제텔카스텐 입문(번역)

입문서를 읽어야 하는 이유는 무엇인가요?. 지식관리의 수수께끼를 바로 해결할 필요가 있거나, 많은 이론들로 혼란스러움을 느끼거나, 당신의 블로그 수준을 높이고 싶거나, 멋지게 책을 쓰고 싶거나, 컨설턴트로 성공하고 싶거나, 연구를 진척시키고 싶다거나 할 수 있다. 제텔카스텐은 작업이나 프로젝트를 완성하는 도구 이상의 것이다. 당신의 삶에서 지식이라는 것을 어떻게 다루어야 하는지에 대한 종합적 수단이다.

제텔카스텐 방법론은 지식관리 분야에서 당신의 성과를 증폭시킨다. 정말 효율적이고, 심지어 지식관리 과정이 WOW(World of Warcraft 게임)만큼 재미있고, 쉬웠다고 말하는 사람들도 있다. 물론, 일관된 노력이 높은 수준에 이르렀을때만 경험하는 일이다.

꼭 수영과 비슷하다. 당신이 수영을 못한다면, 아마 전혀 재미없을 것이다. 단순이 물에 떠있는 것(아니면 심지어 물에 빠지거나)만 할 수 있는 사람에게는 수영은 정말 재미없을 것이다. 하지만, 기술을 익히고 물을 탈 수 있다면 이야기는 달라진다. 수영을 배우지 않고 쉬움과 즐거움을 추구할 수는 없다. 빠름과 우아함을 목표로 수영을 배울 수 있다.

제텔카스텐 방법론 또한 일정한 훈련이 필요하다. 첫째, 당신이 하는 모든 것을 유용하게 할 수 있다. 물론 지식의 보석(gems of knowledge)을 만들어 낸 스스로에게 놀라게 되려면 약간의 훈련과 인내가 필요하다.

당신의 첫걸음부터 탁월함에 이르기까지 이 입문서는 당신에게 가이드를 제시해줄 것이다. 이 길을 따라가면 당신의 제텔카스텐은 당신에게 지적 탐험을 성공시켜주는 도구를 제공할거예.

제가 만약 제텔카스텐 개념을 잘 모르는 분에게 설명해야 한다면 저는 이렇게 설명하고 싶어요:

제텔카스텐은 생각과 글쓰기를 위한 개인도구예요. 사고망(web of thought)을 만들어주는 초연결텍스트(hypertextual)의 성격을 갖고 있어요. 다른 체계와의 큰 차이는, 임의의 크키와 형식을 가진 노트 대신 사고망을 만든다는 것, 그리고 수집이 아닌 연결을 강조한다는 점이예요.

제텔카스텐 방법론의 대부, 니클라스 루만에 의해 시작된 제텔카스텐은 생각과 노트방법 중 가장 파워풀하다.

루만의 제텔카스텐

니클라스 루만은 정말 생산적인 사회학자였다. 그는 50권의 책과 600편이 넘는 논문을 썼다. 혼자서가 아니었다. 함께 한 동료가 있었다.

150편 이상의 마무리하지 못한 원고들이 남았다. 최소 하나 이상은 1000페이지 이상의 양이었다. 그의 생산성은 발표된 부분의 놀라움을 뛰어넘는 수준이었다.

루만은 그의 생산성은 자신의 제텔카스텐과의 파트너쉽에서 나온다고 말한 바 있다. 이는 제텔카스텐 방법론에 대한 대중의 관심을 불러일으켰다.

루만의 제텔카스텐은 특별한 결합이 있는 노트 모음이었는데: 그건 합리적인 수준의 시간과 에너지를 들여 만든, 종이 메모가 가득 들어있는 상자 간 탐색이 가능한 초연결텍스트였습니다. “합리적”이란 말은, 루만에게 그랬다는 것인데, 루만은 사회학 이론에 천착한, 일벌레이자 열정적인 공무원이기도 했었다. 초연결텍스트는 서핑과 비슷한 면이 있다. 위키피디아에서는 클릭 한번으로 다음 문서로 넘어갈 수 있다. 초연결텍스트가 종이 기반이라면 다음 링크로 넘어가는데 좀더 많은 노력이 요구된다. 또 다른 문제는 파도타기에 뭔가 시작 지점이 필요하다는 점이다. 그래서 루만은 그의 제텔카스텐을 만들었는데, 그의 노트 모음을 서핑하기처럼 만들 수 있었다. 생산적인 방식으로 하나의 노트에서 다른 노트로 넘어가기 위한 기술적 조치와 진입 지점이 필요했다.

다행히 우리에게는 파워풀한 디지털 도구들이 있다. 물리적인 제텔카스텐을 다룬다는 것은 디지탈적 방식보다는 보다 어렵고 노동집약적인 작업이다. 우리는 일벌레가 되지 않아도 제텔카스텐 방법론에 따른 혜택을 누릴 수 있습니다.

왜 우리는 루만의 제텔카스텐에 그리 관심을 가지나?

첫째, 사람들은 루만처럼 생산적으로 되는 것을 상상합니다. 루만의 제텔카스텐은 사람들에게 영감을 줍니다. 그의 생산성에 대한 관심이 급격히 늘어나는 주요 원인 중 하나입니다.

둘째, 루만의 제텔카스텐은 일반적인 노트법과 지식관리의 흔한 접근법을 상당히 개선하고 있습니다. 당신의 효율성을 증폭시킵니다. 시간당 더 적은 노력으로 또는, 보다 적은 시간으로 더 많이 생산하는 것을 가능하게 합니다. 만약 우리가 몇가지 점에서 평범한 노트 방식을 개선하는 것을 받아들인다면:

1. 우리는 사고의 연결성을 향상시킬 수 있게 됩니다. 아이디어의 연결을 가능하게 하는 것이 제텔카스텐 초연결텍스트의 본질입니다. 이러한 연결은 새로운 통찰을 가능하게 합니다. 통찰은 진공 상태에서 일어나지 않습니다. 새롭게 만들어진 (기대하지 않았던) 연결의 결과가 통찰입니다.
2. 우리는 보다 생산적이 될 수 있습니다. 제텔카스텐 방법론은 우리가 뭘 해야하는지에 대한 분명한 가이드라인을 제시함으로써 우리의 업무진행방식을 합리화합니다. 결국 마찰과 충돌을 감소시킵니다. 생산성을 더욱 증가시키는 흐름의 단계에 보통 들어가게 됩니다. 저같은 경우 일주일에 이틀 정도는 제텔카스텐 작업이 우선순위를 가지도록 배분하고, 제텔카스텐 흐름이 일어나도록 합니다.
3. 우리의 노력이 낭비되는 것을 막아줍니다. 노트가 지금 하는 프로젝트를 위해 사용되지 않는 것처럼 보인다 하더라도 언젠가는 사용될 수 있도록 해줍니다. 최소한, 해당 주제에 대한 정보 처리의 수준과 깊이가 개선됩니다.
4. 보다 복잡한 문제를 다룰 수 있게 됩니다. 당신이 복잡한 문제와 씨름할때 많은 공을 저글링을 하는 것은 힘든 일입니다. 제텔카스텐 방법론은 문제 중 작은 부분에 집중할 수 있게 한 후, 다시 돌아와 문제 전체를 바라볼 수 있도록 해 줍니다.
5. 보통의 노트방식은 혼란상태를 커지게 만듭니다. 반면 제텔카스텐은 당신이 다루는 문제의 크기에 저절로 맞춰집니다. 이것이 루만이 그의 매뉴얼에서 말한 “내적 성장”(저는 “조직적 성장”으로 번역하는)입니다..
6. 제텔카스텐 방법론은 당신의 글쓰기를 더 쉽게, 더 논리적으로, 더 부드럽게, 더 설득력 있게 만들어줍니다. 글쓰기와 사고에 있어 주요 문제 중 하나는 오랜 시간동안 일관된 사고를 따라가는데 어려움을 겪는 우리의 제한된 능력입니다. 그냥 면밀히 생각하세요. 심지어 숨쉬기 같은 간단한 것에 대해서도 몇분 정도라도 집중하는 것도 어렵습니다. 논문을 쓰기 위해 몇주나 몇개월 동안 한가지 주제에 대해 생각하는 것이 얼마나 어려울지 생각해보세요. 제텔카스텐은 당신의 생각을 생생하게 지속시켜주고, 그것에 집중하도록 도와줍니다.

우리는 문제들을 효과적으로 극복할 수 있는 노트하기를 해야합니다. 루만의 글상자에 넣기 위해:

뭔가를 쓰기 위해 우리가 뭘 해야 할까요? 확실해, 처음엔, 우리는 아마 대부분 별 의미 없는 것들을 쓸겁니다. 하지만 우리는 우리의 활동으로부터 뭔가 의미있는 것을 기대하도록 교육받았기에 별로 유용하지 않은 결과가 나오면 곧 자신감을 잃게 될 것입니다. 그렇기에 우리는 나중에 다시 볼 때 쓸모있을 수 있도록 우리의 노트를 배열을 할지 어떨지 그리고 어떻게 배열을 할지에 대해 심사숙고해야 합니다.

루만 자신의 노트방법에 관한 노력의 결과가 바로 그의 제텔카스텐이다. 그가 어떤 일반 원칙들을 도출해냈는지 한번 들어가서 보도록 하자.

개개 노트별로 고정된 주소

개별 노트를 참조하고 싶다면, 노트에 고정된 고유의 주소를 부여할 수 있다. 실제 검색을 위해서도 필요하다. 디지털 시대에 이런 문제는 소프트웨어 개발자만 고민한다. 웹에서 검색을 하면 몇초만에 검색결과가 짠 하고 나타나는 것에 익숙하다. 그러나 종이노트를 다루는 거라면, 뭔가 검색이 가능하게 할 방법이 필요하다. 루만은 똑똑한 넘버링 체계로 접근했다.

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루만의 넘버링 체계로 인접한 노트들이 서로 연속되게 배치할 수 있다.

가장 첫번째 노트의 번호는 1. 첫번째 노트와 관련되지 않은 두번째 노트라면 번호는 2. 그러다 첫번째 노트를 이어가고 싶고, 내용이나 코멘트 따위를 추가하고 싶다면 가지를 만들 수 있다. 그런 새 노트의 번호는 1a. 그렇게 만들어진 새 노트를 계속하고 싶을때는 1b. 만약 1a 노트애 코멘트를 원하면, 1a1 주소를 가진 노트를 만든다. 정리하면, 사고의 맥락을 계속하고 싶을 때마다, 그 마지막 위치의 주소를 숫자나 문자를 사용해 주소를 증가시키기만 하면 된다. 확장하거나 배치하거나 코멘트를 하고 싶을땐 주소에 새 문자를 부기하면 된다. 숫자와 문자를 교대로 부여하는 것이다.(3)

루만의 넘버링 체계는 방법론의 재창조에 두가지 결과를 가져오는데:

1. 유기적 성장을 가능하게 한다. 루만은 초연결텍스트라는 용어를 사용하지 않았지만, 지금 살아있었다면 사용했을 것이다. 유기적 성장은 정확히 위키와 위키링크가 작동하는 방식이다. 텍스트가 있고, 확장시키고 싶다면: 현재 페이지에서 가지를 만들고, 다른 텍스트를 추가하지만, 현재 페이지에 보이지는 않는다.
2. 링크_연결을 가능하게 한다. 링크를 강조하는 건 제텔카스텐의 초연결텍스트에 있어 보다 명확한 힌트가 된다. 비선형링크 구조는 초연결텍스트의 가장 중심적인 특징이다. 제텔카스텐의 루만의 매뉴얼에서, 이렇게 썼는데: 당신이 새 카드를 어디에 넣을건지의 문제보다 어디에 링크할지의 문제가 훨씬 중요하다.

그의 넘버링 시스템은 종이 기반의 초연결텍스트를 가능하게 했다. 루만의 인내심 있는 노력이 있었다.

이 단계에 이르면, 우리는 링크로 연결된 텍스트 사이를 서핑하듯 할 수 있게 된다(이하 surfable hypertext를 서핑가능한 초연결텍스트 또는 초연결텍스트를 서핑한다고 직역하기로 한다). 그런데, 우리는 초연결텍스트로 들어가기 위한 서치엔진 따위를 갖고 있지 않다. “어디서 시작할까?”가 루만의 대답이 필요한 질문이다. 시작 지점으로 그는 목록을 사용했다.

루만의 목록은 태그 시스템에 비하면 실수 가능성이 있을 수 있다. 제텔카스텐 안에 노트들을 조직하기 위해 개개 노트들에 태그를 하거나 태그 시스템에 넣거나 하지 않았다.

파일:Https://zettelkasten.de/introduction/20201027164313 schlagwortregister.png

루만의 첫번째 제텔카스텐에 사용된 목록

그의 목록에는 노트의 전체 양에 비하면 적은 ID들이 적혀 있었고, 어떨땐 하나만 기재하고 다음 용어로 넘어갈때도 있었다. 그의 목록은 순수하게 시작 지점이었고, 태그 리스트가 아니었다. 예컨대, 용어 체계는 하나의 시작 지점만 가진다. 루만이 이런 용어들이 모든 곳에서 의미를 가지는 체계 이론을 발전시켰다는 점을 고려하면 놀랄만한 일이다. 목록은 가장 크고 중요한 의미를 가지는 노트의 시작 지점의 리스트 정도였다. 그의 초연결텍스트의 시작 지점을 찾은 후에는, 그는 링크 체계에 의존해 서핑을 시작한다.

개별 노트의 고정된 주소는 제텔카스텐 세상의 알파이고 오메가이다. 그것으로 모든 것이 가능하게 된다.

만약 당신이 루만 제텔카스텐의 기능을 재연하고 싶다면, 초연결텍스트를 만들고 시작지점을 주제의 중심 페이지로 제한하고 연결되는 링크를 따라 계속 진행할 수 있다.

생각과 글쓰기를 위한 개인 도구로서 제텔카스텐

다른 방식과는 달리, 루만은 제텔카스트텐을 경직되게 만들지 않고, 유기적 접근을 채택했다. 그의 매뉴얼 이름이 “글쓰기와 생각의 도구로서 제텔카스텐”이 아니라 “제텔카스텐과 소통하기”인 것에 이유가 있다. 제텔카스텐 방법론이 유기적이고, 비선형적이며 마치 살아있는 것처럼 노트 방식에 접근한다는 것에 참조의 핵심이 있다.

제텔카스텐의 가장 중요한 특징들을 보자

1. 초연결텍스트다.
2. 원자성의 원리를 추종한다.
3. 개인적이다.

첫째, The difference between regular note-taking systems and a Zettelkasten is the emphasis on forming relationships. A Zettelkasten makes connecting and not collecting a priority. The difference between just a text and hypertext is that the former is linear and the latter is organic.

To become a hypertext, a Zettelkasten requires multiple texts, or notes, that you can connect via hyperlinks. We call an individual note a Zettel. Zettel is the German word for “paper slip”. They are the smallest building blocks of the Zettelkasten.

Each Zettel needs a unique address by which we can refer to it, to make connections between Zettels. Then there can be hypertext and the note-taking system can qualify as a Zettelkasten.

Second, a Zettelkasten needs to adhere to the Principle of Atomicity. That means that each Zettel only contains one unit of knowledge and one only. These units are the atoms to which the principle of atomicity refers. To figure out what the atoms are, it helps when we ask ourselves what we want the molecules that we create from our note atoms to look like. What are the units that have their own address? The answer is: One thought. Let us explore some examples that do not use thought as their atoms.

Books, for example, have addresses and cross-references. They have chapters, sections and pages. All have unique numbers that can be referred to. However, you cannot refer to a thought, an idea or any content. Chapters, Sections and Pages are more like coordinates. A thought might spread over the whole book! You cannot refer to it directly with just one reference. A book is not a web of thought.

Wikipedia, also, is not a web of thoughts, because you can only link to articles and sections within them, but not to individual thoughts inside the text. None of the addresses matches with any thought. Wikipedia is not meant to be such a thing. Rather, Wikipedia is an encyclopedia with each article containing information on a topic. Wikipedia is not a thinking tool but a tool for information retrieval.

In contrast, referring to an atomic note is unambiguous: when you reference it, you will know what the ‘thought’ is. There should be no room for guesswork. That is what the rule of atomicity means: Make sure that the layer of content and the boundaries between notes match and are well defined. Then and only then can it be a reference to an address identical to referencing a thought.

The Zettelkasten is a tool for thought, thus it needs to treat individual thoughts as its base unit. In order to connect individual thoughts, give each thought an address to refer to. In the words of us “Zettlers”: Create one Zettel per thought.

Third, there is one Zettelkasten per person, and one person per Zettelkasten. Thinking is a different process from communicating with another person. You want your Zettelkasten to be a personal thinking tool.

That does not mean that it is never useful to create a shared, project-specific hypertext. But that is not what we are talking about when we talk about a Zettelkasten.

That brings us back to our short definition:

제텔카스텐은 생각과 글쓰기를 위한 개인도구예요. 사고망(web of thought)을 만들어주는 초연결텍스트(hypertextual)의 성격을 갖고 있어요. 다른 체계와의 큰 차이는, 임의의 크키와 형식을 가진 노트 대신 사고망을 만든다는 것, 그리고 수집이 아닌 연결을 강조한다는 점이예요.

With that, we have a working definition. How do you Zettelkasten-ify your thinking and writing?

The Anatomy of a Zettel

Anatomy of a Zettel

What does an individual note, a Zettel, look like? There are three components that each Zettel has:

1. A unique identifier. This gives your Zettel an unambiguous address.
2. The body of the Zettel. This is where you write down what you want to capture: The piece of knowledge.
3. References. At the bottom of each Zettel, you either reference the source of the knowledge you capture or leave it blank if you capture your own thoughts.

It is really that simple. If you are doubting if you are doing it right always come back to the simplicity of these basics. All you need to enable the hypertext, the bare minimum, is an address, that is the unique identifier, and of course some content in the note.

The Unique Identifier

Identifier in a Zettel

The unique identifier (ID) is mandatory to create a Zettelkasten. Only with a unique identifier you can address Zettel individually. Only with that capability, you can create a web of thoughts that will assist you with your endeavors in knowledge work.

There are several ways to identify notes, the most common are:

1. There is of course the Luhmann-ID. You create some kind of arbitrary hierarchy wherein each Zettel has a place where it could be. Using a paper-based Zettelkasten, I recommend using this technique because it helps to deal with its organisation. The other types of ID wouldn’t work as well for paper.
2. You could chose a Time-based ID. With a digital Zettelkasten, unlike with a paper-based one, there is no real place for a note. To create the hypertext, you need an address, but not a place. A time-stamp is a very simple way to create a unique string of numbers to which you can refer. A sample time-based ID would be: 202006110955. Year 2020, 11th of June, 9 am and 55 minutes.
3. You can use any arbitrary unique string. You could just use an incremental number, execute a program that generates a random but unique string, or whatever else you want. The main reason for me to consider this over time-based IDs is the promise to shorten IDs. For example, if you encode the date and time as a hexadecimal number, 202005191402 could be shortened to 2F08729AEA. This is a direct translation of the timestamp. That would shorten the string by two digits. There are more ways to make it even shorter than that. But you’d sacrifice some simplicity, and you wouldn’t be able to produce an ID manually. Also, this sacrifices human readability of the time of Zettel creation. Therefore, we do not recommend that approach.
4. You could also use the title of the Zettel as its ID. As long as it is unique, it can serve as an ID. Consequently, you cannot change the title unless you change any reference to it if you want to keep your links intact. There is some software that would handle this problem for you, but we do not recommend this. We prefer a software-independent approach and keep our independence from software.

The Body of the Zettel

Body part of a Zettel

The body of the Zettel contains the piece of knowledge you want to capture. It could be an argument, a concept, or anything along those lines.

The most important aspect of the body of the Zettel is that you write it in your own words. There is nothing wrong with capturing a verbatim quote on top. But one of the core rules to make the Zettelkasten work for you is to use your own words, instead of just copying and pasting something you believe is useful or insightful. This forces you to at least create a different version of it, your own version. This is one of the steps that lead to increased understanding of the material, and it improves recall of the information you process. Your Zettelkasten will truly be your own if its content is yours and not just a bunch of thoughts of other people.

The length of a Zettel is directly tied to what kind of hypertext you want to create. Do you want to create a web of excerpts? Then a Zettel should contain precisely one excerpt. Do you want to make a web of thoughts? Then a Zettel should contain precisely one thought. A Zettel is the base entity that has its own address. Therefore the length of the Zettel, what you consider the atom you want to create molecules from, is determined by the objective you want to achieve. Your thinking operates in units of thought. A Zettelkasten can capture your thoughts and their relations as you design it that way. Therefore, we recommend limiting each Zettel to one thought each. Then your Zettelkasten will assist you in thinking instead of just assisting in creating excerpts.

In the Zettelkasten forum, @Nick asked how selective I am and what the nature of the information I put in is. Well, that depends on what you are thinking about. I recommend that you stick to knowledge instead of information.

The difference between knowledge and information, in practice, is quite simple. Information could be summarized in one sentence most of the time. Most of the time, it is “dead”. Information just is.

An example of a piece of information could be:

At this time (2020-05-20 09:14), I, Sascha, create the first draft of an article which has the working title “Zettelkasten – An introduction”.

What do you do with this? As a historian of the Zettelkasten Method, you could process it for a timeline of introductory articles on the Zettelkasten Method, to track the topic as it unfolds on the internet. Then you would create an empirical base of information for your historical work. But as a mere statement, it is quite useless. To most of us, it is just dead information and not knowledge.

As a rule of thumb, you should always make something from the information you process. You should always translate information to knowledge by adding context and relevance. Even if you don’t use the created knowledge directly, as long as you enrich the information with relevance you are on the right path. You don’t need to worry about what Zettelkasten forum user @grayen wondered in the context of taking notes from articles on the internet:

I sometimes struggle to determine whether it is worth writing a detailed Zettel about what makes the website worthwhile to write a Zettel about, but I don’t want to write for the sake of writing, and most of the time I am not sure if it is just transient stuff or whether it really is useful to keep around long term and not just for the processing of a particular thought/query I had. I don’t want to turn my Zettelkasten into busywork, i.e. a kind of procrastination. (slightly edited)

If in doubt, write the note, within the confines of your deadline. If you knew whether or not every piece of knowledge would be relevant to your final product, there would be no reason to take notes, because you would already have the final product in your mind. Every bit of knowledge you add has the potential to be useful in ways you might not be able to see in the moment you produce it.

In practice, you need to compromise between taking broad notes and focussing on your current projects. You cannot just take random notes on what you are interested in and expect to get anything done. So, use your current projects as golden threads to guide your work while allowing a bit of deviation from this path. The amount of deviation depends on what your deadline is.

The benefit of this habit is that you can maintain a flow of writing much more. I cannot count the many good ideas and texts I wrote while technically working on another project. By keeping the flow going you will produce more useful thoughts and text in the long run. The limits of this practice are the how much you need to achieve in the short-term.

파일:Https://zettelkasten.de/introduction/path-to-project.png

The path to a finished project produces all kinds of byproducts

Those byproducts are not waste. In the long run, they become valuable knowledge for your future projects. Also, they form connections to other parts of your Zettelkasten and will enrich your personal learning experience while working with the Zettelkasten.

Example: I have a long-term book project. It is a very comprehensive book on nutrition which is part of a series on living a healthy life. One chapter was dedicated to the integration of nutrition into the other areas of responsibilities: Stress, training, everyday life organisation etc. I let myself loose and the result is that I wrote a whole book from this chapter.

Other Examples

• If you are working on your bachelor’s thesis and are pressed for time, allow very little deviation and do focus on the source material relevant to your thesis.
• If you are a retired mechanical engineer who spends your well earned free Sundays in a forest barn with your Zettelkasten to work on a novel, allow as much deviation from the project as you wish. Enjoy your time!
• If you are a nurse who wants to publish a small book on how to deal with the healthcare system, don’t stress so much to get focused work done. You are doing so much for all of us already, you should enjoy the writing process and satisfy your intellectual curiosity, even if this slows down your progress.
• If you are an ambitious type-A personality, allow room for deviation as much as you can endure. Your personality will ensure that you come back quite fast to the source material that is relevant for your project anyway.

Whether you should work focussed or allow deviation isn’t much of an issue of the Zettelkasten Method but more an issue of circumstances in your general life.

Reference

파일:Https://zettelkasten.de/introduction/anatomy-3-reference.png

At the end is the definition of the citekeys in the MultiMarkdown syntax. Here, it is referenced once in the very last line of the body.

The reference part at the bottom of your Zettel states the sources of the information. The footer is the right place for external sources like books or articles from the web.

To manage the references, use reference management software like BibDesk. It will contain the bibliographical data and provides you with citekeys. Citekeys are similar to IDs. They are identifiers by which you can point to the reference you are using (One common format for a citekey is [#lastnameYEAR]).

파일:Https://zettelkasten.de/introduction/20200702155144 zettel-to-refman.png

Sometimes, however, you will refer to other Zettel as your source of inspiration. In that case, you base your thoughts on something you have already processed in the past. You reference the Zettel by linking to it via the ID, connecting the new to the old.

If you have no reference at all, perhaps that means you wandered through the forest and had a sudden insight about the true nature of the world. In that case, you don’t need to do anything in this reference section. If no reference is given in a Zettel, it is your own thought by default.

Putting the pieces together

See this picture with all the elements pointed out.

파일:Https://zettelkasten.de/introduction/complete-zettel.png

All the parts of a Zettel together

Up to this point, we have only looked at the individual Zettel. Now, let’s take a look at the relationship between Zettels.

Connecting Zettel

파일:Https://zettelkasten.de/introduction/2020-08-13-note-link.png

The Zettel to the left links to the one to the right via its unique ID

The true magic of a Zettelkasten, when compared to ordinary note-taking systems, comes from the heavy emphasis on connection. Each new Zettel needs to be placed in some relationship to another Zettel. Luhmann further stressed the importance of connecting every new Zettel:

If there are several possibilities, we can solve the problem as we wish and just record the connection by a link [or reference]. Often the context in which we are working suggests a multiplicity of links to other notes. […] In such cases it is important to capture the connections radially […], as it were, but at the same time also by right away recording [backlinks] in the slips that are being linked to. In this working procedure, the content that we take note of is usually also enriched. (from “Communicating with Slip Boxes”, emphasis mine)

The main benefit from connections is their effect on you and your brain: When you relate pieces of knowledge to others, you create relationships between pieces of knowledge. Knowledge relationships significantly improve recall, and forming them also trains your mind to see patterns.

Let’s say you read an article about anthills and think: “Wait a minute. That looks like the organization of the factory I own!” You draw many connections about the parallels you see between your factory and the anthill. Why do you see those connections? You see them because there is a typical pattern that can describe both the anthill and the factory. And some may contain more than what you do know: hypotheses on what is yet unknown. Could there be particularly efficient pathways in the anthill, and you could similarly adapt your factory layout to make it operate more efficiently, too?

As you connect, you will learn, understand, and thus expand yourself in two ways: (a) Your knowledge will increase and (b) you will be a better observer. By being a better observer, you will be able to draw more insights from observation. More universal patterns arise and become more apparent to you. A fundamental aspect of working like this is that it allows you to access the general patterns of reality.

To make the most of a connection, always state explicitly why you made it. This is the link context. An example link context looks like this:

Investing for normal people aims towards positiv chashflow #Cashflow #Liquidity Investing starts with liquidity:202001121202 You have to have the liquidity to make investment decisions unless you are using other people’s money (e.g. using leverage). But if you have to start with liquidity what is the end of investing? If Cash is the Alpha, Cashflow is the Omega. If you buy real estate, there is no question that positive cashflow is key to a good investment. The same is true for stocks. Why should we expose ourselves to the uncertainty of the market if we want to support our normal lifestyles.As an ordinary person, you don’t speculate with real estate, but expect it to generate a steady cashflow: You rent it out. There is no reason we shouldn’t apply this principle to stocks. Dividend should be necessary. However, this line of thought should be viewed in the light of the knockout method of investing: 202001171046

Example Zettel with two examples of link contexts

The first paragraph adds context to the link. The link references a note that explains why liquidity needs to be first priority if you start investing. The link context is the explanation that comes after the link itself. I explain to my future self what to expect if he will follow the link.

This type of connection is where one of the leading knowledge creation mechanisms of the Zettelkasten is found: The meaning of the link, the why of the link, is explicit. The explicit statement of the why is created knowledge.

If you just add links without any explanation you will not create knowledge. Your future self has no idea why he should follow the link. One might think now that the links are placed for a good reason. However, if you create a web of thoughts where you cannot be confident that following a link will lead you to something meaningful, then surfing your own thoughts will give you a feeling of disappointment. Your future self will judge its past self (you!) as unreliable.

In short, to collect connections without an explicit intention, captured meaning, or statement of relevance is not knowledge production, and as a habit, it is even counter-productive: You make shallowness of work a habit and lower your skill as a creative knowledge worker in consequence.

Structure Notes

A Zettelkasten should not only be a web of thoughts that you create from the bottom up of Zettels and their connection. Some sort of hierarchical structure is very useful. Luhmann himself needed to tackle this problem, too.

We can have a look at how he used his register. Not each relevant Zettel was listed for each keyword. Only the most central Zettels that served as entry points to a topic.

Also, Luhmann had hub notes. These are Zettels that list many other places to look at for a continuation of a topic. Luhmann’s Zettelkasten posed a severe challenge in getting to all the relevant parts of a search, especially compared to a digital Zettelkasten.

The main benefit of hierarchical structures is the increased potential for knowledge creation. Structuring your knowledge is a very productive method to get a bigger picture. Let’s explore The Structure Note as it is one of the ways to add structure to a zettelkasten.

파일:Https://zettelkasten.de/introduction/2020-07-30-struktur.png파일:Https://zettelkasten.de/introduction/2020-07-30-struktur graph.png

A Structure Zettel with fancy table-of-contents markup, and a graph view of the same connections and hierarchy.

A Structure Note is a Meta-Note: it is a Zettel about other Zettels and their relationships. Luhmann’s hub notes served as fast tracks to navigate through the web of notes. The same is true for Structure Note. For example, I have a Structure Note about The Zettelkasten Method. It is similar to a table of contents specifically made of all my Zettel on the topic. Whenever I write a new Zettel on the Zettelkasten Method, I make sure that I place a link to it on this Structure Note, or on a Structure Note that is itself referred to by the main Structure Note on the Zettelkasten Method.

파일:Https://zettelkasten.de/introduction/20201027155152 models-overview.png

A part of a list of general models in my Zettelkasten

Another Structure Note of mine is about general models. Each Zettel notes a separate schema about various mental models. Two examples for illustration:

1. The obstacle model. It is a general view of the need to increase energy output to transition from one state to another. One application is the phenomenon of hunger. In nature, you need to increase your energy output (hunt or gather) to move from the state of being hungry to being sated. Concentration is another use case. It could be modelled as the ability to increase and focus your mental energy output on moving from an incomplete to a complete task.
2. The chemistry model. Its gestalt is a molecule that has atoms as parts. Atoms are the parts which are assumed not to be divisible into smaller chunks. A molecule is the composition of the elements. The Zettelkasten Method is a model of this application. Another application is Ido Portal’s teaching methods of skills.

The chemistry model is both a part of the Structure Note on general models and in the Structure Note on the Zettelkasten Method itself. Those overlaps in zettels create a semilattice structure:

파일:Https://zettelkasten.de/introduction/20200703153325 semilattice.png

Unlike a strict tree, a semilattice can have cross-connections from one branch to another.

In reality, even the semilattice does not capture what is really going on in the Zettelkasten. The right model would be one of heterarchy.(4) But that goes beyond the scope of this introduction.

Structure Notes are not limited to hierarchical structures like the nested list from above. Structure notes can also have sequential structures. Imagine the following line of argumentation: a -> b -> c, therefore a -> c. A Structure Note could capture this sequence and link each step of the sequence to a Zettel which expands on it. An example, with annotations to point out each step:

(a) The stimulation of surface cold receptors is (b) the main driver of cold adaptation.202005201056 Cold showers stimulate the surface cold receptors sufficiently.202005201057 Therefore, (c) cold showers are a viable method of practicing cold adaptation training.202005201058

The links via ID refer to Zettels that are compilations of evidence for each statement. The structure of the arguments guides this Structure Note.

To recap: To create Zettels about the relationship between other Zettels, is called a Structure Note. The practice of creating Structure Note will further train your ability to deal with general patterns of knowledge. Capturing the results in your Zettelkasten so they will be available for later use.

How to Implement a Zettelkasten?

Choosing Software

If you choose software to handle your Zettelkasten, there are some features the software should have. Below is an essential checklist for features you should look for:

1. The software needs to make hypertext possible. There are two ways to accomplish this. You either use whatever linking feature the software offers – this is often more convenient for less tech-savvy people –, or you stick to the imitation of direct links through full-text search. The search-based approach is more robust over time and across apps, but perhaps a bit more awkward to get used to. See our demonstration how TextMate would handle links. Keep in mind that I didn’t modify TextMate in any way to accommodate the handling of a Zettelkasten.
2. The navigation between Zettel will depend on two things: Full-text search and being able to follow links. The full-text search is an equivalent of finding entry points via the register in Luhmann’s Zettelkasten (more powerful, obviously). Links are just links as you know them. No further explanation needed. A full-text search is an advantageous option a digital Zettelkasten has, but an analogue Zettelkasten doesn’t, which results in the heavier usage of it.
3. A kind of sandbox. An implicit part of Luhmann’s Zettelkasten was his desk. He could just pull out any number of Zettel and arrange them on his desk as he liked. You can’t do this so easy in the digital version. In The Archive I use Structure Notes as my desktop. The arrangement is more hierarchical and not so free like physical slips of paper. But it does the job.

The Paper-Based Zettelkasten

If you chose to make your Zettelkasten paper-based, just follow the approach by Luhmann as he fleshed it out in his article “Communication with slip-boxes”.

I started my Zettelkasten journey this way and experimented with it for a couple of months. Immigration to my digital solution was quite painful. There is no automation for that unless you have very legible handwriting and can use optical character recognition (OCR) on the notes or an assistant who transcribes them for you.

The Archive

One of the main concepts of The Archive is the software-agnostic philosophy and adherence to a simple plain text approach.

1. Software-agnosticism is the principle that you make the opposite of what boxing-in tries to achieve. There are direct ways to box you in, for example, by storing notes in a closed-off file-format that no other software can decipher. But there are also implicit ways to make it difficult to change the software, for example by making the export process difficult, or by training the user to depend on features that are not available anywhere else. One example of how we try to avoid this is our decision to make the search function responsible for carrying out a lot of the features. Even Zettel links boil down to search. Full-text search is omnipresent on computers, and therefore you can reproduce your workflow with about any plain text editor in the world.
2. The plain text approach is the paradigm of using plain text files as the primary storage. Plain text is the most versatile and durable file format.

In sum, The Archive manages a folder of plain text files. You access your files by performing a search via the Omnibar.

In The Archive, an individual Zettel should look like this:

파일:Https://zettelkasten.de/introduction/2020-08-07 the-archive-zettel.png

Short, formatted Zettel in The Archive

1. The ID of the Zettel is both in the filename and in the contents of the file. The main reason is to create redundancy. A use case for this practice is to access your Zettelkasten from anywhere: back in the day, I used Dropbox to access my notes from other computers. Dropbox allowed a filename-based search only. Therefore, I needed to put the ID in the title to make it possible to follow a link via the search function of Dropbox manually.
2. The ID is time-based. It never changes, so you can change the title as much as you want without breaking any links.
3. If you follow a link, you perform a search for the ID inside the double square brackets. So you can follow links with any software that can perform a search. Linking in The Archive works by putting the ID in double brackets.
4. The tags are hashtags. If you click on the highlighted hashtag, The Archive will perform a search for that tag. Tags are nothing but strings that group notes via a shared phrase that you can search for.
5. The Archive uses Markdown for marking up text. It is very readable by humans and at the same time widely adopted in tools that integrate plain text with publishing methods. Many text editors support Markdown, and you can use other tools to produce nice-looking PDF-files. Markdown comes in handy if you want to write an article or assemble a small presentation.
6. Citations and book references are added via the extended MultiMarkdown syntax. It connects beautifully with BibTeX, which is a widely-supported format to save bibliographic data in plain text files. Our recommendation for Mac is the open-source tool BibDesk and for Windows JabRef to manage the bibliographical data and connect it to the Zettelkasten via the citekeys it produces.

All the screenshots here are examples of our Zettelkastens in The Archive.

DokuWiki

DokuWiki is one of my favourite software solutions for managing a Zettelkasten. If you use DokuWiki, you could consider not making each Zettel its own wiki page. The design of the DokuWiki user interface is more tailored towards long(er) pages. This violates the principle of atomicity to appoint. However, if you link directly to subsections and each subsection contains one thought you will be fine. Every page can be divided into sections and subsections, each with its address, making it possible to treat sections as individual Zettel.

DokuWiki allows you to use title-based IDs and keeps the links functioning if you change the title names, hence the IDs. I still recommend to additionally use time-based IDs. They would just come up in the address of each site or subsection but wouldn’t be in the way otherwise. The benefit is that you will be able to export DokuWiki to another software (especially text editors) solution much easier. Think of the time-based ID part of the code of the Zettelkasten itself which can be read by various software. If the code is complete you can use a high number of apps. If you decide against some parts of the code (conventions) transitions will be much harder.

With DokuWiki, Structure Notes are regular wiki pages. They deal with structures just like plain text files do, which I described above.

Starting Now

What can you expect if you follow the Zettelkasten Method? Expect more, way more results from your efforts. Be persistent and just do it. You will likely get stuck at some point when you cannot figure out how to implement feature X or Y with your tool of choice and get things to work. This will all eventually sort itself out when you went through the motions time and again, and when you remind yourself of the basic principles of a Zettelkasten: you need identifiers as addresses, you need links to create a hypertext, and then get confident through practice. Moving forward is the only way to become something in life. So, get to work. It needs to be done. Having a Zettelkasten makes nothing easier, but it makes anything possible.

Start to learn the Zettelkasten Method now. Download our Demo Archive and play with it using The Archive (free 60 day trial) and other apps.

If you start your own Zettelkasten, share the steps of your journey with our great community in the forums! You can also discuss this introduction there.

Start reading about the Zettelkasten Method on the curated overview page

Special Thanks

I owe eternal gratefulness to @Will who did the first round(s) of beta-reading this article. I pity him for being the first exposed to my English.

Many thanks go out to the other beta readers, too, namely:

• @MikeBraddock
• @mediapathic
• @ethomasv
• @henrikenggaard
• @achamess
• @Argonsorts

참고 자료

원문 : https://zettelkasten.de/introduction/