The Zettelkasten Method (Abram Demski)

Abram Demski’s LessWrong guide to running a paper Zettelkasten — and what it teaches about linking ideas.

Why it was kept

The passages Kyle bolded: breaking ideas up forces you to link them explicitly; no preset categories; if you don’t know where something goes, make it a new top-level card; don’t feel bad about cards left mostly blank; and only put ideas in if you’re excited to develop them now.

As Kyle captured it

• Read The Zettelkasten Method by Abram Demski at LessWrong
  • Resources
    • Read about Zettelkasten on Roam Research by Conor White-Sullivan
      • https://roamresearch.com/#/app/help/page/1283 - #articles-to-read
    • How to Make a Complete Map of Every Thought You Think - books-to-read Roam Research
      • https://users.speakeasy.net/~lion/nb/book.pdf
    • https://gilest.org/2004/interview-with-lion-kimbro/ - #articles-to-read Roam Research How to Make a Complete Map of Every Thought You Think
  • When I was learning to write in my teens, it seemed to me that paper was a prison. Four walls, right? And the ideas were constantly trying to escape. What is a parenthesis but an idea trying to escape? What is a footnote but an idea that tried — that jumped off the cliff? Because paper enforces single sequence — and there’s no room for digression — it imposes a particular kind of order in the very nature of the structure.— Ted Nelson, demonstration of Xanadu space
  • Breaking up ideas forces you to link them together explicitly, rather than relying on the linear structure of a notebook to link together chains of thought.
  • No preset categories. Creating a system of categories is a common way to place related content together, but, it is too hard to know how you will want to categorize everything ahead of time, and the needs of an addressing system make it too difficult to change your category system later.
    • I think in hash tags, but I need to be less encumbered by my pre-selected thoughts and throw out several options. These are idea boomerangs to see what shows up again and again
  • If you don’t know where to put something, make it a new top-level card. You can link it to whatever you need via the addressing system, so the cost of putting it in a suboptimal location isn’t worth worrying about too much! You don’t want to be constrained by the ideas you’ve had so far. Or, to put it a different way: it’s like starting a new page in a notebook. Zettelkasten is supposed to be less restrictive than a notebook, not more. Don’t get locked into place by trying to make the addresses perfectly reflect the logical organization.
    • But Luhmann often remarked that he never forced himself to do anything he didn’t feel like doing: “I only do what is easy. I only write when I immediately know how to do it. If I falter for a moment, I put the matter aside and do something else”
  • I have been keeping idea books since middle school. I think there’s something very important in the simple idea of writing regularly — I don’t have the reference, but, I remember reading someone who described the day they first started keeping a diary as the day they first woke up, started reflectively thinking about their relationship with the world.
    • “I have been inspired and moved upon to keep a journal and write the affairs of this Church as far as I can. I did not understand why my feelings were exercised so much in the early age of this Church, but I understand it now.** I seldom ever heard Brother Joseph or the Twelve preach or teach any principle but what I felt as uneasy as a fish out of water until I had written it.** Then I felt right. I could write a sermon of Joseph’s a week after it was delivered almost word for word, and after it was written, it was taken from me or from my mind. This was a gift from God unto me.” Wilford Woodruff
  • I never got into autobiographical diary-style writing, personally, instead writing about ideas I was having. Still, things were in a very “narrative” format — the ideas were a drama, a back-and-forth, a dance of rejoinders. #Journals
  • As with Zettelkasten, my advice is to not get too hung up on this. A child is sort of like a comment; a parenthetical statement or a footnote. You can continue the main thrust of an argument in sibling nodes — just like writing an ordinary sequence of paragraphs in a word processor.
  • Don’t feel bad if you start a card and leave it mostly blank forever. Maybe you thought you were going to elaborate an idea, so you made a new card, but it’s got nothing but an address. That’s ok. Maybe you will fill it later. Maybe you won’t. Don’t worry about it.
  • You should probably only spend time putting ideas into Zettelkasten if you’re excited about further developing those ideas right now. You should not just be copying over ideas into Zettelkasten. You should be improving ideas, thinking about where to place them in your address hierarchy, interlinking them with other ideas in your Zettelkasten via address links, and taking notes on any new ideas sparked by this process. Trying to put all your old notes into Zettelkasten at once will likely make you feel hurried and unwilling to develop things further as you go. This will result in a pile of mediocre notes which will ultimately be less useful.
    • I only disagree with this based on the way I think about notes. Evergreen Notes are ones I keep a close eye on and are tied to big Portfolio Ideas or other specific categories.
    • The more old notes I have in my system the better I can discover them naturally via unlinked references, etc.