Reading is hard and books don’t work. Zettelkasten aka slip-box note-taking is the new cool kid on the bock. Don’t go down the same rabbit hole as I did, researching the method for tens of hours. This article should be enough of the introduction to get you started.
Slip-box method promises to prevent your notes for piling up deep within your note-taking app and being forgotten. Instead, using this method will improve the value of your notes as you create more of them. This method also gives you better and quicker feedback than usual note-taking.
Advice #1: Don’t try to get this method perfect from the get go1. The advanced practices are useful only when you’ve got close to 1000 notes2.
As with everything else you want to utilize iteration. Read this article, use it to create your first couple hundred notes and then research more details if you feel like your current process should be improved.
The source for the method summary is Sönke Ahrens’ book How to Take Smart Notes. I only added the technical aspects.
You write notes with a clear purpose: your future self is going to be reorganizing them and using them to produce articles or books.
You fill your slip-box with notes by following this process:
Advice #2: Always use your own words. Copying doesn’t give you feedback on your understanding.
Let’s call these resource notes. Writing resource notes is where you get the first feedback from the method: Are you paying attention and do you understand the text? At this step, you are not trying to predict how are your notes going to fit in the slip-box, you are just trying to capture the essence of the text.
You can use a separate app like Zotero for these notes. But I recommend having them as Markdown files in a Resources folder
Folder structure so far:
└── Resources
└── Sonke Ahrens - How to Take Smart Notes.md
Reference note:
---
title: How to Take Smart Notes: One Simple Technique to Boost Writing, Learning and Thinking – for Students, Academics and Nonfiction Book Writers
author: Sönke Ahrens
type: book
link: <https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/34507927-how-to-take-smart-notes>
---
# How to Take Smart Notes
- **Short feedback loop** - Writing literary notes provides quick feedback on our understanding of the text. We double-check this understanding when we try to make permanent notes out of the literary notes. (p54)
- Fleeting notes - they are supposed to capture an idea for a brief period before it is processed, 1 or 2 days max (p43)
The file content format is arbitrary, I choose to use Frontmatter for the metadata, but it’s not that important.
Remember, the purpose of slip-box is to aid your future self to make use of the notes for writing. The main unit of information within the method is a permanent note. This note is: