The Zettelkasten

The Book & The Course

The book aims to make the idea of Zettelkasten accessible to everyone interested in reading, thinking and writing, while explaining the science behind it. It was written with students, academics, and nonfiction writers in mind, but resonated with a much broader audience than anticipated.

New: Ever since publishing the book, I have been asked to help implement its principles in digital form. Through coaching people from diverse professional backgrounds, I gained valuable insights into the most common questions and obstacles, and refined my own workflow using Obsidian. To make this knowledge more widely accessible (and affordable), I created a comprehensive course that brings it all together. It is now finally online.

More

The appendix of the 2nd edition (PDF)

Read the first chapter (PDF)

Read a review in the Journal of Writing Research (PDF)

Read what others think on Goodreads

And here are the links from the footnotes

Here you can purchase the ebook as a PDF

And here you can purchase the audiobook

Go to the Course Page

When Niklas Luhmann, the German sociologist, became professor, he was asked about his research project. His famous answer:

"My project: theory of society. Duration: 30 years. Costs: zero."

Twenty-nine and a half years later, he published the last chapter of what is probably the most systematic and comprehensive sociological theory ever written. In these 29 and a half years, he published roughly another 60 books and hundreds of articles on a huge variety of subjects. And all of it was achieved by writing one smart note at a time.

A good note-taking system is simple, well thought out and helps you to stay focused on what really counts: Reading, Thinking and Writing.

It should not only make it easy to find notes quickly, but it should also point out relevant notes when you need them - even if you did not search for them.

It should help you to clarify your thoughts, let you experiment with ideas and spark new ones.

A sound system gets exponentially better the more you feed it.

The Tools

As long as the principles of Zettelkasten are well understood, they can be implemented with a wide range of tools, both analogue and digital. But because changing tools midway is always a hassle, it is worth giving the right tool a bit of thought.

The first program I used was ZKN3 by Daniel Lüdecke, which is free and developed explicitly to emulate the Zettelkasten, but it lacks the flexibility of newer apps. Alternatives of stand-alone Zettelkasten programs include Zettlr and The Archive.

Later, I used Roam Research, but finally switched to Obsidian, which I intend to use as long as I write. The course I created is based on Obsidian. There are plenty of more tools, including Logseq, TiddlyWiki, its add-on Stroll, RemNote, Amplenote, and Org-roam. Sometimes classic note-taking apps, such as Bearnotes, Notion, and Evernote, are also used as a Zettelkasten, but I have the feeling most people will eventually switch to something versatile, such as Obsidian.

For academics, a separate reference manager is a must; for everyone else, it is something I highly recommend. Zotero has some neat features to make your life much easier. As an open-source project, it is constantly being improved. Alternatives include Endnote, Mendeley, and Citavi.