I’ve been taking small, permanent, densely-linked notes for over a year. Now I’ll share how my understanding of the Zettelkasten (aka Slip-box) method changed and what I’ve learned. 16 months ago, I wrote a popular post about Zettelkasten right after reading the How to Take Smart Notes book. I’ve been taking smart notes since then. This is my update.
Update: I wrote an article about what I’ve learned from using Zettelkasten for 16 months, you might be interested in reading it.
Reading is hard and books don’t work. Zettelkasten aka slip-box note-taking is the new cool kid on the block. Don’t go down the same rabbit hole as I did, researching the method for tens of hours. This article should be enough of the introduction to get you started.
“Illustration” by Ljubica Petkovic
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This book is a good introduction into the motivation and science behind using atomic interconnected notes, a method known as slip-box or German Zettelkasten. The massive drawback of the book is that the description of the system is not giving enough examples of the process. You are therefore not able, for example, to make slip-box notes directly from the book without looking into external resources like the zettelkasten.de site.