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Why create a Zettelkasten
For me, the Zettelkasten is the system of last resort for writing and research. I've tried index cards, blogs, Kanban boards, journals, mind maps, structured procrastination, spaced-repetition algorithms for long-term memory, dual-N-back for short-term memory, transcranial direct-current stimulation, URL bookmarking sites, flashcards, incremental reading in SuperMemo, Scrivener, emails to myself, and wikis. Wikis were the most effective of these until they ran out of gas. Still, the siren song of brain prosthetics, ringing like the tinnitus in my ears, led me to the Zettelkasten, the only system I've tried with any staying power.
According to Sönke Ahrens in How to Take Smart Notes, 2nd Ed, the Zettelkasten promises to spare the writer the existential horror of the blank page and a blank mind to accompany it (Ahrens 2022, pp. 2-3). Ahrens is critical of standard educational approaches to academic writing and proposes the Zettelkasten as an alternative (ibid., pp. 44-46). While Ahrens critiques ineffective study methods and the lack of integration between note-taking, thinking, and writing in traditional education, he wants to cultivate intellectuals who follow ideas wherever they lead. He claims that the Zettelkasten is suited to exploratory reading and writing in preparation for projects that interest the writer. By contrast, the usual methods prepare students for employment as mental technicians who must write about topics of interest to their employers. I owe the distinction between intellectuals, who follow ideas wherever they may lead, and mental technicians, who direct their attention to external, non-epistemic ends, to Richard Hofstadter in Anti-Intellectualism in American Life.
Ahrens could have been more specific about implementing a Zettelkasten. His note classification includes permanent notes—which subsume literature notes—and permanent, non-literature notes, which are the main notes of a Zettelkasten. Ahrens uses the phrase “the main notes in the slip-box” in exactly one place in both the first and second editions of How to Take Smart Notes (Ahrens 2017, pp. 44–45; Ahrens 2022, pp. 42–43). I now use main note for this subcategory because it follows Ahrens’s wording and avoids introducing another term. Dan Allosso helpfully refers to Point Notes and Source Notes in How to Make Notes and Write (Allosso, pp. 14–15). Documentation on installing and configuring a digital Zettelkasten appears hard to find, hence the Zettelkasten-software-inventory and Zettelkasten-software-configration pages here, at least for one working example on one operating system.
With its protean capacity to co-opt anything for profit, the market tells another story. Cultivating a Zettelkasten does not an intellectual make; thus, we see the Zettelkasten marketed to the mental technician as a "personal knowledge management" (PKM) system. The term "personal knowledge management" is non-neutral, given its marketing toward professionals seeking to enhance productivity, efficiency, and practical outcomes. However, the Zettelkasten software inventory makes no distinction between intellectuals and mental technicians, which I mention to account for some of the appeal of the Zettekasten lost to marketing and for what I take to be Sönke Ahrens', Dan Allosso's, and Bob Doto's interest; Bob Doto uses his Zettelkasten to support his spiritual practice and provides illustrations in A System for Writing.