This week, in continuing on our recent episodes about note-taking methods, Ray, Augusto, Francis and Art are taking on a closely-related topic of personal knowledge management to discuss Zettelkasten. Don't know about Zettelkasten? Listen in and learn!
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In this Cast | Personal Knowledge Management With Zettelkasten
Ray Sidney-Smith
Augusto Pinaud
Art Gelwicks
Francis Wade
Show Notes | Personal Knowledge Management With Zettelkasten
Resources we mention, including links to them, will be provided here. Please listen to the episode for context.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wFZHuWLA09M
Zettelkasten
The Zettelkasten Method: Examples to help you get started.
Getting Started • Zettelkasten Method
OneNote
Evernote
Obsidian
Instapaper
Feedly
Maker’s Schedule and Manager’s Schedule by Paul Graham
Raw Text Transcript
Raw, unedited and machine-produced text transcript so there may be substantial errors, but you can search for specific points in the episode to jump to, or to reference back to at a later date and time, by keywords or key phrases. The time coding is mm:ss (e.g., 0:04 starts at 4 seconds into the cast’s audio).
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Voiceover Artist 0:00Are you ready to manage your work and personal world better to live a fulfilling productive life, then you've come to the right place. ProductivityCast the weekly show about all things productivity, here are your hosts, Ray Sidney-Smith and Augusto Pinaud with Francis Wade and Art Gelwicks.
Raymond Sidney-Smith 0:17Welcome back, everybody to ProductivityCast, the weekly show about all things personal productivity. I'm Ray Sidney-Smith.
Augusto Pinaud 0:23I'm Augusto Pinaud.
Francis Wade 0:23Francis Wade.
Art Gelwicks 0:24And I'm Art Gelwicks.
Raymond Sidney-Smith 0:25Welcome, gentlemen, and welcome to our listeners to this episode of ProductivityCast. This week, we are going to step our toe into a little bit more of our note taking methodology topics that we were talking about earlier. And of course, that's going to get very muddy very soon. But we're interested in discussing the concept of zettelkasten. And today, what we're going to do is we're going to define the concept of zettelkasten, as best as we can, as the ProductivityCast team, and then talk about the ways in which people use zettelkasten in the in their own personal productivity methods and systems. And then talk a little bit about how you can maybe get started utilizing zettelkasten in your own work and life. And so let's start off with jumping into what is zettelkasten. And for those of you who are a little bit confused, it's ze TT ELKSTN. zettelkasten is a German word that means Slingbox, kind of like, think about the Dewey Decimal System in the old libraries, where you would put little cards into those little slip boxes. That's the the term that was used by this particular gentleman who developed the system. Art Do you want to give us a little bit of background on zettelkasten, where it came from, and then we can all kind of dive in and give our interpretations of what several caston is,
Art Gelwicks 1:44here's the nutshell version, the original premise. And unfortunately, I'm going to, I can't, I'm drawing a blank on the author's name, or the the writers name, but he's maybe a goose, or maybe Ray, you remember his name, very prolific writer, 400, articles, books, everything generated huge amounts of content. And he developed this system called zettelkasten, to allow him to organize all the knowledge he needed around these topics and all this research content. Now keep in mind, this was all pre digital tech. So he designed all this in an analog platform, basically index cards, and he would put a piece of information he learned or a quote, or a reference item on a card and have a specific index, a referencing number system to allow him to identify each one of those pieces. And then based on each one of those pieces, he's then able to go through and say, Okay, now how do these relate to each other? What are what are the concepts that are tied to this particular item. So let's say for example, I'm I don't know I'm writing a paper on flowers. And I find a reference piece of information about a particular type of flower, the zettelkasten, not only would have an index related to how this fits into my system, but also all the pieces that this is a flower, and this is maybe about pollination. And this is about location. The the core energy around this, if I can use the term energy is to create the relationships between the ideas, and in basically an old school method of hyperlinking. So that within each idea, you have those connections to the other ideas. So by being able to leverage those connections, you can find relationships between information and ideas that you normally would not recognize. And see. It's designed to handle a huge volume of information. And it's also designed to be very scalable. Its liability was always at the time. Because it was analog, it was it literally, and I can't again, I can't think of the guy's name. But if you look up one of his quotes he talked about that he always worked at in partnership with his zettelkasten. That's a big level of commitment for any system. I mean, if you're going to consider that system to be an equal to you, and whatever you're doing, adds a crazy level of commitment. With digital technology, it's easier to do the mechanical parts that were so prohibitive within zettelkasten to create the hyperlinks to create backlinks and the relationships within there to be able to do the search indexing around content to find those relationships between ideas. But it doesn't change the fact that this is something that really lends itself to pure knowledge management. I don't know that I would try to use a zettelkasten for task management or even managing a project. But if it's all the information around various topics, this becomes that kind of second brain type of approach and it doesn't have to be for just a topic. If you're working on say a thesis or something like that, you could use a zettelkasten to do that. But there's no classes designed to grow well beyond that. And its benefit comes from the fact that you may be putting content in there for your thesis. But you may also be putting content in there. From a series of articles, you're just randomly reading, and identify relationships between those things that you normally would not see, just because of how those hyperlinks are. I don't want to say organically created, but they develop on their own as they as you start to see the contextual relationships. I'm not doing the explanation of this justice, because it is a fairly complex thing to initially get set up. But at its core, thinking about dealing with those abstract pieces of information that we find very valuable in and of themselves. But we don't know what to do with and never truly realizing the the benefit of those interacting with each other. Well, that's where something like zettelkasten comes in.
Raymond Sidney-Smith 6:03Yeah, so the person you're probably thinking about was Nicholas lumen, or lumen in German. And so He's a sociologist, and quite prolific, as you noted. And so I really think about zettelkasten in terms of like capturing knowledge in ways that are purpose driven. One is reference. So I would consider that knowledge management. The other, of course, is being able to file then filter and find what I've consumed. And what I want to be able to remember from my readings, and that being able to help support me as I'm writing new material. And so you know, as I'm writing any longer term piece of material, I want to be able to capture and surface those items. So I think about the zettelkasten method from that perspective most frequently. And I think you've captured most of the pieces that I think would help to define what the zettelkasten method really does, and how it helps someone as a in their own system.
Art Gelwicks 6:56One point I did leave out and this is this was something that came up looking at it related to digital technology, is that one of the key things about zettelkasten is its small captures, we're not capturing like entire dissertations into the zettelkasten. These are all individual quotes, individual facts, individual items. And it's because they're small, they can relate to each other much more effectively than something that's large and comprehensive. It's a common question that you see, when people when you start to research implementing zettelkasten in a digital note taking tool, a lot of the feedback that you'll see as well, does it how well does it handle little notes. And that's exactly what we're talking about is the zettelkasten requires little notes. Most of our note taking tools are really designed around longer form notes. One note is a really common tool for using for zettelkasten. And that's one of the first questions is well, one note likes big notes, not necessarily little notes, but you can do that. So it's it's an important context to apply around it. When you think about a book you may be reading, you're pulling all those little things out. So the best example I can give you is if you would sit there and highlight something, that highlighted thing is a great candidate for zettelkasten card. Because that is an individual piece, you're not going to highlight four pages, well, I would hope not.
