Zettelkasten is complex, obscure and not for you

Knowledge management
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Gurus of “productivity” usually talk about Zettelkasten as the ideal way of taking notes that one should strive for.

But no one ever talks about its shortcomings.

Meanwhile, there are some, and not insignificant ones. I’ll list five of them (Russian blogger Fedorov wrote about them not so long ago).

Zettelkasten complicated

The original Zettelkasten is a complex system. It is difficult to master. It’s roughly like learning to play big tennis: there’s only a minuscule percentage chance that you’ll make it to the Grand Slam Cup.

  1. Zettelkasten is nowhere to learn it

Any complex system needs a guide to master it.

Meanwhile, the author of the Zettelkasten method himself has not written a manual for it. Niklas Luhmann has less than a dozen cards in the card catalog and two small essays about his Zettelkasten.

The principles of Zettelkasten are not fixed anywhere, everyone invents them for himself based on his subjective understanding of the system.

  1. Zettelkasten requires a lot of time

Not everyone has so much free time, which is necessary to create a full-fledged Zettelkasten.

“It takes me more time to keep notes than it does to write a book.” - N. Luhmann

“It takes several years for a filing cabinet to reach critical mass.” (Luhmann, 1992).

If you are not a researcher, you may simply not have time to create and maintain a Zettelkasten.

  1. The Zettelkasten is difficult to replicate

The Zettelkasten is a system for taking handwritten notes on paper cards. That’s its advantage. It is almost impossible to reproduce Zettelkasten digitally. With all productivity teachers, it’s always about links and connections. But that’s not the point. There aren’t that many linked cards in Luhmann’s card catalog - no more than 15-20%, I think. Zettelkasten’s strength is not in the links, but in the sequence of notes that help to “grow” an idea and trace the path of growth.

And finally, the main point.

  1. Zettelkasten is not suitable for most tasks of the average user

Creating a Zettelkasten under normal living conditions is like buying a yacht to sail on a small lake. Or hammering nails with a microscope.

An ordinary person solves ordinary problems and simply stores information. He does not aim to share it with others in the form of a publication.

But Zettelkasten originally aimed precisely at creating a valuable intellectual product (or rather, it was one scientist’s specific method). So leave it for writers and scholars.

The average person is better off with the PARA method - it meets the needs of most people much better.

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Hi,
I’m a Zettelkasten practitioner :slight_smile:

There are often wrong assumptions around Zettelkasten that make its practice much more ploblematic than required.

One of these is having a zettelkasten = strict need to exactly replicate the Luhman system.
Luhman was a luminary of the previous century in his field, who used the tools of the previous century to his best (boxes, pen and paper) to carry out his sociology studies and publications, and so on.
My life has nothing about this, so why would I need to replicate Luhman’s system. Instead, inspired by Luhman’s system, I can build my own Zettelkasten, that is, a zettelkasten suited to my needs, my talents, my attitudes, the tools that I know how to use at best (a pc with Obsidian), my goals for my hobby, study, work interests.

  1. Zettelkasten seems complicated because is almost always poorly told and poorly explained. Once of the worst storytelling is just what I’ve explained above. The concepts underlying are not so complicated, they are presented in a complicated and misleading way, you need to extract the “essence” of them. The method is not complicated on itself, but the explanations you often meet are complicated.

  2. I tend to agree, there are few resources for learning zettelkasten in a simple and fast way. Learning zettelkasten is an exploration of fragmented sources. Even reading only one of the few available books is not enough. Learning a zettelkasten from start requires a bit of discovery work, rather than “here is a tutorial so you are ready when you have finished it”. After you have learned, you ask yourself why there isn’t an easy guide for learning this easy stuff. It’s really funny :slight_smile:

  3. partially agree. Zettelkasten takes time. But this time is required if you want to do the stuff the zettelkasten is intended for well. Zettelkasten core purpose is not a being a method for store and retrieve quick informations, a simple database. Zettelkasten purpose is learning and thinking and using the results of these activities for things in our lifes that requires knowledge, reflections, thoughts and similar cognitive works.
    Zettelkasten takes time if you want to use it to write a book but pay attention, writing a book worth reading rather than a useless stuff, takes time anyway. Quality takes time, and Zettelkasten business is develop quality stuff. In any case, nothing stops you from adjusting your zettelkasten based on the time available. Time issues can be managed, once you understand that you don’t need to do the same things and live the same life as Luhman to make a Zettelkasten.

  4. As consequence of the first thing I’ve written, it’s perfectly possible to develop your zettelkasten in a digital way, not based on handwritten notes, based on links, with or without indexes if you want, with of without folgezettel if you want, and so on. Once you have learned the principles, you can add one or more features that Luhman didn’t used, and you can skip features that luhman used.

  5. Yes. Zettelkasten is not suitable for most tasks of the average user. But is **
    tremendously effective in some of them that are more wirespread that you think.
    If you need to acquire and learn knowledge from the external world, develop your thinking about what you’ve learned, and use these results of your mind to do something in your life (and this is a need that I hope is very widespread in the lives of average people) Zettelkasten is incredibly powerful.
    Another very bad misconception about zettelkasten is that it can be used only for write books, or only for having notes stored somewhere.
    In this moment I can have a conversation with you into a forum about a specific topic, presenting to you my knowledge, my ideas, my reflections and my opinions as counterarguments to yours. All this stuff is not a gift from heaven, is what I’ve acquired, learned, and developed using a zettelkasten. And all of these arguments are clear and solid into my mind, I’ve written this post, kept very short due to time and effort constraints in few minutes, without even opening my notes. I can say with big confidence, today, that I perfectly understand the zettelkasten, which you yourself say is a very difficult and obscure thing to undestard :-). This happens thanks to the use of zettelkasten on its own theory, I’ve used zettelkstaten for read books, articles, see videos, participate in online communities, extract the knowledge from these sources, make everything mine and also develop my personal thoughts on it. As the final benefit, I can use this knowledge for something (writing this post) .And all I’ve written is only a very small fragment of what I could say about.
    You can also integrate your zettelkasten with features taken from other models, building a system that cover other needs for you. Into my system I use daily notes, too, that Luhman didn’t. I could integrate, too, some structure and some ideas taken from PARA, from GTD or from other models, having and hybrid system.

I couldn’t have written a post like this without having a zettelkasten. I was able to write it thanks to what developed my mind using a zettelkasten. This post is not a book, I’m not a writer nor a researcher, I use a digital zettelkasten :-), that takes the basic principles inferred by Luhman model but very different in many implementation details

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I think with this kind of system, you will have chance to focus on the simple thoughts from a complicated life.