Zettelkasten

Made by Niklas Luhmann.

1. Always have a way to take notes with you, then take notes of all your thoughts, ideas, questions, etc. you have through the day.
2. Process those notes no more than 48 hours to turn them into more permanent notes on various topics or ideas, or to research them further.
3. Try to find new relations between a new note and all the other existing notes.

Reading

1. Take notes of all the thoughts, ideas, questions while reading.
2. Process the reading notes to make a note in a bibliography system with a summary of key ideas of the book, rephrased in our own words.
3. Process this summary to add new ideas to the permanent notes.
4. Try to find new relations between new permanent notes and the other existing notes.

• Ideas spark from creating relationships between two seemingly unrelated concepts.
• Human brains learn better with tightly-connected ideas.
• Rephrasing an argument, explaining a concept, in our own words is critical to understanding something.
  • That is probably where “the teacher learns more than the student” comes from
• The learning techniques used by most students, as well as most guides on learning or on academic writing, just don’t work.

While the author aims academic writing in particular, I felt this book relates to my own writings, especially for brainshit. I have a few articles that could benefit from more research, and I am pretty sure taking more notes would help me spark new blog post ideas. I tend to often keep article ideas in my mind, so I usually either forget them or start feeling anxious because I can’t just find something good to post and I want to post something.