Create permanent notes of atomic ideas from your literature notes - only one idea per note - in your words.Turn highlights and fleeting notes into literature notes.Capture quick thoughts in fleeting notes.A Zettelkasten workflow emphasizes connecting atomic ideasĪt the risk of over-simplification, the Zettelkasten workflow is: Do this well, and the rest of the system falls into place. The essential concept of this system is creating and connecting atomic ideas. It is easier to connect a single idea across various contexts by distilling knowledge into its atomic ideas. Atomic ideas are the cornerstone of the systemĪtomic refers to something that cannot be broken down into smaller parts. He discovered topics to write about while looking through his connected ideas and used his notes to write his articles and books. By linking atomic ideas to each other, he found he was thinking with the system, which reduced friction for writing. What caught my eye with Zettelkasten was how Niklas said his productivity stemmed from working in a partnership with the system. Niklas built a Zettelkasten of 90,000 index cards and credited it with his extraordinary productivity of more than 70 books and 400 scholarly articles.Ī few months ago, I read through all types of personal knowledge management systems. It emphasizes connection, not the collection. Zettelkasten, German for “slip box,” is a tool for thinking, writing, and connecting thoughts across disciplines. Niklas Luhmann was a German sociologist and prominent thinker in systems theory who created the Zettelkasten method. I do include a referral link for products if one exists, although please do not feel pressured to use them. In the end, I go through multiple sample workflows.ĭisclaimer: I have no affiliation with any of the companies below. The primary components of this system are Zettelkasten, automation tools, and a scalable learning process. This article is guidance for what works well for me after four months of research and experimentation. This approach is exponential because each idea can belong to multiple topics and classes. Get the atomic level (i.e., the lowest-level possible) ideas down pat and then connect topics and classes. What I propose in this system works the other way-the ideas matter the most. This approach is linear because each idea belongs to one topic and class. And we are incentivized to learn this information primarily for exams, without much incentive to retain it for future classes. We end the day with a binder with isolated topics and ideas for each class. But then the bell rings, and you can guess where this ends. But then the bell rings, and we head to our next class. We start with a class and then learn topics and ideas. My biggest issue with learning is we approach it linearly. Looking back, I now know that I quickly became good at learning how to pass a test at the expense of long-term knowledge. Less so for building an excellent educational foundation. That experience was great for learning how to meet people and adapt to change. I wanted a system that generated exponential returns on prior knowledge.įor context, I lived in 18 places during my first 21 years. I did this because I strongly felt there had to be a more effective way to learn in a scalable way. Walled Gardens for Lifelong Learning: To build a lifelong learning system that scales, I shifted away from top-down walled gardens, organized by topics, towards a bottom-up virtuous cycle, focused on ideas, which increases in value as the number of ideas grows. Over the past four months, I tore down my lifelong learning system to the studs and rebuilt it from the ground up with a focus on scale.
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