After tossing away my Zettelkasten, I was still left with the task of thinking (and hanging onto my thoughts) in this noisy world. Fortunately, I got some unexpected help.

The article about my break-up with ZK prompted an unusual number of responses. Among others, I was contacted by THE Sascha Fast himself from zettelkasten.de, and offered a coaching session. As done as I felt with the method, I was incredibly curious to hear what Sascha had to say, and obviously couldn’t decline the offer. If you feel like watching what we have talked about, the coaching session is on YouTube.

Anyway, it gave me a lot to think about, and just at the right time. While I was feeling relieved and happy after I got rid of my dysfunctional Zettelkasten, I was still living in the same world overflowing with information, still needing to think through the things I read, saw and experienced, still needing to note down bits of information that otherwise wouldn’t do me the favour of just sticking around in my brain, thank you very much. Put simply, I was still doing knowledge work, but now without a framework.

So, here are some of my thoughts about developing a sustainable knowledge-work practice that actually works for me. This article will have several parts: first some thoughts about what a Zettelkasten is, then addressing the key aspects of the practice that I need to take into account (as suggested by Sascha), namely depth, breadth, and energy and information input management. Finally, I will consider the practical details of how I can translate this into reality. Let’s go!

What is even a Zettelkasten, anyway?

What is meant by Zettelkasten these days is rather specific. Read almost any article about the Zettelkasten online, and you will get the same: first the story of Niklas Luhman and his miraculous slip box, then the three principles of the Zettelkasten Method - atomic notes (writing only one idea per note), writing in your own words, and linking the notes to each other. This view of the Zettelkasten is so widespread that you can even read it on Microsoft’s business blog, of all places, which tells you all you need to know about its modern popularity. For some reason, many of these articles leave the impression that Luhman invented the Zettelkasten (or even state it explicitly like the aforementioned Microsoft blog.")

In truth, Zettelkasten is simply German for “slip box” or “card box”, and these have been in use for centuries before Luhmann. Really, Luhmann wasn’t even the first—nor the only—power-user (as seen on the Zettelkasten page on Wikipedia). Luhmann’s main contribution might have been his linking system which uses unique identifiers for each note, resulting in an analogue version of the digitally ubiquitous hypertext. He definitely also added to the popularity of the method by crediting his slip box for his prolific writing.

Funnily enough, the three principles of atomicity, deep processing and connection don’t even come from Luhmann. His notes weren’t atomic; most weren’t connected in any other way than through their position in the sequence and many of them were rather telegraphic—definitely no detailed processing written with an audience in mind. And so the most famous user of the Zettelkasten method wouldn’t even recognise the rules that now seem to define the method he is credited with inventing.

But really, it shouldn’t even matter what exactly Luhmann did or didn’t do. He was just one person, and he might have had the same success with a different system, or even no system at all. Luhmann’s prolific output is not a proof that his version of a Zettelkasten is the best one, or that any version of a Zettelkasten is the ultimate system. Ultimately, we need to look at the principles and ideas themselves, rather than just appeal to authority.

But what is a Zettelkasten, then? A hundred years ago it would have simply meant a slip box - made up of slips of paper organised in whatever way the owner wished. For Luhmann, that organisation meant unique identifiers for each card and hyperlinks between them. Nowadays, almost every Zettler thinks of a digital system composed of single text files, following the three principles that are featured in every introductory article about the method. They are all just as much the real Zettelkasten.

Revisiting the three principles

In my last article I wrote about how the Zettelkasten method didn’t work for me. How it felt too rigid, how it felt too “zoomed-in” (because of the atomicity), how I felt like it was inviting me to map the full contents of my brain to capture all the connections (because of the connecting), and how I kept capturing and “processing” (read: rewriting) way too much. I was done with the “modern” ZK and its principles.

Discussing the principles with Sascha was incredibly interesting, because his take on them was very different from how I understood them before. This is surprising, given that (as far as I know), these principles, so often erroneously attributed to Luhmann, actually orginated from zettelkasten.de, started by him and Christian Tietze. I have to admit, I much prefer the version of Zettelkasten that Sascha introduced me to much more than my old one.

Here are my takeaways from the conversation I had with Sascha and how I see the three principles after talking to him (it’s my understanding, not his words). Spoiler alert: I really did do it all wrong before.

1. Atomicity is the principle of striving for clarity and trying to get to the core of the idea. It’s not about splitting up the ideas into the smallest possible particles. It’s a goal or a process, rather than a prerequisite. As a result, a note can totally start as a dumping ground of everything relevant, and be the space where the actual thinking happens.
2. Writing in your own words is not about making sure you understand the idea. Rather, it’s a challenge to think about the idea, to expand on it, to develop it, improve it, to add to it in some way.
3. Connecting the notes doesn’t mean trying to recreate the landscape each idea lives in. It is simply a way of leveraging old thinking whenever it is relevant to new ideas.

So yes, the way I have applied these principles before was not working, but clearly, it wasn’t the only way to apply them.

Letting go of the “proper” way

Previously, I have spent a lot of time splitting up all the ideas I got from a book/article/video, and trying to put them into “atomic notes” so that I could work with them. It was boring busy work that only fragmented my thoughts and didn’t leave me with time and energy for the actual thinking I so wanted to do (funnily, that thinking is the real meaning behind “processing”). I felt like I needed to connect the notes “properly” and integrate them into the network. But thankfully, I don’t need to do any of that.

Atomicity can just be a direction, not a starting point.

A Zettelkasten does not have to be some sort of map of ideas, or, god forbid, a second brain. It can be a log of previous thinking efforts—a living archive that I can still interact with. I want my notes to hold my past thinking available for the future me, but in no way do they need to (or can) represent the landscape of my mind.

What I did before, might have been recognised as a Zettelkasten by anyone familiar with the modern idea of it, but it wasn’t useful (to me). Now my understanding of the Zettelkasten Method has changed a lot, expanded, loosened. After reconsidering the principles, I can still get behind them. The principles of striving for clarity, adding to the ideas, and connecting when relevant still sound good to me, and can be applied in many different ways.

Why I’m not calling it a Zettelkasten anymore

Ultimately, I have decided to continue on the same path that I started when I quit my ZK a few months ago. What I wrote back then still applies. If anything, talking to Sascha confirmed it for me; what I was doing was, indeed, useless. But it wasn’t all that a Zettelkasten is or can be.

I know I just said that the Zettelkasten can be a lot of things, but I, personally, decided not to call my future note-taking a Zettelkasten. The word to me now is both too loose and too loaded. Loose because it can encompass so much, and loaded both with all that is being written about it out there and my own unfortunate experience. I want to start anew. I want to give myself the space to end up with not-a-Zettelkasten. Or not-quite-a-Zettelkasten. Or a sort-of-a-Zettelkasten. Or whatever it might end up being. I don’t want to be Luhmann. I don’t even want to be Sascha. I am looking forward to finding my own way to a meaningful, sustainable knowledge-work practice, developed from principles I can stand behind, adapted to my needs. Good luck to me.

What I need from my knowledge-work practice

Parting ways with what most people understand to be a Zettelkasten, I still find myself facing the challenge of knowledge work in a world drowning us in information. But I can’t blame it on the world only, I excel at making things harder for myself with my homemade cocktail of boundless curiosity, squirrel-level distractibility, crippling perfectionism, and an overdevelopped sense of responsibility. To make it easier for my future self to make good decisions, even when she’s deep down some rabbit hole, I need a plan.

Or rather, a system. A practice. One that takes into account my needs, such as the need for breadth and depth, and the need to manage both the information influx and my own energy (as suggested by Sascha after our coaching call).

Slow down the flow

The first step in knowledge work is ingesting information and inputs from outside. While this part doesn’t directly happen inside my note system, it is what sets the tone for all that follows. I have been finding it difficult to deal with the constant, relentless influx of cool and interesting stuff that is the internet. And I doubt I am alone in that.

It is tempting to think that the answer to the information overload is somewhere out there. That there is a tool, or a system, that will allow us to manage the waterfall. Isn’t that what the philosophy of apps like Evernote is? Capture everything. Funnel it to a safe storage place. Store for later—for ever.

A tool that lets us capture everything we find mildly interesting is just like a huge funnel taking in the waterfall, directing it to—well—us. Sure, unlike a funnel, it also has a storage space that can expand basically infinitely. But no matter how big the funnel is, no matter how big the storage space is, our stomach is still the same as it was. In a way, the situation is even worse now. Our funnel lets us capture more water than we would have otherwise and makes sure we don’t let any of it slip by unnoticed. (Is it just me, or is this waterfall metaphor getting out of hand?) We save things for later, for when we will have more time, but, surprise, surprise, there is no later. When that ’later’ arrives, it’s just like now. The stream never stops.

I tried. I mean, that is what my old Zettelkasten was. I was capturing left and right, lying to myself that I was being selective. And then, not wanting to fall into the trap of only capturing, I was organising. Not really processing, just organising. And I was tired.

The only solution I can see right now to the information overload is to deliberately slow down the flow. I don’t think we have a realistic view of how much information we are able to absorb. Three or four “short” informational videos of 15–20 minutes, tightly edited and fast-paced, will easily hold more information than an average lecture. Regardless of whether the information is useful or important, it is still input that our brains need to process, evaluate and make decisions about.

Social media, with their bite-sized bits of stuff and endless scroll, are no better. I don’t know about you, but they always leave me with a feeling of open tabs in my brain, somewhere in the background, ones I can’t access. They are thoughts and feelings that appeared in response to whatever I scrolled past, but that had no time to develop before they were pushed away a half a second later by a flick of a finger. Trapped, they have now become ghosts in the tower of my mind. Back when I wrote about this for the first time, I was still keeping my social media. Now, I have left most of them, and the ones I kept, I visit less than weekly. I just don’t quite see anymore how to use them without falling into this trap.

In addition, not only do we think we can easily deal with this amount of information, we think we can do it on the side! There is a problem with smartphones—actually, several—but one of them is that they make whatever you do with them feel like “not-a-thing”. Like something you can do while doing something else. We use them without quite realising that they have our full attention, thinking that we are still engaging with the living world around us. Not only do we lose sight of our surroundings, but we also put ourselves in the worst position to process what we are seeing and reading. Multitasking is not the best strategy for doing knowledge work.

I think the answer to the digital overwhelm is curating the inputs, which in my case means removing social media and heavily limiting my phone use. But it also means choosing carefully what I will give my attention to.

Which brings me to agency. Agency is a tricky thing that has been on my mind for a while now. There are two parts to agency - it’s a clarity about what you want, as well as an ability to pursue it.

We need agency to keep ourselves on course when facing the “content” deluge, but ironically, this deluge also strips us of it.

In practice, agency often means acting non-reactively. It requires stopping what we are doing regularly and reevaluating whether it is what we really want to do.

To regularly pause, we need moments with no input. To know what we want, we need to know ourselves; something we do by spending time with ourselves. And both of these, my precious, are freaking difficult with a distraction machine lurking in our pocketses.

So the answer that keeps staring me in the face once again is to be mindful with my information diet. For me, that means staying off of my phone as much as possible, and using my computer for enganging with the internet. To use my RSS feed and treat it as a river, not as a lake. In other words, what catches my attention then and there, I read. What doesn’t—well—it floats by and that’s ok. I don’t have to read or watch everything I subscribed for.

Being mindful of my information diet also means choosing sources that are worth my time, prioritising long-form and (ideally physical) books. And lastly, a good information diet includes some fasting—leaving enough time for myself to sit with my own thoughts, whether in front of a blank page, or just staring out of a (real-life) window.

Finding depth again

As a child, I dreamed of being a polymath. I was ridiculously curious, and I literally wanted to learn everything there is to learn in the world. It stuck with me for longer than it does for most people, but I grew out of it eventually. But while I don’t want to learn everything anymore, my interests still go in quite a few directions.

My previous Zettelkasten was able to hold the breadth, but I kept myself so busy with collecting, curating and organising bits of ideas, that I never had the time to sit down and think through an idea on (or of) my own. In other words, I was lacking depth.

This time, I am changing that. If I am to write a note, it is because I have something to add to an idea, something I am trying to process about it, understand, or apply to my life.

Ever since I have started my first Zettelkasten, I have been haunted by the spectre of the Collector’s fallacy. I have also read about how processing was the answer to it. But it turns out that what I understood as ‘processing’ wasn’t enough to stop me from collecting too much. Realistically, I can’t write about everything I find interesting, so I needed a new way of deciding what to include in my notes. The filter that I pass new ideas through now is one of ‘developing’. I still jot down ideas when they strike, but I now decide whether to keep them based on whether I want to develop them. Not just process them to make sure I understand them and can connect them to other ideas. I need to feel like I want to think about it deeply, apply it somehow, somewhere, or add to it.

Because ultimately, what good is having information, having notes, if they don’t change what we do or who we are?

Knowledge only becomes useful when it is assimilated, when are able to apply it to our lives. And to get to that point, much more ‘processing’ is needed than to get to a point where we understand the idea. We have to make it our own.

I think this shows again how important it is to manage our information diet. What point is it to read book after book, highlighting and exporting half of it to our digital second brains, if we haven’t made any of the ideas in it our own?

Going forward, I will be using my (note-)writing system for exactly the thing I didn’t get the time for before: thinking.

The forgotten need—energy

Now, the last need Sascha brought up is the one I keep forgetting. Or rather, ignoring. Energy. It’s one of those things I generally don’t have and haven’t had much of for a while (see my post on burnout/long Covid). Honestly, the moment he mentioned it, I was surprised. I was equally surprised by the idea of taking energy into consideration and by the fact that I was surprised by it. Because, duh. Who doesn’t consider their own energy needs and stores when planning and doing activities? (Me, clearly.)

So here we are—I am finally considering energy while setting up my knowledge-work practice, and realising that it affects everything else. While all activities require energy, strictly speaking, some of them—the good ones—leave you feeling better afterwards than what you started with. And I don’t mean the finally-got-that-done kind of better. Rephrasing ideas from books and frantically trying to get to the bottom of my inbox is not one of them. But what is?

Actually, this is. Blogging is one of those things that bring me joy and leave me with more energy and clarity than I had before. Writing on my blog feels more like actual creation than writing notes for myself does. I care about the text more, I feel prouder of it when it’s done. It prevents me from collecting without processing, because why would I publish someone else’s ideas? It feels inherently more creative.

Plus, as Kening Zhu talks about, the act of sharing can be seen as the culmination of the creative effort, a release of the energy one has put into it, a kind of completion. I like the idea. Publishing takes my blog post out of my hands and lets it live freely on the internet. It’s done. It’s finished. I can’t continue tweaking it or even connecting it into the web of my thoughts. It has its own life now and that feels rather liberating.

I have been struggling to figure out why I am blogging at all. I’m not building a business, I’m not interested in being famous, and while I have identified some reasons before, like sorting my thoughts, learning, practicing writing, connecting with people, etc, I wasn’t sure why I wanted to do it publicly. Do I think the world needs to hear what I have to say? Well, no. Not at all. But at the same time it feels right to release what I make back into the world. It makes me feel like a part of a cycle, rather than a hoarder. It makes me feel like I am contributing, like I am giving back. I have gotten so much value from what random people on the internet have written and made, and I want to give back. And while I don’t think my voice is worth any more than anyone elses, it should not be worth less either.

Of course, blogging can’t replace all of my note-taking and thinking efforts, and so I need more energy-conscious strategies. These need to address 2 aspects of my knowledge-work practice: the what and the how.

Concerning the what, I have decided to only put my energy into topics and ideas that feel really compelling. Unless I am doing this for work (because, as it happens, my day job is knowledge work too), it has to be something that is genuinely fun and that I want to do, not just want to have done.

When it comes to the howness, I want to put more play into my knowledge work. I want to embrace experimentation, mess and unfinished things. I want to make space for silly rabbit holes and short dips that lead nowhere. I want to allow for creativity and beauty. The main purpose of my personal knowledge play is to enrich my own life. So what is the point of it if it’s not fun and useful for me?

Designing my knowledge-play practice

And so here we are, having considered a bunch of needs and requirements for my practice, it’s now time to put it together.

1. Curate the stream

The first step is to make sure I am ingesting things that I actually do want to ingest, and at a pace that actually allows me to digest them. Which means limiting phone time and picking up paper books more often.

2. Capture on paper

Left to my own devices, I take notes about everything. And so I have set up my system to strategically add friction to my idea capture flow. Copy-pasting is completely out of the question—it’s too easy. I always carry a small A6 notebook with a pencil in it to capture interesting things I hear or read, whether I read them on paper or on a phone screen. I later rewrite what still feels relevant into my main A5 journal. If I am sitting by a computer, most of my capture goes directly into the A5 journal.

Writing by hand—especially in a small notebook—adds just the right friction that makes me think twice about what and how much I capture, the friction of where to write is likely to stop me from capturing altogether. That’s why I like to use bound journals, because “where” is always just the next blank space.

3. Reflect in a bound journal

Most of my reflection happens in my A5 journal (Leuchtturm 1917, if anyone wonders). I prefer bound journals, because, with rearrangeable ones, I will be rearranging. And that usually doesn’t add any value to my notes.

My journal holds everything. It is a mix of task management, diary, project planning, captured ideas and long reflections. Everything simply goes on the next available page and I keep a table of contents of the most important things on the first few pages.

At least now, in the early stages of my new “system”, this is where I spend most of my note-taking time.

4. Organise just enough

In addition to the table of contents in the journal itself, I also archive my journals digitally. I have been doing that for years now; simply taking pictures of every single page. Now that I officially moved my thinking into my journals, I set up a text file with links to each image and started adding some information and tags to the links. This adds a sort of searchable index.

5. Synthesise and share

When I want to go back to any of the thinking I have done before, I can flip through my physical journals or search through the digital index. Sometimes that is enough. When it isn’t, I gather the information from the journals and dump it into a new text file where I can work with them.

This blog has now also become a part of my system. I am planning to share more here. (I know, I tell myself that almost every day, and still struggle with it, but what is the alternative? Stop trying?) Sharing pushes me to put more effort into my thoughts (for my benefit, and hopefully for others as well), and it gives me more satisfaction and a feeling of completion. Plus the feedback helps me grow in a way I couldn’t do just on my own. Even this article wouldn’t exist if I hadn’t made the previous one public.

When, and how

I am curious to see how this system will evolve (because it surely will). It’s still very young, but it was built on a lot of practical personal experience and tailored to who I am. Questions I obsessed over early on—like which app or metadata system to use—now seem almost irrelevant, while others that I have not considered previously proved crucial.

One of the aspects of my note-taking that I didn’t know I needed to pay attention to was the ‘when’ and the ‘how’. My plans used to live in some parallel universe where I had time and energy for everything. I don’t—and never did—so I kept feeling like a failure; my plans thwarted by reality, and me frustrated with myself and the world. It’s much easier to admit to myself that what I have are small pockets of interrupted time here and there, and maybe one or two longer sessions a week that I steal from my sleep in the early morning, or more often, late at night. And that’s ok in this period of my life.

And the ‘how’—well—the ‘how’ is where the fun and the beauty live. It’s an expression of who I want to be and why I am doing this at all. It’s nice paper and a smooth fountain pen. It’s fingers stained with inks of all colours. It’s stopping abruptly in the street to jot down a thought into a tiny notebook. It’s half-finished sketches and bad calligraphy. It’s old books next to scientific articles. It’s a cup of tea by a computer when the world has finally gone quiet. It’s mess and wonder.

How I want to be: an amateur writer—one who does it out of love.

P.S. Sascha wrote a response to this blog post that you can read here.