I don’t understand why headlines like The Film Students Who Can No Longer Sit Through Films aren’t inciting moral panics. Our ability to focus is under attack. We are losing our minds.
Photo by 2Photo Pots on Unsplash
But it is possible to move right when everybody is turn...
I listened to a Podcast episode of Modern Wisdom with Cal Newport. There was an interesting idea of him feeling like Cassandra. He called the problem of the modern knowledge work environment early and, in his book Deep Work, gave a pretty straightforward manual on how to sol...
Dear Zettlers,
There is immense tension between AI’s advances in capabilities and its negative effects on our minds. In the last newsletter, I called claims that you don’t have to remember anything a scam.
Time proved me right. The canary in the coal mine, software enginee...
Nori said my zettelkasten notes look more like mini-essays. First, I dismissed this idea as just a gut reaction to the length and thoroughness of my notes compared to the typically presented notes in the Zettelkasten world.
However, the notion stuck with me, and I came to t...
You never know the value of the idea unless you execute it. If you never roll the dice, you never know if you hit the jackpot or come up empty. But even in a game of luck, there are skills and strategies that skew the game in your favor.
Today, we will explore the relations...
Dear Zettlers,
I am currently wrestling with the question of what to make of mnemonics. I barely dipped my toe in this world. But I never seriously engaged with mnemonics.
But I am in sporadic exchange with Anthony Metivier, one of the or even the current leading teacher o...
How to start as a beginner?
This is arguably the most important question of all in any domain, including fitness and the Zettelkasten Method.
The typical and best approach is to start with simple explanations and instructions. In fitness, you begin by incorporating regular...
If you haven’t been academically trained on the topic of citations, chances are nobody ever told you about basic citation conventions. It’s not hard, it’s just something you need to learn (and maybe put in your Zettelkasten for reference) once.
I present three examples. I c...
Dear Zettlers,
In today’s newsletter, we will discuss a fairly technical aspect of the Zettelkasten Method: How to link.
The Archive encourages you to link using only the unique identifier. The Archive utilises link-as-search. What you see in the double brackets is not a d...
While Zettelkasten practice improves thinking outside the Zettelkasten, we’ll have to lay out a specific problem with the Zettelkasten Method: we can only think in and within our Zettelkasten when it is available. However, we are often somewhere else.
Naturally, the inbox p...
Dear Zettlers,
This might help you relate McPherson’s book, Effective Note-Taking, to the Zettelkasten Method:
The term “note” has multiple meanings that can cause confusion.
Engagement notes: Those are notes that you take because they help you to engage with the current ...
In the world of the Zettelkasten Method and in the broader world of PKM, size matters. The big, beautiful graph view images, and the number of notes in one’s repository are part of the genre of productivity porn that consistently catches attention.
Another genre of producti...
Dear Zettlers,
Currently, I am building a podcast called “Das gute Leben in der Moderne” (“How to Live a Good Life in Modern Times”). When I hit a mere 9 episodes, I got mail (2026-01-13) from podstatus.com that I hit the following rankings on Apple Podcasts:
Position 2...
I wrote a post that outlines rewriting as one element of how the Zettelkasten Method trains your mind. Rewriting is basically an externalisation of wrestling with an idea.
u/UnderTheHole asked on Reddit two very good follow-up questions:
Wouldn’t the effort of rewriting...
Dear Zettlers,
This sentence states perfectly the mechanics of the Zettelkasten as a tool and how to integrate it into one’s overall workflow:
The cultivation of knowledge is the objective of knowledge work and productivity workflows facilitate this effort. (Source)
Origi...
TL;DR:
Friction that increases with system size is an existential threat. Any note-taking or knowledge system whose marginal cost per note rises as the system grows will eventually become unusable, regardless of how beneficial it feels early on.
A Zettelkasten must b...
Dear Zettlers,
Here are some universal questions for any note-taking system.
What do you want to build for your future self?
The ability to store a note quickly, for example, benefits your
present self. Possessing a valuable note is what your future self
will be g...
This guide is deliberately concise. It is written for people who struggle to get started and get stuck endlessly consuming Zettelkasten theory.
Start with a minimalist, distraction-free app.
Learn only how to quickly create new notes, set direct links, and find notes i...
This piece has two goals:
Provide a tool to assess the benefits of various methods and tools for writing and thinking.
A deeper dive into the iceberg of the Zettelkasten Method.
There are distinct but interconnected chains of cause and effect within each method.
Ima...
A Zettelkasten session has the following form:
Phases of a Zettelkasten session
the warm-up phase,
the productive phase,
the busy but unproductive phase.
Warming Up
When we sit down at the Zettelkasten, we need a while to reach operating temperature. To do this, ...
Dear Zettlers,
The last newsletter went viral. I was lucky in striking a chord that is played quite regularly. The chord is the sound of the attack on our minds. To each topic, there is a fundamental existential layer that is below layers of pragmatics and other layers.
Th...
Atomic note-taking is one of the buzzwords surrounding the Zettelkasten Method. In short, it is about putting one idea and one idea only on a note.
With this guide, I will take you into the exciting deep waters of both the Zettelkasten and thinking skills. Having read thi...
Dear Zettlers,
This scam is decades old now and it is quite surprising that people still fall for it.
The search engines, old note-taking apps (you know, those with an elephant icon and the like) and AI have something in common: They claim that the effort of remembering th...
This is the last session of this little series of developing a knowledge work practice with Nori.
Background: Nori wrote an article on leaving her Zettelkasten for good. The quality of her reflection led to my decision to contact her with the offer for a couple of coaching ...
There was a bit of backlash on Reddit regarding the video on using the Zettelkasten Method for Hindu Philosophy.
The core point of criticism was about the lack of atomicity of the notes. Isn’t the Zettelkasten all about having atomic notes?
I like to take the opportunity t...
Context: Nori wrote an article about quitting the Zettelkasten Method. She clearly tried hard and wrote a thoughtful reflection on her journey. So, I decided to reach out to her and offer some help. We recorded the first session here: Nori’s Zettelkasten Journey and Why She ...
“Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!” - The Red Queen
Those who don’t learn to use AI, won’t be able to keep pace with those who do. AI wri...
Dear Zettlers,
I’d like to share three paragraphs from the English translation of the Zettelkasten Method book:
The Zettelkasten’s active approach counters the problem of modern information inflation—the overwhelming abundance of low-value content.1 Information availabil...
