A maturity model [1] can be viewed as a set of structured levels that describe how well the behaviors, practices, and processes of an organizational system can reliably and sustainably deliver the required results. While originally designed for software development, its structured approach to improvement can inspire creativity when applied to other areas of life.

Imagine training for a marathon. At first, you might struggle to run even a single mile (Level 0: Incomplete). But as you keep practicing, you manage short, inconsistent runs (Level 1: Initial). With time and effort, you create a basic training plan, running regularly each week (Level 2: Managed). Over time, you refine your routine, tailoring your runs to build speed and endurance (Level 3: Defined). Eventually, you monitor your progress with stats and tweak your plan for specific goals like improving pace (Level 4: Qualitatively Managed). Finally, running becomes second nature, and you experiment with new techniques to keep improving (Level 5: Optimizing).

This same concept of structured growth is the foundation of maturity models. But what happens when we apply it to personal knowledge systems like the Zettelkasten [2]? Drawing on Csikszentmihalyi’s insights into creativity [3], this playful application can reveal new ways to think about the evolution of our own note-taking systems. The enclosed concept map explores six levels of Zettelkasten maturity:

• Level 0: Incomplete
• Level 1: Initial
• Level 2: Managed
• Level 3: Defined
• Level 4: Qualitatively Managed
• Level 5: Optimizing

My questions: Where is my Zettelkasten on this map? Will this framework inspire fresh insights into my system? And how can it guide the evolutionary development of my knowledge organization?

References
[1] Paulk, Mark C., ed. The Capability Maturity Model: Guidelines for Improving the Software Process. The SEI Series in Software Engineering. Reading, Mass: Addison-Wesley Pub. Co, 1995.
[2] Ahrens, Sönke. How to Take Smart Notes: One Simple Technique to Boost Writing, Learning and Thinking, 2022.
[3] Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly. Creativity: Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention. HarperCollinsPublishers, 1996.

With Warmth,

A.

This is an excerpt from the book "How to Read a Paragraph" which highlights that ideas belong to particular systems (domains such as psychology, sociology etc.) and thinking in terms of systems (with a look to big picture at least).

This is something I experience in myself too. Zettelkasten is so atomic note oriented that even though you connect things and only create notes as branches, and not allow any orphans; it becomes messy in my head.

I wonder what you think about such a top-down structure (in our heads or in our systems, doesn't matter). And I wonder your experiences about remembering what's in your ZK. Did you train yourself to think in terms of building blocks? How do you handle not having an anchor in head?

Exploration maps like this help us to understand the connections between existing concepts. At first glance, they may seem very complicated. However, they can help us discover hidden insights.

@tomp said:

I'm mostly interesting in moving away from paying too much attention to whether a note is "sufficiently atomic" and thinking instead of what the note is supposed to be for, and crafting it so that it promotes that purpose in a helpful way.
(…)
I think the focus should be on cardcraft and not atomicity. Realizing that a card is usually best when it is about one subject is part of cardcraft; but it's only one part.

Interesting topic. Would you mind starting a new thread, so that we can chime in?

Happy to oblige. By cardcraft, I mean all kinds of techniques to make a z-card effective. So what makes for an effective z-card? To some extent it depends on what one wants the card to do. I think that a card should generally be about one subject, but whether that is the same as "atomic" is another question. Let's not get into that here - for now, let's just say that the card should usually be about a single subject without being too particular about what that means.

Why does a card exist? I have cards that remind me of the right syntax for a computer command. Useful but not very exciting. The main thing I want from them is that I can find them when I need them. That, at least in my system, is mostly about the title. I also want to be able to find the actual command easily when I scan the card.

The purpose of a card might be to comment on a quotation, to collect a number of sources about a subject, to capture one's speculations about "consciousness", to be part of a chapter for a book, to keep the correct citation form for some published work, to act as a structure card, just to name a few. I want my cards to help me pick up the card's purpose.

For this discussion, I created a mind map to help me work out the things I wanted to write about. I put a link for it into a card. Actually, I put a link to both the mind map and its .png image file. I can open either one with a click. That way I don't need to go fussing around trying to find the right file. There is no computer machinery to get in my way.

As usually happens, working on the mind map got my mind associating and I kept thinking of things to include. As I wrote, some of the points made their way back to the mind map. By now there is too much material for this post and I will have to cover some of it once over lightly. Here is an image of that mind map.

Of all the branches in the mind map, all the ways in which a card can be tuned up for its purpose, note how there is only one related to the subject (the "aboutness") of the card; or two if you include the title. The aboutness is important, no doubt about that, but it's only one of many things involved in making a card that can sing to you.

Let me just talk about a few of the elements. Refresh means to recreate the mental state or "scene" which was active when that card was created. That scene will naturally depend on the card's purpose. All the elements aren't needed for every purpose.

"Cache" means to save for later use, a time when one will come back to the work. The idea is that one's mental scene will get refreshed by the card. Any z-card can only be a flattened and compressed version of one's thoughts, so it is worth while to work on adding some depth with the aim of having the card un-compress and un-flatten in the mind when one returns to it.

By typography I mean mostly boldface and italics, though if the ZK system supports more, great.

The branch labeled title refers to working up a title that will help the user to find the card, and to serve as a reminder in itself as to what the card is about.

Spreads means spreads of multiple cards, images, etc., across a screen as if they were actual physical cards and photos. A card can be a multimedia hub. It helps to have a second monitor but even with just a single monitor one can put up a small spread. Right now I have the image of the mind map up on my second monitor. I have been looking back and forth at it as I write.

Every card does not need all these elements. But many will benefit from some of them. Even if you only pay attention to the title, physical, and cognitive principles branches you will have nine ways to enrich your cards.

To Illustrate, here is a side-by-side view of a card with the basic content of the mind map as an indented list (I can copy-paste this directly from the mind map editor). It is contrasted with a crafted version, shown in a rendered view. Which one speaks more vividly to you?

• 1.5: The brain is expensive.
• 3.3: Republic of Letters letters were often sent multi-hop
• 4.3: Russian fairy tales are constructed from linearly organized event types.
• 7.1: What does the abstraction abstract away?
• 14.1: People hate negativity.
• 15.1: Socialism aimed to change the environment in order to change mankind.

(All my top-level titles – as PDF)

This is reminiscent of nothing so much as Borges' top-level classification of animals, supposedly taken from the (imaginary) Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge:

• those belonging to the Emperor
• embalmed ones
• trained ones
• suckling pigs
• mermaids (or sirens)
• ...
• those that have just broken the vase
• those that from afar look like flies

I'm wondering if this is typical. I'm happy enough with it, to the point I consistently use that list when I start to decide where to put new notes. I have a keyword index from jargon words to notes, but I don't use it. (It may be relevant that I have only 284 main notes.)

(It may also be relevant that I started my Zettelkasten mostly by taking my unfinished drafts, extracting their claims, and loading them into the Zettelkasten. But when I take notes on other people's texts, I still tend to put highest whatever's first in my Inbox today. Maybe I should scan my Inbox and do the most abstract claims first?)

One thing Luhmann says in "Kommunikation" is that a good communication partner should be able to surprise you. I doubt that means he was surprised at what card 17.a3b8 contained, so much that his browsing process caused him to make a new connection between two cards that had perhaps never been considered together before. Plausible?

Thanks.

I'm a PhD student and an experimental material scientist, and I've used a zettelkasten via Obsidian for organising my review of the scientific literature. It's an incredibly useful framework for synthesising and summarising literature, but I remain unsure how to best integrate my original research (seeing as I'm yet to publish a paper!) Of course, in the humanities and social sciences the output of the zettelkasten consists of original research in and of itself, but aside from the review paper I hope to write I still have to get my hands dirty with electron microscopes and geochemical modelling software due to the nature of the field (not by itself a problem, as I love labwork).

But how I go from calculations in a spreadsheet or results from a machine to coherent zettels in obsidian isn't trivial. Does anyone have any advice about how to incorporate this kind of material into a zettelkasten?

Many thanks,

Patrick

After using the (Digital) Zettelkasten for about three years, I realized that when I looked at the monitor and tried to structure my existing ideas, my mind would become dizzy and I couldn't think straight. Then, when I simply turned off the computer and sat there blankly, looking at the scenery, or taking a walk, the ideas I'd written in Zettelkasten would naturally come to mind and come together.

From my observations, I found that the brighter the monitor, the more difficult it was for me to think. The darker the monitor, the better my thinking. There were also times when I was able to think effectively while typing. In those instances, my eyes were on the monitor, but my mind seemed to be in some space inside my head. It's as if I'm looking into some inner space.

I want to be able to generate, integrate, and connect ideas in the Zettelkasten, just like when I'm walking or without a digital screen, but I feel like something's not working. Has anyone found a solution to this?

P.S. I looked it up and found the concepts of divergent thinking and convergent thinking, but I'm not sure if they're relevant to the problem I'm facing.

Most PKM conversations focus on capturing, connecting, and developing ideas (note types, tools and the like). But when I reflect on the moments and situations that have lasting impact in business and life zoom out, they tend to be decisions — what to pursue, what to drop, how to respond, which direction to commit to.

So the question I'm working through and which I'd be interested to get others' perspectives on is:

When you’re facing a real, consequential decision, how (if at all) does your PKM system help you think it through (in practice)?

For example:

• Do you enter the decision into your notes and work it there — or does the thinking mostly happen elsewhere, with the notes playing a supporting role?
• Have you ever created notes that function less like reference material and more like thinking tools (prompts, checklists, decision records, assumption maps, pre/post-mortems, etc.)?
• Or do you deliberately avoid formalising decisions in your system because it adds friction or feels like over-engineering?

I’m especially interested in where this breaks down:

• moments where your system felt like it should help, but didn’t
• situations where structure helped clarity — or where it got in the way
• things you’ve tried once and quietly abandoned

I’m not assuming there’s a right answer here, instead I'm interested in how (and whether) people who care and invest time and effort into thinking, learning, and knowledge work relate to decision-making as a first-class activity and whether most people implicitly (or explicitly) treat it as something separate from knowledge systems.
Would love to hear how this shows up (or doesn’t) in your own practice.

1. Define in Zettel, reference Literature

This is the approach seemingly taken here[^1] where the Zettel notes contain the mathematical definition in its entirety and then may hold links to other relevant definitions and perhaps the piece of literature it was extracted from. This method is useful for:

• Linking to specific definitions from other Zettel notes
• Quick, simple reading of a specific definition (atomicity)
• Reading in parts (you don't have to update the Literature note, just add more Zettel notes)

The main problem I see with this approach is it seems to violate the spirit of the Zettel notes being (1) your own ideas, (2) not just exact quotes from a piece of literature you have read, and (3) you may end up filling what is supposed to be your vault of your ideas with other people's definitions.

2. Define in Literature

The second approach I could imagine is keeping all the definitions extracted from, say, a textbook in the Literature note for that book. This perhaps keeps more in the spirit of how I understand the Literature vs. Zettel note split to be. The idea being that exact quotations (which definitions are by technicality) should go in the Literature note, that is what it is for! But then it becomes harder to reference specific definitions, and in the case of a textbook, you may end up with an enormous Literature note filled with 10s if not 100s of definitions, which may be difficult to reference.

Please experienced zettler's, give me guidance! How have you/would you handle(d) this?

[1] https://forum.zettelkasten.de/discussion/2604/latex-zettelkasten-project-for-mathematicians-and-other-latex-users

I was using the lit note/perm note split. And the amount of lit notes became voluminous and hard to manage. My ZK was flooded my these lit notes. It became a collection processing job. I quit.

4 years later, I know I need to start created content again for my company.

After reading this blog I found the missing piece. By removing the lit note, I moved the processing of my thinking outside of the ZK. Thinking is messy, but a ZK is structured, based on my experience, these two things didn't gel.

The key think was a post from Christian about how to "process" a resource. Turning them into themes (he called them clusters) and writing well developed ideas based on the resources.

So now, instead of 100+ notes per book, I have 1 to 7 well developed "source notes".

The good thing about all this is that we can make it our own. So, here are the levels I have:

• Source note - a well developed note from a source, like a book.
• Perm note - a well developed note from my thinking. Often an original thought from a collection of ideas or my own experience.
• Content - a new piece of content written based on ideas that arise in my zettel.

For anyone wondering, this is the blog that made it click for me: https://zettelkasten.de/posts/create-zettel-from-reading-notes/

How does a Zettelkasten fit into the larger landscape of knowledge sources that shape how we think and write?

I have been working on a concept map [1] that tries to answer that question. Now starting from Euler's definition [2] — intelligence as the cognitive capacity to respond appropriately despite indeterminacy — the map places the human author at the center, surrounded by six external world models: Books, the Zettelkasten, Social Media, the Internet, Experts, and AI.

The central distinction the map tries to make visible is between consulting a world model (deliberate, active, voluntary) and being shaped through language by one (ambient, often involuntary). Most external models do both. The Zettelkasten is the exception: its inward arrow is labelled "reflects through own language" — which is the argument for why it occupies a different position from the others.

The map also embeds a simple workflow: ① Read, ② Think, ③ Write. The Zettelkasten sits at the hinge between all three.

This is v0.14 of an iterative process. I would be curious whether the consults / shapes distinction resonates with how people here experience their own practice — and whether anything important is missing from the map.

Reference
[1] Obsidian Forum. “Select Tools for Zettelkasten. But How? - Knowledge Management.” September 5, 2023. https://forum.obsidian.md/t/select-tools-for-zettelkasten-but-how/66067/4?u=edmund.
[2] Euler, Matthew J. “Intelligence and Uncertainty: Implications of Hierarchical Predictive Processing for the Neuroscience of Cognitive Ability.” Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews 94 (November 2018): 93–112.

I mapped the eight ways thinking changes shape as it leaves your head.

The question isn’t how well does your system capture ideas? It’s how many modes can it hold?

Fig: Zettelkasten Thinking. 8 Modes of Externalization.

I have to read philosophical essays. Philosophy is a bit unique academically in that it's "primary units of thought" aren't particularly "atomic" facts about the world that can be paired down into index card sized notes. They're (often poorly written) rants where ideas stretch over several pages or whole chapters of a book. They only make sense if you're aware of their context, and their context is itself usually pretty complicated.

Reading that sort of thing is hard which is why I started thinking about note-taking methods in the first place. Scrunching ideas down so that they fit in my head all at once is the only way to process books like this.

So I end up with summaries. Gigantic files where I've compressed the actual thought process in the text. I need these. I could split them up by section or something, but the structure of the original text is important in itself.

It seems like zettelkasten as an idea is fundamentally opposed to long-form summarizing like this. The expectation seems to be that if there's any rote facts for you to reference, you're either putting a dictionary definition in a ZK note or just doing a bibliographic reference (on the assumption that you already have what's being referenced in your head). This can't possibly be right. It seems totally backwards. What am I missing?

I use the ##tag method from Sasha to signify a root link or parent link attached to a note. When I search for ## I also get all the H2 sections.
So I changed all my ##links to @#links, is there a way to have a saved search with a joker like to catch every terms beginning with @# like @#$ or @#catchall?

To organize myself I use ttt to signify a note as a terrain in french, meaning field, for me they work not like hubs. And I have the feeling I would appreciate to have a saved search with ttt AND my root tags to get an idea of where my energy is going.

Thank you

I have a question for the community participants. Has anyone ever felt like the slip box becomes a thinking being? How would you describe the feeling?

Let's start with some data from reconstructions of Luhmann's second, sociological Zettelkasten:

• Permanent Notes: about 67,000 cards.​
• Literature Notes: about 15,000 entries (mostly books and articles).
• Books he authored: a bit over 70.

This means as an estimation, not a directly documented figure:

• For each book or article he read, he only creates on average ≈ 67,000/15,000 ≈ 4.5 Permanent Notes per book or article. ​
• He processed on the order of 15,000 books and articles in depth, with perhaps roughly half of those being books, so about 7,500 books.
• So the ratio is approximately: books read per book written ≈ 7,500/70 ≈ 100.
• Productivity expressed as output per unit of input: ≈ 70/7,500 ≈ 1 %

The “books read per book written” ratio is a quiet reminder that visible output sits on top of a large, invisible foundation. A writer who publishes one substantial book for every hundred they read is not inefficient; they are distilling, selecting, and discarding far more than they keep.

This flips a common obsession with productivity: instead of asking “How many books have I written?”, one might ask “How many have I truly digested deeply enough that a book could grow out of them?” Measured this way, high productivity is less about speed and more about the density of thought each finished work contains.

1. If I have, for example, 6 notes on a given day that I want to enter into the zettelkasten as part of the folgezettel, do I insert them in random order, from oldest to newest (or vice versa), or e.g. from the most general to the most detailed? I'm curious how you do it (especially people using folgezettel), or how Luhmann did it.
2. When using the notes, if I have, for example, existing note 1/a, the next note associated with it is 1/b, the next one is 1/a1, the next one is 1/a2, 1/a3, 1/a4, etc.? Am I understanding this correctly? And probably linking directly to 1/a for these subsequent notes.
3. Furthermore, if I create, for example, a 1/a4 note, and thanks to it I come up with an idea for a new note that's not particularly related to it, should I still set it as 1/a5 and hyperlink to a closely related note (e.g., 2/c8) since it's a "thought chain"? Or should I place it close to the note it's closely related to (i.e., place it as 2/c9), and just link to 1/a4 there? 4. Furthermore, in Luhmann's notes (on this website https://niklas-luhmann-archiv.de/bestand/zettelkasten/inhaltsuebersicht#ZK_2_editor_I_23-2), I've seen more than once a jump, for example, from 3414/3b to 3414/3b3. The notes (3414/3b1 and 3414/3b2) weren't cataloged? Or was there another reason?
4. If you have a note from the literature, I assume you simply provide a link from it to the permanent/main note you're creating based on it?
5. Furthermore, in Bob Doto's book, I saw information not to include old notes from before the creation of the zettelkasten in the zettelkasten, only new ones. I admit this doesn't make sense to me. Is there a specific reason I'm not aware of?

Thank you in advance for any help. I like to be prepared before doing something like this. To clarify, I only recently learned about zettelkasten and really liked the idea of ​​this note-taking system. So far, I've read Sonke Ahrens's book "How to Take Smart Notes," Sascha's blog posts, some discussions on this forum, and Bob Doto's book "A System for Writing." Unfortunately, I haven't read Sascha's book because German is too challenging for me (maybe someday).

So far, I haven't taken any specific notes for zettelkasten (though I have many notes I've taken previously in files). I only prepared some test notes on Greek mythology (30 notes) to test zettelkasten and folgezettel.

I apologize for any grammatical errors; English is not my first language, so I'm using a translator.

Isn't that a surprising approach? What did you discover? Did you find any unexpected connections? What are you missing? Can you identify a personal narrative? Can you discover some pieces for a first outline?

Here is my version from today.

References:

• Zettelkasten Exploration Maps — Zettelkasten Forum
• Philosophical Tools for Zettelkasten — Zettelkasten Forum
• The Title Game – The Minimalist’s Zettelkasten (v0.14) — Zettelkasten Forum

In my case, I want to create some guides and rules to guarantee some success (or headaches in the future).
And there is some of the question that are keeping me from committing to my Zettelkasten:

1. I start using file name as yyyyMMddhhmm Title of the note.md

• Should I avoid spaces in the files names?
• Should I use Folgezettel? Or using yyyyMMddhhmm is enough to guarantee the evolution and future prof of my notes?

2. Using Obsidian and The Archive as my main tools for Zettelkasten, I started using wikilinks [[yyyyMMddhhmm Title of the note]] to connect notes

• Should I use Markdown links [yyyyMMddhhmm Title of the note](/path/to/the/file) or Wikilinks is something standard for markdown?

3. Since Obsidian supports properties using YAML and The Archive is just a markdown editor, I using YAML with this format (202501091122 four values of the agile manifesto)

I don't have tags for now on YAML because The Archive don't search on click when using tags: [tags1]

• Should I use tags at all?
• If yes, should I put tags on YAML or in the body of the note using #tags1?

Ok, I have more questions, but those are the most important ones for me now.

Can I have some feedback on that from you?

In the picture, attached below, I used double brackets to link them to a centrail point (book reviews). Should I just tag (#) or should I make the central point (book review) as an index?

I recently started applying the Zettelkasten Method and wanted to ask you guys for some insight

My first question is how do you know whether to go back to a structure note versus linking to a new zettle inside of a note you are already working on? I ask this because I noticed that it could get quite exhausting to keep going back to a structure note and creating new entries in it versus what felt more natural which was to link to a new note inside of the one I was already making. I noticed however that I couldn't fully get rid of the structure notes though because they were useful for organizing different but related ideas. This is what made me ask the question.

My second question is how important is software independence? I ask this because I am using Obsidian and it has three features which I find very useful.

The first is being able to name zettles their proper name versus using the dated method that was taught in the overview article. It was way easier to find a zettle this way when I needed to link to in a note I was working on in the moment. (for context Obsidian changes the file name when you change the title of a note)

I guess this also extends to another question I had of how do you find what you are looking for and not get lost in a Zettelkasten that uses dated titles? I guess this may give me an answer to my first question huh, on structure notes, I'm sure it would be easier to find stuff if you have structure notes.

The second feature I found useful was Obsidian's ability to have pictures. sometimes having text from the original source is not possible or more practical as a picture of a drawing I have made or one from the source. If we are sticking to a pure markdown file mentality then sadly this would be lost.

The last feature is the ability to have table, I like tables because it lets me go back to my thinking when I am done free writing a zettle before I go back to refine to find a singular idea for a zettle. the table is like having margins where I can later ask questions to sharpen my thinking. I noticed tables break on markdown files.

Sorry if this feels like a ramble and all over the place and thank you in advance if you respond

JMJ,

Starwarp

P.S. also I'm not sure how to respond to individual comments on this forum, sorry I am a zoomer haha and it's pretty easy on discord and reddit to respond to individual comments but I could figure out how to do it here.

I'm berc and I've just finished "How To Take Smart Notes" by Sönke Ahrens and while I understand the general idea, I still have some questions.

How many and what types of notes are there exactly? I found hard to follow Ahrens card system and the fact that my english isn't my mother tounge made it even harder. The fleeting notes aren't permanent right?

What also confuses me, that it seems like people use different names for the notes.

-Fleeting notes?
-Literature/Bibliographic notes?
-Permanent notes/Main notes?

Also, how long are thee notes supposed to be?

I've heard a lot about Obsidion, and I'm planning to work with it, but is it ok, if I do the fleeting notes on little papers? (since they're not so useful?)

I would like to request such a proof.

If I were able to create a proper zettelkasten, then I would and wouldn't be asking for this.
My current view is that it's a nebulous body of nebulosity akin to astrology.

How would a zettelkasten look that helped me think about how correct I am in my assumption that it's all BS?
Can you create one?

Can not you create one? If so, why? I reckon too much of a pain. I find trying to use zettelkasten to be too much of a pain.

I see people wax on wax off and rarely show a full zettelkasten.
Thus, I request a fully featured zettelkasten, in fact, I would like many of them, from as many users as possible, not a collective one.

And it's a clear topic, too. So you actually have something to work with. Otherwise, everyone is just cooking their own little soup and no wonder no consensus seems to be able to be reached.

Thus, this clear topic. Prove that the zettelkasten does not work by creating a second brain zettelkasten to converse with that gets you there.
I'm very interested in how the notes for that look.

Perhaps it would prove it to be working too, but that's not the goal. It should prove that it doesn't work, that it's BS.
Math can do that.
"Math is completely arbitrary it doesn't work on its own, we have to make it work, but it doesn't work on its own."

I think that's pretty correct. The heavy lifting is all done by people who set it all up.
And math works. But it's nonsense. And math can admit it.

Can the zettelkasten pull something off like that? Use itself to showcase that it's nonsense?
There is no time limit to this. I'll check back every now and then.

If you truly believe that the zettelkasten is watertight working and cannot be disproven, create a zettelkasten that thinks it's nonsense anyway.
That's the point of a zettelkasten, as a partner to think with. Right?

While doing some research about Luhmann’s numbering system’s antecedents, I recently came across a “one pager” (typescript) written by Luhmann himself in the form of some lecture notes from 1968 that folks may appreciate.

Luhmann, Niklas. 1968-01-13. “Ms. 2906: Technik des Zettelkastens.” Münster, Germany. Lecture Notes. Niklas Luhmann Archiv: https://niklas-luhmann-archiv.de/bestand/manuskripte/manuskript/MS_2906_0001.

Seemingly everyone with a blog that ran across the idea of Zettelkasten in the last decade or so wrote up their own description of what it is. If you know of other blog posts about zettelkasten, let me know for my collection.

Of special note to those who are still under the misapprehension that Luhmann “invented the zettelkasten”, in the closing section of his 1968 notes he writes “In conclusion: from personal experience, others work differently” by which one understands that he’s aware of others who use similar systems and admits that they’re all idiosyncratic to their individual users. I would suspect that he gave this lecture while at Sozialforschungsstelle an der Universität Münster (Social Research Centre of the University of Münster) to students about how to arrange and do their own sociology research work.

Marginal Notes in Books

When I was young (1970s), there were no personal computers, smart phones, etc. When I read a book, I would stop, consider an idea, and write concise notes in the margin of the book. The focus, effort and thought that went into these notes certainly qualifies them as complete zettels. Many of my old books are filled with such marginal notes (a classic was "7 Habits of Highly Successful People" by Steven R. Covey). Sometimes, one marginal note would refer to a previous marginal note on another page. When I reread a section of the book, I also reread and in some cases enhanced the marginal notes. A friend read one of these books when he was laid up in hospital. He said reading the marginal notes was just as interesting and thought-provoking as reading the original text. I may have stumbled on an early, fledgling version of a ZK without even realizing it (until this moment).

As Applied in the Bible Study App

This practice was extended when reading the Bible in an app called "Gospel Library". In this app, one can highlight text, add tags and/or notes to highlighted text, and make your own links to other verses of scripture. I have been the most diligent in applying this practice, and have accumulated about three thousand bits of highlighted text and over 700 attached notes, over a five year period. Again, the notes are written only after intense study and thought. I find the extension of the linking capability to not only other verses of scripture but also to other information in the app to be most helpful. So, in a way, this is an enhanced version of a fledgling Zettelkasten. It doesn't meet the full "specifications" for a Zettelkasten, but it is getting closer.

Just thought I'd share this "aha" moment. Has anyone else had a similar experience?

I've been thinking about whether there is value in integrating this scripture Zettelkasten into my main (external) Zettelkasten, and if so, how I would do it. Any suggestions?

Luhmann had a law degree. One of his early jobs was to develop a filing system. It is safe to assume that he was familiar with the best practices of the time.

@chrisaldrich reminded us of Rand Corporation's Progressive Indexing and Filing, a text for courses covering the fundamentals of Indexing and Filing. The fifth edition from 1950 describes a duplex-numeric arrangement, that looks very much like Luhmann's numbering system. Here's the example on page 182:

1        Administration
1-1        Office Maintenance
l-la        Supplies
1-lal        Stationery
1-2        Staff
2        Applications
2-1        Correspondents
2-2        Office Assistants
3        Advertising ‘
3-1        Contracts
3-2        Prospects
4        Manufacturing
4-1        Factory
4-la        Employees
4-1b        Equipment and Supplies
4-1c        Maintenance
4-1d        Stock
4-1d1        Paper
4-2        Job Printing
5        Transportation
6        Educational
7        Publications
7-1        Articles of Interest
7-2        News Items
7-3        Reviews
7-4        Subscriptions
7-4a        Solicitations
8        Associations, Conventions, and Meetings
9        Literature, Requests for
10        Information, Requests for

Did Luhmann use this system or did he invent something new? Luhmann writes (emphasis mine):

The inner workings, the arrangement of the notes, the mind of the Zettelkasten depend on a decision not to order notes by topics and subtopics, and instead choose an order with fixed placement. A content-based system (like a book’s table of contents) would mean that you would have to adhere to a single structure forever (decades in advance!). If you assume that this communication system and oneself can evolve, this will necessarily result in unsolvable problems where to place a note. The fixed-place orderdering doesn’t require topical ordering.

In my opinion Luhmann's main innovation was to break with topical ordering. Rand's example shows what Luhmann explicitly decided against: ordering notes by topics and ever smaller subtopics.

Luhmann continues describing his innovation (emphasis mine):

The fixed-place numbering, abstracted from any content ordering, has several advantages that together enable a higher kind of order.

(1) Free internal branching. You don’t need to add notes at the end, but you can connect them anywhere, even to single words within a text. (…) This enables internal growth of the system without systematic pre-programming and without depending on sequential linearity. The downside is that the original running text may often be interrupted by hundreds of in-between notes; yet, you can easily recover the original context if you are methodological with the numbering. (…)

(2) Opportunity to connect. (…) With this technique it is not important where you place a new note. When there are multiple options you can solve the problem by placing the note wherever you want and create references to capture other possible contexts. (…)

(3) Register. Considering that there is no topical order, you have to put a search mechanism in place because you cannot rely on your numerical memory. (Alternating numbers and letters helps the memory and may be an optical aid when searching notes, but is of course not enough). It is therefore necessary to maintain a keyword index. (…)

The Rand system is aware of content. The content determines the place in the system. Solications are filed under 7-4a.

Luhmann's system is more flexible, but it requires a register — and some trust in serendipity.