Clear and Living with a Zettelkasten by Magnus Eriksson. To read more about the method I recommend the fantastic illustrated essay Zettelkasten - How One German Scholar Was So Freakishly Productive by David B. This essay is not meant to be a deep introduction to the Zettelkasten method, but rather shows how I implemented it into my daily workflow. I learned that Ryan Holiday and Robert Greene use similar methods for note-taking. His physical Zettelkasten-a huge shelve with 90,000 notes-was an abomination to me as a Minimalist.īut a few weeks ago I found some time reading into the links my colleague had sent me about the method. The founder Niklas Luhmann seemed rather eccentric to me. At first, I discarded it as too complicated. Because you collected something doesn’t mean you learned it or are able to explain it.Ī few months ago a co-worker pointed me to the Zettelkasten Method. But I fell victim to the Collectors Fallacy. I sorted and curated, tagged, and sometimes even highlighted content. Having used Evernote for a decade I was used to saving everything I wanted to remember into the tool.
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And saving content into some archive doesn’t either. I can ask Siri or Alexa.īut knowledge-building doesn’t work that way. I don’t need to know this, I can always look it up is a common sentence you hear today. And worse, it produces the Illusion of Competence in a person. This is a grave error because it looks convenient to have all knowledge at the tips of my fingers.
The Illusion of Competence and the Collectors FallacyĪ lot of people avoid taking notes and search for answers on the Internet instead. Repeated reading and connecting ideas is another important part. The best retention comes with writing, reading, and listening combined. Many studies have shown how useful writing notes is. The way we write notes determines how we think and learn.