## Zettlekasten Note Taking Method Zettlekasten, meaning "note box" in German, is a note taking method credited to Niklas Luhmann, a 20th century German sociologist (1927-1998). Luhmann wrote an astounding 70 books and 500 articles in a span of 30 years. He attributes his impressive productivity to the Zettlekasten method. This method of note taking has become popular recently as an alternative to traditional note taking. ### Zettelkasten's Approach to Notes Zettelkasten differs from traditional note taking methods in that it is focused on building connections between notes. Each note, or Zettel, is atomic and the power of Zettelkasten is in the connections between these atomic notes. It is decentralized in nature and through these connections new and abstract ideas form naturally. You can, for instance, have a Zettel about sedans. You write all of your notes pertaining to the sedan: its weight, number of seats, number of doors etc. Separately, you could have a Zettel about trucks with similar information. Seeing the correlation, you could create a Zettel about automobiles and link both the sedan and truck Zettel to it and add more information specifically about automobiles. Each individual piece can be independent, but the connection of the group gives additional insight. If you are familiar with programming, you might be familiar with this type of grouping as it relates to objects. At the end of the day, in an object oriented programming language, everything is an object, but we can build relations between those objects. ### Bottom Up vs Top Down Have you ever created a file on your computer and spent too much time trying to figure out which folder to put it into so you can easily access it later? Maybe the file doesn't fit into your existing folder structure so you add a new folder just for that file, in its own category. You soon find that you're creating folders for everything that does not fit and when you want to go back to retrieve something you have to rummage through all of your folders to try to find it. This is the problem inherent in top down approaches. Zettelkasten addresses this by flipping it on its head and taking a bottom up approach. As mentioned before, Zettels are atomic. That is important. They are files that don't have folders. There is no hierarchy. Instead, the categories and similarities emerge from the linking. The focus is less on categorizing the information and more on the information itself and how that fits into the existing web of knowledge. When you visualize these links, like the graph in the upper right hand corner of this website, you begin to naturally see clusters of notes forming. That is the sign to think abstractly about their connections and potentially form another Zettel out of the emerging concept. Even this newly created Zettel is treated no differently than the rest. All nodes are on an even playing field. You can see this in the navigation pane on the left of this site. Most of the pages of this site are free-floating and rely on connections to navigate. ### Resources [Zettelkasten Method: How To Take Smart Notes For Knowledge Management](https://leananki.com/zettelkasten-method-smart-notes/)