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.Here's my rather brief summary of the process:* 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.* 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.* 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.* 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.* Notes are linked to other notes which support your ideas. This also help the discovery of new ideas.* 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.* You can create index notes that help you find your way around.* 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.Hope that's somewhat helpful. I'm still experimenting with it to find out what I understand correctly and what I don't.