zettelkasten

A Zettelkasten, literally slip of paper (zettel) and box (kasten) in German, is a system of organization.

A zettelkasten consists of many individual notes with ideas and other short pieces of information that are taken down as they occur or are acquired. The notes are numbered hierarchically, so that new notes may be inserted at the appropriate place, and contain metadata to allow the note-taker to associate notes with each other.

The point of a Zettelkasten is to create connections between ideas by allowing the user to traverse nodes and arrive and serendipitous insights.

It’s related to the idea of a commonplace book, a favorite of Ryan Holiday’s, and is also a predecessor to Evergreen Notes.

References

• Zettelkasten — How One German Scholar Was So Freakishly Productive | The Writing Cooperative

• Zettelkasten | Wikipedia

• Commonplace Book | Wikipedia