When I first heard about the Zettelkasten (ZK) method, it seemed like the Holy Grail of note-taking. (And I happen to be the kind of person to get excited about that.) One place to put all my thoughts, all my ideas, all the things I am learning and would wish to remember? One place to always find them? One place to bring them all… and in the darkness bind them? I mean: bring them all together?

A system where my notes would come alive and become a ‘second brain’, a ‘conversation partner’? Yes, please! I mean, who wouldn’t want that?

But that is not quite what happened.

My train-wreck of a Zettelkasten journey

When I first wrote about the Zettelkasten, I was about a year into it, had almost 500 notes and was still very much in the honeymoon phase. My enthusiasm started showing cracks just a couple of months after I wrote that article. I found myself running into duplicate notes, realising I wrote down what was basically the same idea several times in different notes without noticing I already had a note on that. I was spending unreasonable amounts of time sitting by my computer writing notes. I started capturing way, way too much information and not actually going back to it. My Zettelkasten felt like a black hole that I was feeding, but getting nothing back from it. I knew I fell into the trap of the famous Collector’s fallacy. I did the only logical thing (hahaha) – and I moved my ZK to paper.

I spent a few weeks rewriting, pruning and consolidating my 500 notes to about 100 A5-sized index cards. I am a big fan of writing on paper, by hand, with a smooth pen, and I was super happy with my new ZK. It finally didn’t feel like a black hole. All the notes were right there in front of me, there was an order to them, a certain topography that my mammalian brain could orient itself in, and they felt more alive. I remembered them better. And writing on paper is slower, so the added friction helped me to get my collecting urges somewhat under control. I was happy. For a few months.

Eventually, I found myself with some 500 notes again and the topography I so enjoyed in the beginning was constantly getting disrupted by whole trains of thoughts-worth of new cards being added between the old ones (that I remembered being next to each other). With a few hundred notes, looking for things has become a nightmare and manual backlinking was a horror. I was missing search. A lot.

Never one to give up, I decided to double my paper Zettelkasten in a digital system again. The plan was to use both, do everything on paper first, then duplicate on digital, to give myself that search I was wishing for. Just writing it now, I can’t believe I was thinking this would work. It was a crazy amount of work. It was ridiculous.

I wanted my ZK to work. I wanted it so bad. I was diligently taking notes, distilling ideas, processing them, linking. For two years. It was a lot of work, whether on paper or digitally, but it was also fun, and I was looking forward to my ZK reaching the famed ‘critical mass’ and starting to surprise me. I didn’t get there.

There were some upsides, sure. Whatever I processed in my notes, I remembered better than I probably would have without it. But I never actually used my notes when I was writing anything. Not that I didn’t try. They simply weren’t that useful once it came to writing. Worse though, I was feeling more and more paralysed by my notes. Anything I thought about, anything I read, I started thinking about where it would fit inside the web of my Zettelkasten and I found myself not even wanting to think anymore, because it was all too overwhelming. And worst of all, eventually, I felt like my brain was getting muddier and muddier and my ideas more and more fragmented and difficult to express. I felt like I was full of things I wanted to say or write, but couldn’t find the beginning, never mind the thread of the narrative through the jungle-like web of thoughts. Even this blog suffered for it.

Eventually, with the help of my darling husband who had to intervene, I tossed my box of papers into the recycling bin.

My Zettelkasten autopsy

I have spent the last few months on a bit of a note-taking fast (not that I didn’t try to restart a few times) and as always, I felt that if something went wrong, it was surely my fault. So for those of you out there, thinking to yourselves that I failed because I did it wrong, welcome to the club. I have been thinking that for over a year, ever since it stopped quite working for me. But not anymore, not quite.

Despite the message one might get reading online (including my own old post on it)

the Zettelkasten Method is not THE note-taking method, it’s just one of them. Its principles impose a way of seeing things and structuring ideas that might be perfect for some types of work and for some types of brains, but it will not work for everything and everyone.

And it didn’t work for me.

Here are some of my thoughts about why ZK doesn’t mesh with my mind, maybe it will be useful for others who find themselves ‘failing’ at it.

Images from canva.com, collage by me

A map that is never complete

I think, subconsciously, I have been trying to ‘recreate my brain’ in my ZK. There are enough narratives online that refer to the ZK as a ‘second brain’ that even though I didn’t take it too seriously, this idea stuck around in the background. The modern Zettelkasten Method emphasises atomic notes, i.e. one idea per note, and connecting them with each other. The result is an interconnected web, where any and all structure arises from this linking.

In some sense, if the mind is a landscape, the Zettelkasten tries to be a map. But just like any map, it can’t and shouldn’t capture it all. The landscape of the mind is rich and full of details and densely connected with roads and trails. How close can we recreate it in our notes? How close should we?

I found it very difficult to write atomic notes, because for each of them, for each little landmark, I felt compelled to recreate at least a part of the landscape that held it. It was all about the connections, after all, right? Without realising it, I started writing notes about things I would never have written about otherwise, just because they were related to something else I wanted to note down, and I needed them to create the right context. It was laborious and frustrating, because it never felt good enough.

Well, surprise, surprise, it’s not possible to capture one’s brain in a web of notes. Not even close. And while I would never embark on such a futile quest on purpose, I found myself sort of, kind of doing it in a Zettelkasten, because I felt like I was being invited to do that. I think with enough discipline and a clear idea of a goal, one might avoid this trap, but that is a fight I don’t need in my life.

The living land vs the frozen image

In addition to being incomplete, the map is frozen in time. What was one of the biggest promises of Zettelkasten – remembering things – becomes one of its shortcomings. Where our ideas and understanding are constantly evolving the way the living land changes from season to season and even from day to day, updating the map is slow and takes effort.

Of course, it is perfectly possible to update the notes (especially digital ones) or add new notes that refine or dispute ideas in the old ones, but a shift in understanding can have far-reaching consequences that require updating a bunch of notes. I do wonder whether and how much it affects our ability to quickly adapt to new ideas, if we are constantly working with old ideas and old structures that we have put considerable effort into? Once again, it’s an issue that could be overcome with diligence and discipline, but in my mind it is an unnecessary uphill battle.

The thing I craved and missed the most when I was working with a Zettelkasten was a feeling of overview and clarity. One of the main reasons I take notes and write is to sort out my thoughts and to clarify ideas. The more I was using a Zettelkasten, the less clarity and more overwhelm I felt.

With the Zettelkasten ‘remembering’ everything we feed it, it only grows and grows (I know you can prune it, but we mostly talk about the growth as a good thing, right?). Inevitably, a lot of the notes start feeling either obvious, or outdated (as in, our view has shifted somewhat), but they still hang around and clutter the space. I can imagine that there are people who have zero problem ignoring these notes, but I am not one of them.

Looking at a map through a straw

There is another thing that I found to impede my sense of overview and clarity. To me, a Zettelkasten feels too zoomed in. It’s like looking at a map through a straw, you only see a tiny little part of it. I know, I know. That is what structure notes, or maps of content, or whatever you call them are for. Those are the notes where you can organise the other notes. And while they do help, I, personally, found them lacking. The digital ones, especially, since they don’t allow for much more than a linear ‘map’, unless you employ some fancy drawing/mind-mapping/canvas software.

In any case, a lot of the grunt work of maintaining a Zettelkasten happens at the level of single, atomic notes. One file/paper = one idea. As zoomed in as it gets.

And the connections, the thing that the Zettelkasten is all about, are the one thing that is the most difficult to visualise. They exist between notes, not within them. By design, you can’t look at them. I was always trying to connect my notes well and describe the nature of the connection as I was linking, as that was often one of the most interesting parts in the note (sometimes it would even become its own note), but I wasn’t able to create a feeling of overview and clarity that I was lacking.

Some note-taking software comes with the ability to create an interconnected graph of the notes. This works well – for a very, very small number of notes. More than a few tens of notes, and the jungle of lines becomes impenetrable, although aesthetically pleasing. With each reload, the notes are shuffled around a little (goodbye, feeling of space). The lines connecting two notes tell us nothing about why they are connected and the distance between them does not reflect the strength of the connection. In the end, I found the graph view mostly useless.

I found that the Zettelkasten invites to focus on the parts, rather than the whole. Dissecting everything into single ideas, into atomic notes. I am not saying that it doesn’t provide the space to put the bigger picture back together again, because that is what structure notes can be for. But ultimately, I found it to emphasise the parts over the whole much more than would suit my thinking flow.

Going forward

I abandonned my Zettelkasten some 4–5 months ago. It wasn’t a clean end. I found myself coming back to it in various forms, feeling like I failed somehow, because it was supposed to be the ultimate knowledge management system and thinking space. Heck, it even looked like it for a while. I thought I just needed to tweak something. I thought I just needed to do it better.

I have finally got over the Zettelkasten. I was finally able to start thinking outside of the slip box and consider systems that don’t resemble it much.

I feel like I should say here, if the Zettelkasten works for you, that’s wonderful! Congrats on finding something that fits your needs and wants. But if you are like me, and you find yourself struggling with it, the problem isn’t you, nor is it the Zettelkasten itself. To use a precise term here – you just don’t vibe with it. And the world would be terribly boring if we all vibed with the same note-taking system.

Right now, there isn’t much of a system to my notes. I went back to what worked before and what I enjoyed and loved the most. I write. In my journal. I open it to the next empty page and write what I want to write. If it feels important a few days later, I add it to the notebook’s table of contents. I might one day add a digital table of contents, when the number of notebooks becomes too big to comfortably search.

It might seem like a proper downgrade from a Zettelkasten, but it’s not, it’s just different.

It’s a system that allows me to think through my thoughts and note down the things that I want to remember in a place where I can find it later. It has just enough friction for me not to over-collect, but not so much to stop me from using it or to make it a chore. There is little to no overhead.

It’s pleasant – I love writing by hand.

Writing by hand is just the thing that gets my memory to pay attention, and preserves the benefit of better recall that I got from using the Zettelkasten.

The journal is focused on the now. The new blank page is the focus. The old entries are preserved, but allowed to disappear in the background, into the past. The now changes and evolves freely and what should be forgotten is forgotten.

My mind does not work in an interconnected map of atomic ideas. It works in narratives. Where the Zettelkasten is a map of the mind’s landscape, free-form writing is a walk through it. It doesn’t capture it all. It can only take a single path at a time through an ever-changing land, exploring the views, the landmarks and the roads between them. My journal thus becomes a collection of these little mind-walks, criss-crossing the land. And just like the photographs we take on a real-life walk are not the point of it, the scribblings on the page are not the point of my mind-walks. It is the experience that counts.