A Guide to Zettelkasten : Part 1 - Why am I Writing This?

A justification of why you should bother with this series of posts.

I have been surprised that there is no general introduction to effective note-taking practices in the education systems I have participated in, not because I expect modern educational institutions to care about fostering independent thought alongside the instructional process, nor because I expect that they would attempt to teach a process which is ubiquitous in the lecture/class room, for if a practice is not denounced it must to some extent be encouraged, and for an activity to be so widespread among students one would expect there to be great deal of encouragement behind it. Yet in my educational experience I have found that note taking is primarily begun by the student with little input by the teacher, and that unlike so many fruitful processes is rarely treated as an organic one by students, one that is to be meditated on so as to be developed into a more efficient system in future. I am surprised because the task of learning a process which is essential to the student, which consists of identifying important information during ones learning, and using that information to understand the concepts one is taught, is being left almost entirely to the student too, when it is in fact not a simple task, and one which knowledge of would be of notable benefit for so many students if only they were instructed in it.

You may still be wondering why I described the note taking process as one that can potentially foster independent thought. That may be the first indication that you have probably not learnt how to take notes. I describe it as such on account of my acquaintance with the system which I have learnt to associate with the process of note taking, in which thoughts are encouraged to be promiscuous and fertile, rather than isolated and shrivelled, in which the ideas one learns about beget original ideas and/or create useful connections between ideas that further ones comprehension, and in which learning occurs. That system, the subject of this post series, is my interpretation of a system called Zettelkasten.

It is unlikely that educational systems will devote much time to teaching the kind of system which I will describe below. The state of some academic issues, such as attempting new note taking methods, are in part an economic problem, a consequence of the competitive nature of educational institutions, which require a signalling system to indicate the competence that can justify a grant. If a signalling system exists which is inaccurate at reflecting the competence of an institution, and which is widely entrenched into the operations of the system, such as a busy-looking but inefficient note system, then the incentives to change it are unlikely to swiftly occur, if only because of the potential risks of doing so. If a new idea regarding the role that note taking can have is to spread amongst teachers, it must endure the normative resistance which will come about as it attempts to quantitatively test itself compared to other note taking methods. New educational ideas (or simply untried ones) can only ever be tested in small pockets isolated from the mainstream school systems, if only because of the regulation involved in the latter. This state of affairs makes the endeavor of collecting data on the various aspects of uncommon educational methods, such as their effectiveness, more difficult. I suppose it most likely the case that the Zettelkasten system will be useful to individuals who are in higher education, whether as students or researchers, in which creative thought is needed to produce new insight, or to those who walk the venerable path of autodidacticism (I would like to clarify that I do not in the least consider the set of individuals in higher education, of which students and researchers are subsets, as being mutually exclusive from the set of autodidacts. Many of the greatest researchers in various fields have been involved in multiple domains of knowledge, possessing a degree of curiosity unnecessary for tenure).

I would like to clarify above all that my attempt at describing such a system is not motivated by a desire to demonstrate the superiority of the Zettelkasten system as I have come to understand it above other legitimate methods of note taking, including other modifications of the Zettelkasten system which the reader might conceive of. Throughout these posts I will advocate that the reader engage in a ‘tinkering’ method in which they try to figure things out for themselves. Most of my advice will consist of descriptions of the characteristics and uses of the Zettelkasten software I have been using, and, more importantly, of explanations of the various intuitive pitfalls which I believe other inexperienced users might fall into as well at the start of their Zettelkasten use. These pitfalls are the various errors which I made in my Zettelkasten, and which I continue to make (I make new errors now) which might be of use to the reader as a guide of what to avoid. I hope that by reading the explanations of how the pitfalls came to be, the reader will be able to avoid making errors that can affect them in the long term in a system as interdependent as Zettelkasten (I promise I will explain what that word means in the next post), and will be encouraged to explore the system rather than spend too much time reading/watching someone else explain it.

I find that most Zettelkasten instructors are very concerned with what works rather than with what doesn’t, and so I hope to fulfil a niche by describing the various ways in which I have failed to use it efficiently. That way, I also free up the reader to try out things in the system, for rather than telling them “Do X, and things will be fine”, limiting what they are likely to try to X out of fear that anything else is wrong, I will say things along the line of “Probably don’t do X if you don’t want Y to happen, but that depends on whether you want to use this system to work as a Z or W or some other system not concerned with Y”, thereby leaving them open to try and do A and/or B and/or J rather than just limiting themselves to X, whilst keeping in mind what each action might do for the system as a whole, and whether the consequence is consistent with their vision. I find that this kind of approach is useful in any kind of instance in which one needs to figure out the best methods for how to understand a system.

Before I explain the basics of Zettelkasten in my second post, I will draw attention to what I mean by a tinkering approach to learning Zettelkasten. I suggest the process of tinkering after having attempted to learn the Zettelkasten system through video mediums and having come to the following conclusions on learning it efficiently. I found that most video-guides on Zettelkasten online tend to go into great detail pertaining to the various methods of customising their system, occasionally exceeding an hour or being within 15 to 30 minutes of one, specifying the various ways that the individual has modified the system to their benefit, with such guides often being labelled as introductory, which I believe to be a poor moniker for most of them. An introduction is meant to clarify the fundamentals to those who are inexperienced, yet the learning of Zettelkasten is generally hampered by these videos. Perhaps their most major flaw, in terms of how much time it can take away from the eager learner, is the profusion of content they communicate, which hampers the progress of the novice by preventing them from experimenting with the system and deal with its complexity firsthand, instead leading them towards a false impression of how it works from a half remembrance of various portions of two dozen videos, each of which they will have watched because they see the long list of content below the search bar and presume that there must be something they are missing if they don’t watch at least a part of person X’s ten fifteen minute videos on the system.

If the Zettelkasten student wishes to find advice from external sources, there exist some forums devoted to the topic, and some well written introductions in these forums and by Zettelkasten bloggers. I have found these to be more helpful to the novice, for though they might lack the intuitive demonstrative element of a video, they can generally be consumed and comprehended more quickly than video content(additionally, the possibility of inserting images and interactive animations in digital essays allows them to incorporate all of the benefits of the demonstrative element of videos without the corresponding drawbacks of poor content quality filtering, which is generally eliminated by the speed with which the articles can be evaluated through skimming).

So what is the software mentioned above by which I will introduce the system?

What The Hell Are Zettelkasten?

Who Is That Imposing Egghead In The Picture Above?

Tune in next time to find out.