Use ox-hugo to export in to markdown and push it on to the blog

What has changed as compared to the workflow I followed in the previous years ? Everything. My starting point was always an org file and I used to do Step 6 and nothing else. But with the new workflow Steps 1-5 make it a rich workflow as well as it makes the whole activity of reading, note taking, thinking, reflecting, connecting very interesting and fun.

I figured out the above process before reading the chapter from this book where the author writes about his own workflow for reading books using Zettelkasten principles. There were some steps that were similar to the above workflow but there were other steps that I found useful such as using the principle of progressive summarizing for converting highlights in to literature notes.

Also the heavy emphasis by the author to rewrite the highlights in one’s own sentences is something I found useful. In my work flow I was summarizing chapters in my own words but I did not have any specific workflow or guiding principle for summarizing highlights. This whole concept of “Progressive Summarization” was made possible in emacs, thanks to inbuilt orgmode features as well as org-remark package. Also org-noter package gives a few more functionalities to do progressive summarization. The combination of org-noter, org-remark, nov-mode makes it very easy to do progressive summarization in emacs

The last few chapters of the book might or might not be relevant based on the system that you follow in implementing Zettelkasten. For example, there is a chapter on naming the files. Most of the time, the tool that you use automatically names your files such as org-roam that creates a filename that is a combination of timestamp and fileslug. In other tools, the file names might be automatically created if you create a new file. For curiosity sake, one might read this chapter and understand four types of file naming conventions

Phrases
Unique ID
Folgezettel
combination of the above

I found a gem of an advice in the “Choosing keywords/tags” chapter.

The way people choose their keywords shows clearly if they think like an archivist or a writer. Do they wonder where to store a note or how to retrieve it? The archivist asks: Which keyword is the most fitting? A writer asks: In which circumstances will I want to stumble upon this note, even if I forget about it? It is a crucial difference.

The above made my rethink the way I was tagging notes. org-roam makes it easy to tag notes but what do you tag a note with ? Tag for discoverability is the key and that alone might be worth the time one puts in reading this book.

Takeaway

I stumbled on to this book while implementing Zettelkasten in my workflow. If I were to read just one book on this massive topic, it would be this book. I believe that this book needs to be read after you have experimented with analog or digital Zettelkasten. This book is about 80 pages and can easily be read in less than two hours time. If you have never organized the info that you consume on a daily basis, then it might be worth your time and effort to get a quick understanding of the basic concepts and see if it makes a difference in your life. If you are a massive consumer of news, research papers, books, podcasts and videos like me, you will find Zettelkasten to be a fantastic technique to collect, organize, distill and express information. This book may well be the perfect start you will need instead of going through gazillion videos and tutorials out there.