Zettelkasten

What is Zettelkasten?

The zettelkasten (German for “slip box”) is a system of note-taking and personal knowledge management used in research and study. It’s a way to use slips of paper or index cards to stores and organizes a commonplace book.

Jessica Arcenas

A ‘zettel’ is a slip of note of paper. Information we wish to keep gets written on a Zettel. A classic form of a Zettel is a sticky note, and index card, or a piece of notepad paper for writing down your thoughts.¹

Jessica Arcenas

The Zettelkasten Method encourages you to connect the dots between different trains of thought and knowledge. The steps facilitate our intrinsic ability to generate new connections between ideas, and thus increase our knowledge and productive output.¹

Jessica Arcenas

How often do we take notes intending to utilise the information in the future, only to forget they even exist later on? Pieces of information without a clear description of their original intent for keeping or collecting it in the first place, result in an assortment of miscellaneous information without any connection to a train of thought.¹

History

Chris Aldrich

Born out of the commonplace tradition with modifications by Conrad Gessner (1516-1565) and descriptions by Johann Jacob Moser (1701-1785), the Zettelkasten, a German word translated as “slip box”, is generally a collection of highly curated atomic notes collected on slips of paper or index cards.²

Chris Aldrich

Slips of paper which were moveable within books or files and later on index cards were a significant innovation in terms of storing and organizing a commonplace book²

Chris Aldrich

Generally zettels (or cards) are organized by topics and often contain dates and other taxonomies or serialized numbers as a means of linking them to other cards within the system. The cross linking of these cards (and thus ideas) were certainly a historical physical precursor of the internet we have today, simply in digital form.²

References