My Second Brain – Zettelkasten
For anyone who wants the gist of Zettelkasten, I've just finished reading How to Take Smart Notes by Sönke Ahrens.<p>Here's my rather brief summary of the process:<p>* You create fleeting notes to capture ideas as they happen. They should be short lived notes that don't become the main store of your knowledge.<p>* You create literature notes as your read material. These should include your own thoughts on highlighted passages, not just quotes and highlights on their own.<p>* You organise your fleeting notes as permanent notes into your 'Slip Box' (taken from the original use index cards). Each note should contain a single idea and should be understandable when reading in isolation.<p>* You want to avoid burying knowledge in large notes as it makes it hard to glance at and link to other notes in a concise way.<p>* Notes are linked to other notes which support your ideas. This also help the discovery of new ideas.<p>* You use your slip box to help you do your thinking. You want to ask it questions, find the related notes that support/oppose the arguments and find gaps or newly related information.<p>* You can create index notes that help you find your way around.<p>* Part of the process is to help your understanding by writing. With a well maintained slip box, you'll never be starting from a blank sheet. You decide what insight/question/knowledge you want to explore, and pull together the notes that give you the body of research to get you started. You shouldn't need to start a new blog post by researching, that happens prior by taking smart notes as you naturally read what you're interested in.<p>Hope that's somewhat helpful. I'm still experimenting with it to find out what I understand correctly and what I don't.