Zettelkasten and Evergreen notes

Luhmann’s zettelkasten

Limitations The image illustrates one of the biggest limitations of a physical ZK, working with lots of information in the real world is impractical (using thinner paper because it gets too big!).

Luhmann’s system was well-thought out system of notes. It was like a mini library, containing both a collection of original source, and a collection of his own thoughts and ideas.

Especially the latter was interesting, stored as they were in what we would now call a web of notes, with an index as a first entry into the system. His zettelkasten was an exceptional version of a commonplace book, the linking made it so much more powerful then previous systems.

More modern implementations add further refinements:

Literature notes

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–This is Sönke Ahrens interpretation of Niklas Luhmann system

Notes

3 cards + links = zettelkasten Zettelkasten overview

  • Card 1:
    • Bibliography
    • brief notes about content
  • Card 2:
    • NL’s ideas and thoughts on the subject
    • Short and brief, but full sentences
    • Note written in context of other notes, linking ideas
    • No quoting, strive original meaning
  • Links:
    • Linked note to more than one other note
    • gave it several contexts
  • Index cards
    • Index as entry point to one or two notes

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–Niklas Luhmann Communication with Zettelkastens AP: A large physical ZK is a pain to work with (and carry around!)

Luhmann’s notes were sometimes incredibly terse, probably a habit out of space contraints (also notes are simply components, stripped of external context, collected for future use):

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Fleeting notes

It served Luhmann well

  • The modern perspective is that it’s a bit convoluted
  • but it did work
  • Physical limitation, card has only two sides