How to Create, Maintain, and Use a Zettelkasten — The Research Cheat Code
Like a garden for your brain — plant ideas and watch them grow, flourish, and merge with others.
I don’t know about you, but I often have a hard time coming up with ideas for new writing projects. The actual projects are no problem once I get started, but simply waiting for inspiration can be highly demoralizing. That’s why I’m so stoked about this method of note taking, the Zettelkasten, which is like an assembly line for ideas — information gets converted into your own ideas, questions, and notes, then connected to other notes and synthesized into concepts that you can turn into articles, stories, essays, or whatever you want.
Okay, so what is it?
Basically, a Zettelkasten works like this: You have a ton of small, bite sized notes that each capture a single idea. For example, here’s one of mine:
You’ve likely noticed all those other bits in there too — I’ll explain those below. The top half of the note, however, shows you what exactly a note in a Zettelkasten will look like. They’re brief, concise, and in your own words.
By having these short notes, you can easily create links between them and relieve the cognitive load on your brain’s associative engine, meaning that you can easily spot connections between notes and concepts. Doing so provides immense clarity on what to research and how to research it — you know exactly where the gaps in your knowledge are. The assembly line analogy from above is accurate in practice, but when it comes to maintaining my Zettelkasten, I like to think of it like a garden — by taking notes on content and planting seeds, as you continue to do research and come across ideas, these seeds grow into plants. Once you’ve gathered enough information or choose to dive deeper into a topic, you can harvest these ideas that have grown.
How do you keep one?
The first Zettelkastens were kept physically, on index cards — hence why the notes are tiny. Thankfully, we have better methods now. There are plenty of note taking softwares to look into: Notion, Roam, and OneNote are popular ones. The most important feature you’ll want is the ability to make internal links to other notes, which is essential to Zettelkasting. My program of choice is Obsidian. I like it because it’s free, your files are locally hosted (meaning they are always accessible and owned by you, even offline), and widely available: It’s on Mac, Linux, Windows, iOS, iPadOS, Android, and probably more. It has markdown formatting, community support, and, again, it’s free. It also has this handy graph view, which takes the associative powers of a Zettelkasten to a new level — each of these nodes is a note or tag, and I can visualize the connections, as well as the notes that aren’t connected, which is possibly even more useful.
Here’s what my workflow looks like with my Zettelkasten:
Fleeting Notes
Everything starts at a source, whether it’s an original idea or something I read in a book. While I’m reading something, I’ll take what are called “fleeting notes” — these are almost always highlights. How many times have you highlighted something in a book or article and then forgotten about it entirely?
I did this constantly, and after beginning Zettelkasting, I’ve gone so far as to completely rework how I consume literature by building it around Readwise integrations. Readwise is excellent because it compiles all your highlights and gives them to you in daily reviews. By reviewing highlights regularly, retention of key concepts is massively improved. Once it’s all set up, Readwise is entirely automatic, and even has an official Obsidian plug-in, meaning that all of your highlights can be directly and automatically imported to your Zettelkasten.
Since I’ve built around Readwise to consume all my literature, here’s the programs I use:
- Kindle app for book reading.
- Command browser on iOS and iPad, a browser built specifically for research.
- Command unfortunately isn’t on Mac, so instead, I use hypothes.is, which allows me to make highlights in Safari.
- Airr for podcasts, which allows you to take “Airrquotes”, which are clips of podcasts that are easily saved for you to look back on later.
- Medium highlights are automatically synced.
All of these applications sync directly with Readwise, so no matter where I’m consuming literature, it all gets funnelled through Readwise and directly imported into Obsidian. If I make notes on any of these highlights, those get imported as well. I couldn’t possibly do this without Readwise, and while it’s unfortunately not free, it does offer a 30 day trial and a generous 50% student discount. Unfortunately, I’ve found no easy way to integrate audiobooks, but Readwise even has a solution for that by allowing you to manually list audiobooks you’ve listened to. By doing so, Readwise will provide “supplemental highlights,” or, the most popular highlights from other users.
It’s worth pointing out that not all of your fleeting notes will become permanent notes later. Some may double up on concepts and be unnecessary, while others simply don’t provide enough info. That’s fine, and is the exact point of fleeting notes! You will synthesize them into quality information later on.
Literature Notes
Fleeting notes eventually get synthesized into Literature Notes. These are summaries of articles, books, or essays that I read — the key ideas. If a book is particularly dense, I may make a note for each chapter. The literature notes exist as a “home base” of sorts — from here, I dilute them into other notes that break down concepts in greater detail.
Something I do that I haven’t seen in other Zettelkastens is listing “What-to-do’s,” or WTD’s on literature notes. Essentially, these are things that I would like to do with this particular piece of literature. They might be questions to answer, essays to write, or more reading. I list these under a tag so that if I don’t have anything in particular to work on, I can look up all my WTD’s easily and pick a project.
In addition to WTDs, each literature note gets a list of related notes. These are either notes that I’ve already made that are relevant, or notes that are created from this particular literature. This is why linking is essential — Zettelkasting is all about exploring connections and associations. You can look at a note, trace it back to the original source, and jump to other topics from there. You’re creating a web of ideas that you can jump around with ease.
Permanent Notes
After you’ve made a literature note, you can dive deeper into concepts by turning ideas into permanent notes. These are notes like the first one I posted above, “Identity Tourism”. Each one should theoretically read like the introduction of a Wikipedia page — simple, concise, and comprehensive. Resist the temptation to go on a tangent: If a concept is very multifaceted, make a series of notes for it instead and link them all together.
My permanent notes are comprised of four sections:
- The actual note: This is where all the info is.
- Questions: This is where I list any questions that this info prompts. I like to make this a tag for the same reason as my WTD’s — I can easily look at all my questions at once to find where there’s gaps in my research that I can fill.
- Related Notes: Direct links to notes that are relevant to this topic.
- Tags: Tags are tricky because they require some forward thinking. Aside from the Question and WTD tags, I don’t generally use tags to find things. Instead, I use them to see connections later, meaning that my tags aren’t for sorting things. Instead, I create tags for articles that I might want to write in the future about this topic. I want them to remind me about this note when I start those projects. I’m still practicing tags and odds are, many of mine will be useless later, but that’s fine. The more you have, the more connections you can make, and that’s the idea.
The Hardest Part Is Starting
Truly, the trickiest part is just figuring out what’s first. Truthfully, it can be anything you like. As soon as you plant your first seed, it will grow and spread with proper care. One note per day will add up quickly, and if you’re compiling your highlights somewhere, one note a day isn’t hard to keep up with.
WTD’s
If you’ve read this far, you’re likely thinking about starting a Zettelkasten. Here’s some resources that helped me that you may want to look into! I find Zettelkasting to be extremely helpful, and make research projects much less daunting. I also find that my retention and comprehension of things that I read is much improved — it’s definitely worth trying for a while.
- Introduction to smart notes with Obsidian and the Zettelkasten Method, a Youtube video that details an effective workflow for making notes in Obsidian.
- Digital Zettelkasten, a short book that details tons of useful info.
- Zettelkasten Subreddit, a community to ask questions and see others’ experiences.
Good luck, and I wish you a fruitful harvest!
