Workflow - Zettelkasten

I have a “guiding project” in mind (or several) for which I am using my Zettelkasten. Usually this is in the form of writing articles or books while researching a topic. Don’t expect a Zettelkasten to do this for you (you can’t just feed it random slips, shake well, then serve up research).

Step 0: Read the Book. (Or article, or whatever.)

Step 1: Take reading notes. As you read, take notes in your own words. I typically write this down on a quarter slip of printer paper (4.25 inch wide, 5.5 inch tall). Write only on one side of the paper, the other side has the bibliographic information (author names, book/article title, publisher, chapter or volume number, sections read, date published, and then near the bottom the date I read it). I also use blue highlighter to mark the side of the slip.

These reading notes will be stored in a shoe box. They form the basis for all my permanent notes, my entries in the Zettelkasten.

Some useful hints:

• Try to extract exercises from articles, in the sense the authors had a question they were trying to answer: what was it? Can this be simplified to be an exercise we could give students?
• If in doubt, jot it down
• For hard-to-obtain articles, more is preferable to less.
• Only jot down the unique contributions (unless you don’t know the subject). This is to avoid repeating the same material.

Step 2: Go for a walk. Or cook a meal, or do somehing else, and let the reading percolate for an hour or two (or more).

Step 3: Write permanent notes. Using a quarter-slip of printer paper (5.5 inches across, 4.25 inches tall — approximately an A6-sized piece of paper using “landscape” orientation), I usually write a terse summary or topic phrase on the top-right corner. There is an ID written in a later step, written in the top-left corner (more on that elsewhere).

To be honest, I defer writing IDs on slips until I integrate them into the Zettelkasten. Why? Well, sometimes I believe the order of subjects and topics found in books and articles is not logical or optimal. It’s useful to try out variations, shuffle around examples, etc.

I write in a manner similar to “Twitter threads”, i.e., a sequence of atomic ideas. While writing slips, I can consult notes from step 1 or previously written slips in my Zettelkasten. If I need to reference or “link” to entries already existing in my Zettelkasten, I use red ink to write in parentheses after making the connection explicit.

But it is very important that each slip has exactly one atomic idea, not two, not three, not more than exactly one.

These permanent notes will be stored in a separate shoe box, not the bibliography shoe box. This separate shoe box (either metaphorical or literal) is referred to as the Zettelkasten. Caution: I only store notes in my zettelkasten which have IDs.

Step 4: Continue or integrate. If I have finished a chapter in a book, section in a technical paper, or maybe a section in a book, and I have assembled slips based on reading the chapter, now I assign IDs to the slips. And if I have not finished the section or chapter, I basically go back to step 0.

I also usually have some “guiding question” in mind which filters the literature down. For example, right now, I am (a) trying to articulate further the foundations of mathematics using set theory, and relatedly (b) trying to explain to my Zettelkasten what “model theory” is in general.

Adding notes to the Zettelkasten allows me to spark questions a hypothetical intelligent colleague would ask, if this Zettelkasten were the contents of my colleague’s brain.

Step 5: Store reading notes. I take a blue highlighter and across the “outward facing spine” draw a blue line, then place the reading notes in a shoe box (or other storage container exclusively for reading notes). The reading notes are organized by author, year, title.

The permanent notes were written in step 3.

Step 6: Use the Zettelkasten. If we adhere to the “Write one idea on a slip of paper, but no more”-rule, then the Zettelkasten gives us fertile material to consult when writing a paper. I take out the thread on a given topic, and look at linked material, possibly taking them out as well, then I sit at my desk, and write in pen on paper whatever comes to mind as I review the topical material on these slips of paper.

I found, sadly by error, if I wrote too much on a slip, it leads to worse writing. (I had too much content on my Zettel for “Formal Grammar”, and I believe my draft subsection on formal grammar suffered because of this.)