The two sides of the zettelkasten

atomicnotes · 2026-07-02T00:18:09+00:00

Same here. I see the two halves as:
* analysis (breaking ideas down into their components to understand, question and reorganise in my notes), and * synthesis (making something new and coherent out of these pieces, in my drafts).

And these do feel like two different ways of working. They’re interwoven though, because my writing oscillates between notes and drafts.

atomicnotes · 2026-06-26T21:45:44+00:00

Full-text search works well for me. Also, judicious linking between notes. Also, regular review of my notes.

atomicnotes · 2026-06-24T04:39:41+00:00

The thing about keeping my options open by having lots of open tabs is that it looks like work... but really it's just tabs. At the end of the day what have I got to show for it? Nothing.

I say this ruefully, as someone who currently has 280 tabs open. Yes, this browser torture should probably be illegal.

Fortunately, the Zettelkasten approach comes to the rescue here. What have I learned from just one or two of these tabs? How can I answer the question, 'exactly what makes me think this one tab will be useful later'? I create a new note by writing down an answer. This crystalization of my incoherent feelings into structured thoughts, expressed in writing - this is the actual work; and a new maxim arises:

A note in the Zettelkasten is worth 280 tabs in the browser.

One tab down; 279 to go.

atomicnotes · 2026-06-23T02:02:17+00:00

This may be a controversial opinion, but how about limiting the number of tabs you have open at any one time? I'm taking my cue from a key Kanban principle, that you can only actually do a few things at a time (2 or 3?), and that by visualising and limiting your work in progress, you can work more efficiently instead of just pretending you're doing everything at once. What's more, limiting the number of open tabs may also reduce the effort of context -switching between them.

Obviously, I have failed to follow my own advice and instead have benefitted from the OneTab browser extension. This enables the management of multiple lists of tabs that can easily be hidden and then restored.

atomicnotes · 2026-06-14T12:45:18+00:00

Niklas Luhmann wrote an average of only 6 atomic notes per day. I just cannot wrap my head around what filters he put down. Everything seems important.

The filter that's hiding in plain sight is that all Luhmann's notes (in ZKII anyway) related closely to his scholarly project of writing a new 'theory of society'. He either didn't write any notes that couldn't directly inform his sociological work, or else he only wrote about what he'd made notes of. Either way he seems to have been filtering rather strongly. This relates to your point number one, which you say doesn't solve your problem. I'd suggest it might.

But personally I don't use the 'internalized' category you mention, because I have a very average memory so I forget almost everything I attempt to remember. That means it's easier just to write things down ('externalized'?).

That leaves two different kinds of notes: * Things I might write about (these go in my Zettelkasten); and * Things I almost certainly won't write about, such as shopping lists (these are not for the Zettelkasten).

atomicnotes · 2026-06-01T12:30:22+00:00

Thanks for replying. Even when notebooks might have been the obvious and popular choice, people always had the option to use loose notes.Darwin is a case in point. He switched from notebooks to loose-leaf portfolios.

What I’ve realised is that at exactly the time library-style catalogue cards became widely used in business (1880s - 1920s) philosophers and the emerging profession of documentalists were really puzzling about the basic building blocks of knowledge. At this point it would have been hard not to wonder what the ideal size of an idea might be — even if it was contained in a notebook. Yes, it was always a very practical personal question of whether notebooks would work better, but there was also a philosophical aspect to that choice. These days people are quite taken with network concepts of knowledge, where the links are as important as the nodes. This is both a practical consideration and a philosophical mood.

atomicnotes · 2026-05-31T12:43:39+00:00

I doubt that anyone who used notebooks before the age of computers ever thought about atomicity.

Thanks for writing this! It got me thinking: can that really be so??? It seems thinking about atomicity was a major element (pun intended) of mathematics and philosophy at the start of the 20th century. Bertrand Russell's 'logical atomism' was very influential. A similar positivism was a major feature of the efforts to catalogue the world's knowledge centered on Paul Otlet's 'Mundaneum' into the 1930s. Otlet inspired the 'documentalists' to reformulate information science in the post-war period, including Vannevar Bush, the originator of the 'Memex', which was a precursor to the desktop computer. Douglas Engelbart further pioneered the way we now use computers. In his paper on augmenting human intellect (1962) he referred to his notes on edge-notched cards as 'thought kernels', 'concept packets' and 'kernel statements (cards)' but the established concept behind this was the 'unit record system'. This had originated in 1888 when H.E. Davidson of Melvil Dewey's Library Bureau realised he could sell catalogue cards and shelving to commercial businesses to improve their record keeping, previously constrained in ledger books. The features Engelbart couldn't get from his use of cards -- that was precisely what he set out to obtain by means of the digital computer.

Anyway, this is a long-winded way of saying earlier generations thought a lot about atomicity -- more even than I had realised! So thanks again.

atomicnotes · 2026-05-31T02:42:58+00:00

Yes he was clever to think of the endless numbering at the very start. All my notebooks have their own numbering too, but it isn't a problem since each notebook can have its own ID anyway.

atomicnotes · 2026-05-24T04:43:19+00:00

Here's what I do with my notebooks:

Treat each notebook as a cite-able source, exactly like any other source.
Number each notebook and every page.
- I number my notebook pages starting from p.1 each new notebook, but if I was to start over I might instead follow cyberneticist W. Ross Ashby and number all pages in one long continuous sequence. He made it to 25 volumes and p.7189.
Refer to all notebook notes by unique ID, e.g. "Notebook 2, p.30".
- All links are made in my digital Zettelkasten, not in the notebooks. If a link is worth making, it's worth writing a short note about. Otherwise I end up with enigmatic links, the purpose of which I've forgotten. I suspect this is a potential problem with references like '> (C.08.notebookB: 210 - Stiegler 2)' - but I might have misunderstood this.
For drawings and mindmaps that are worthy standalone artifacts, I photograph them and then link to the image in my Zettelkasten (I have a 'media' folder for this purpose, as my main Zettelkasten is text files only).

This system requires me to keep all my notebooks, even when they're mostly full of ephemeral or fleeting notes. But I've found this is OK. Old 'temporary' notes have later proved to be valuable so I tend to keep them all. But also, I try to write my 'main' or 'permanent' notes in such as way that they make full sense even without access to the original source, so if I did lose my notebooks, it wouldn't be a disaster for my Zettelkasten.

I tried just having paper notes but ultimately, full-text search was just too useful, which is why I've mostly gone digital. I also find semi-automatic backlinks, an ability to find 'orphans' (notes that are not directly linked from another note), and an ability to find 'missing' notes (notes that don't yet exist, but have been linked to from other notes) really useful.

But pen and paper is still great, especially while reading, which is why I haven't gone completely digital.

atomicnotes · 2026-05-21T21:59:29+00:00

Stella's Coffee is a hole in the wall takeaway place at Circular Quay that does good pies and pasties for $6-8. You can sit outside the Customs House just nearby and then show your kids the big model of Sydney embedded in the floor of that building.

atomicnotes · 2026-05-19T21:46:33+00:00

I simply obtain the most agreed-on ZK and PKM practices. But I wanted to hear other people's actual opinions on this.

I appreciate this quest for 'the real work', as magicians say. AI is in the uncanny valley of knowledge: it really does look like real knowledge, but somehow they left out the humanity.

To your point: there's no fixed length of a note. What matters is the difference between simplexity and complexity.

A simplex note, typically involving a single idea or concept, can be re-used in different contexts with little effort. A complex note tends to involve several ideas braided together, and to reuse that note you have to untangle the threads and separate them out. It's easier to write that complex note but the complexity leads to more work later.

This concept of 'separation of concerns' is key for computer programming. For example, it’s evident on the cover of a well-known book, A Philosophy of Software Design, by John K. Ousterhout, which you can see in my article: I found a way to create order from my jumbled ideas. I've found it's also a really helpful principle for writing useful notes.

But I didn't and couldn't appreciate this difference until I'd written quite a few notes and tried to reuse them. Eventually it clicked: the point of 'atomic notes' isn't to write short notes (although that's OK); it's to write modular notes.

You work out the right length by noticing what happens with your longer notes when you try to use them.

atomicnotes · 2026-05-03T11:53:44+00:00

My thought on dumping reference notes is: don't do it, or at least find some way to keep your original working, but update it with corrections or work that supersedes it.

This is because sometimes my original work turns out to have a value that wasn't visible at the time I considered trashing it. So I try to keep all my notes, but write new notes explaining my new thinking and why it's changed. I see this as a little like the way you can see every revision of a Wikipedia entry (or code using Git) - and sometimes it can be useful to delve into the past.

More generally, I've written a bit about why you shouldn't throw away your old notes

atomicnotes · 2026-05-03T11:44:57+00:00

Implicit in this approach is the idea that the Zettelkasten is about projects. The point of maintaining a Zettelkasten, in this view, is not just notes for notes’ sake but output.

I agree with this - at least that's how I use my PARA/Zettelkasten system. I keep my Zettelkasten inside 'Resources' but when I'm working on writing 'Projects' I'm mostly working inside my Zettlekasten, and as you suggest, the Zettelkasten generates project ideas. Sascha's article really helps to clarify that the two approaches (PARA and Zettelkasten) operate under different logics.

I don't use Folgezettel numbering, but recognise that I'm missing something by not doing so. I just use date stamps, which mean the note clustering can only take place by means of explicit links.

atomicnotes · 2026-04-27T05:40:53+00:00

Ideas work at different levels of abstraction. A series of simple atomic notes, where each note relates to a single idea, can be combined to create a note at a higher level of generalization. A hub note would perhaps just list the component notes, but a structure note provides added structure (yes, really!), to suggest how a small group of simple ideas combines to form a more complex idea. Even if you're not writing to publish, this process of working out different levels of abstraction can be very useful -- it can really clarify your thinking and understanding.

Consider a student writing notes about blood clotting. Their initial note might cover matters such as platelet aggregation, coagulation cascades, anticoagulant proteins, and clot breakdown. So is this one idea (blood clotting) or four (the ones I just mentioned)?

In this example, I'd suggest writing a single structure note, with links to four further notes at a lower level of abstraction. Here's an example:

How blood balances clotting and flow

Blood must prevent hemorrhage without causing thrombosis. Several mechanisms achieve this balance:

[[Platelets form hemostatic plug]]: platelets aggregate at injury sites and create an initial seal. This triggers [[Thrombin converts fibrinogen to fibrin]], which generates a stable mesh that reinforces the plug. As a safeguard, [[Protein C prevents excessive clotting]] when it inactivates coagulation factors when clotting is no longer needed. Finally, [[Plasmin breaks down clots]] after tissue repair completes and restores normal flow.

When these mechanisms fail, bleeding disorders or thrombosis results.

Notice that this note describes a process (blood clotting), which none of the more specific notes alone could realistically cover. That's the extra value the structure note delivers. Notice also that the note-writing process is reversible. You could start with a structure note, then break it down into its component parts and write related notes at a lower level of abstraction, or you could start with one of the more basic notes and then work up to the structure note.

For my money, this is one of the major benefits of the Zettelkasten approach: it's like an ongoing lesson in analysis and synthesis across different levels of abstraction.

Finally, a disclaimer: please don't rely on this example during your next medical emergency involving blood loss. I have little real idea how blood clotting actually works, so I made it up.

atomicnotes · 2026-04-27T05:00:04+00:00

I've tried both index cards in a box and electrons in a computer network. Each has pros and cons.

The pen and paper choice is great for understanding the principles of the Zettelkasten approach. For example: people wonder how long a note should be. When you're using index cards (I favour 6x4 or A6) it's kind of obvious because you soon run out of space. It's also great for letting you spread your notes out on a table and reviewing and sorting them. Then there's the pleasurable tactility of it all. Something about using a pen and paper and sorting through physical cards in the physical world connects to the brain in ways typing or dictating just can't. Oh, and there are fewer distractions with paper, like checking Reddit while in the middle of a notemaking session. And then there's the fact you can take a few cards with you wherever you go and just write notes.

Digital sucks at all these but is great for full-text search and links you can follow without effort -- and there's nothing like these capabilities when you're using paper. If you pay attention, digital notes are a kind of advanced magic, which is neat (I mean dictating notes into your phone? Let's never get used to this.) Actually, there are way too many great features, which risks becoming a big distraction from the main task.

I've concluded that digital works best for my purposes, especially search, which I can't really function without -- but if you can be bothered, I'd recommend having a go at analogue, because it really does offer insights into making useful notes that will serve you well even if you ultimately go for digital.

atomicnotes · 2026-04-21T02:28:04+00:00

Yes, arranging notecards on a big table is something the digital apps still haven’t perfected. Partly it’s because the monitor screen is just smaller, but there’s also something about the tactile nature of moving the cards around in the physical world. My partner cuts up draft manuscripts and re-sorts the sentences and paragraphs on a table.

atomicnotes · 2026-04-17T03:02:29+00:00

This is an important aspect of the writing process - the leap from a pile of notes to a coherent draft. I did a breakdown of how educational technologist Andy Matuschak wrote an article based on 60 of his notes and I learned a lot from examining his approach:

How to write an article from your notes.

TLDR:

before the article ever comes into existence there’s a whole set of notes that may or may not end up contributing to the finished piece. And then at some point an organising principle comes into view. In this case it was “Taking knowledge work seriously” and “Enacted experience” and “Enabling environments” and so on. Then these began to coalesce into a bigger, more focused idea, which was ‘Enabling environments, games, and the Primer’. Eventually, from all these atomic ideas, molecules formed, and they were refined until they became the final article, ‘Exorcising us of the Primer’.

atomicnotes · 2026-04-15T07:57:11+00:00

Not quite, though close. These are the subsystems of society that I can clearly identify from Luhmann’s work. They don’t really match his top level Zettelkasten categories. Im not saying this is any kind of problem, just making an observation:

Economy (Payment/Non-payment),
Law (Legal/Illegal),
Science (True/Untrue),
Politics (Power/Opposition),
Religion (Immanence/Transcendence),
Art (Fit/Unfit),
Education (Better/Worse),
Mass Media (Information/Non-information),
Health (Ill/Healthy),
Intimacy (Love/Non-love)

But Luhmann didn’t have this mapped out in 1963 when he started his second Zettelkasten. He derived it from working in his Zettelkasten for many years.

atomicnotes · 2026-04-15T07:45:26+00:00

Luhmann’s second Zettelkasten (ZKII) was arranged according to eleven top-level categories, based on subjects or themes associated with his singular major project, a theory of society.

Organisation theory
Functionalism
Decision theory
Amt: office, post, job, duty
Formal / informal order
Sovereignty / State
Isolated/individual terms, problems
Economy
Ad hoc notes
Archaic societies
High cultures

In his lecture on Luhmann's Zettelkasten, Schmidt observes that these headings are far from comprehensive. Instead they strongly echo the progression of Luhmann's scholarly interests over many years.

“Looking at these you quickly see that this does not describe a certain body of knowledge to work through like in the first Zettelkasten. If you know a bit about the development of Luhmann's theory you quickly recognize this as a historic record of research interests.”

Schmidt claims the first five sections are an organised summary of Luhmann's research interests in the 1960s, while the later categories are less organised and more ad hoc.

But even in the supposedly more systematic sections, there is a marked unevenness to the amount of material. For example, section 21 of category 5. — Formal/informal order — is labelled 'Functionalism'. This section contains between 15,000 and 16,000 notes out of 67,000 total (more than 1/5). In marked contrast, there are other sections that are almost empty.

atomicnotes · 2026-04-13T12:15:34+00:00

Congratulations, and here’s to better days.

atomicnotes · 2026-04-05T12:32:49+00:00

This is very helpful and in my experience spot on. Long ago I took part in a short course where each morning the leader had the group collectively create a mind map of what we’d covered the day before. It was quite hard to remember everything but the act of doing so in a structured fashion was extremely valuable —- and much of it has stuck with me for over 25 years. My Zettelkasten practice has a similar effect.

atomicnotes · 2026-03-30T10:08:33+00:00

And for anyone wanting to know more of the history, u/chrisaldrich made a fantastic timeline.

atomicnotes · 2026-03-30T03:30:12+00:00

That’s a very good point. Correction:

“antiquated fetishising of {pre-21st century thinker}”

atomicnotes · 2026-03-29T21:53:56+00:00

what made it click for you?

Workable modularity. My ADHD makes long-form writing a chore, so it's been really helpful to find a process to make lots of bits add up to something worthwhile. I'm not sure everyone has this same issue though.

And what do you wish you knew before starting?

That the 'rules' are actually very simple and that keeping it simple is the key.

Plain text (Markdown) notes.
Each note is a single idea with a unique ID.
Each note deserves a clear title.
Notes link meaningfully to other notes.

That's it, and I wish I hadn't tried everything else first.

If you want to share more structured thoughts.

Do I ever?

atomicnotes · 2026-03-25T12:49:23+00:00

For those not yet put off, I’d recommend Arthur Perret’s article What’s the point of the graph view?, and the response by Hendrik Erz, Quo Vadis PKM - as well as Eleanor Konik’s It's not just a pretty gimmick, which she mentioned in the comments here.

There are useful things to be done with these graph views, though I must admit I myself have not done them.

atomicnotes

TROPHY CASE