Can you recommend a book or article explaining the system in more depth?
-tomos
Oh, how I wish I could!
I
can explain why most of the well known books are actively wrong and misleading, in part at least.
This and
this aren't bad summaries, but hardly how to do its. (One poi - Luhmann actually started his second, differently structured, zettelkasten after attending a conference in the US)
There are many reasons why I believe that the published books and articles aren’t great:
- most writers automatically add their own ideas; they’re very opinionated but try to give the impression that they are just describing the original
- most writers started as academic wannabes rather than productive and successful academics (and therefore unable to discriminate what would work from what wouldn’t; let alone what needs to be done to make a system work) and a number have ended as zettelkasten publicisers
- a marked discrepancy between them and Luhmann in terms of self-discipline and life circumstances
- an obsession with improving the system when creating a digital analog
- and with their ideas about zettelkasten being shaped by the programs they used
- Luhmann’s target was writing, he had no need of a memory aid; many of the students are primarily interested in remembering
I’m now very opinionated, but it’s taken me a long time to get there. Many of the many detailed systems I’ve seen described struck me as procrastinatory rather than productive: the notes themselves are the purpose.
My own approach has been shaped most by studying how Luhmann actually worked and reading his cards. And comparing that with myself and the workflows of productive successful academics I know.
But being aware that I’m not the same (I pursue more subjects, I have less self-discipline, I am usually doing things rather than reprocessing what I read).
Like Luhmann, I’m very focused on output. Some of that is writing, but it is also investigating, also doing. Output quality is even more important than quantity. A system that isn’t visibly improving this is not one for me. (One reason I still write longer notes: I can usually write these straight off, remembering citations, rather than having to put them together from short notes. The zettels are for what I don’t know and haven’t yet thought.)
I rejected the wikilink/graph/backlink approach because I could see that it doesn’t do the same thing. It can be useful in itself, but tends to be passive and self-serving. At some point on my journey, I remember someone writing that they had looked at zettelkasten and it was just outlining: they were wrong of course, but also still right. Like everyone who has tried following a digital approach, I’ve been limited by software. Workflowy is well short of ideal, but it will do; for now. And it has analogues for all the features of Luhmann’s system.
What I
would say is that you need a clear purpose for using the system. I would suggest that purpose being to do with thinking and doing. With that it is very quick to see whether it is helping or not. But the purpose doesn't have to be academic and doesn't have to involve writing as an output.
And don't eschew longer notes, outside the zettelkasten but being linked into it.