General summary
It presents the Zettelkasten, a writing system for note-taking created by Niklas Luhmann, a prolific german sociologist of the 20th century among other occupations.
- It gives you instructions on how to organize your noteking by separating it in:
- literature notes: notes on the book, article or whatever you're reading about its general content, relevant tags and key notes.
- permanent notes: the actual notes, emphasis in writing it in notes or 'blocks' instead of long pages writing so you can use the same 'block' on other writing, thus being a prolific writer.
- reference notes: usage of tags and 'indexes' serves as organization for all your notes on the Zettelkasten.
- fleeting notes: momentary notes, it can have any kind of utility as longs as it serves to make your thoughts/writing clear. it can be discarded or be some kind of skeleton to your permanent notes, you shouldn't leave it for more than 2 days, if you didn't use it it might be not that important for your work.
- It also presents the software to use it (personally recommend Obsidian or Logseq) or some indications to recreate it non-digitally.
- Apart from that it gives you
- some sort brief (?) biography of Luhmann and why the Zettelkasten wasn't used before (it was a mystery before this book, outside a tiny bunch of german academics).
- some thougths by the writer about writing, thinking and that sort.
My Review
Personally, I've read this book fully it back on 2020, it has around 176 pages and I think all of that could be nicely summarized on 40 pages at most. But the reason it receives my 4 stars instead of less is because this book was my foundation of thinking and writing, it has helped me to think more on categories and patternlike and think of note-taking as progresively instead of any other linear process nonsense for writing.
It changed the way I think about writing and boosted exponentially my cognitive processes: a. thinking clearly b. problem solving and c. methodology. This is due to my experience of almost 3 years writing though and not the book alone: I've been taking notes with the Zettelkasten foundation since 2020 June until this day and made a full writing system that was born out of the Zettelkasten and general influence from the tools for thought community.
A rec would be don't be too rigid with your note-taking system, your writings reflects your thoughts, by writing more everything will be clearer to you even though everything might not be 'clean' or pretty at the start.
