This episode transcript has been AI generated and edited by our team, for your convenience and accessibility.

[William Wadsworth] Hello and welcome to the Exam Study Expert podcast. I’m your host, William Wadsworth, study psychologist, here to help you work smarter, not harder. Today’s episode is a juicy and very practical one for anyone working on any kind of academic writing. That could be ranging all the way from a school essay or research project, maybe a college essay or an EPQ here in the UK, as many students take, through to proper big dissertations, term papers, theses, both undergraduate and postgraduate level, even research papers, even whole books. Anything you’re writing, anything that contains ideas you’ve collated from multiple sources and perhaps combined with your own ideas, episode is all about a smarter system you can use to help you with that research, idea collation and writing process.

So a few weeks back we welcomed Dr Sönke Ahrens to the show to introduce us to the fascinating Zettelkasten system for capturing and organising your notes. Really Zettelkasten being a kind of a whole end-to-end system for researching, brainstorming and ultimately producing great If the technique captured your attention, as it did mine, you may be wondering how to get started with it, how to put it into action. you’ve already experimented it and you’ve taken some steps, but you have a few questions, you’ve got a few ideas, you’ve got a few kind of corners you want to tighten up when it comes to your implementation of the principle. And to help us with the practical implementation side of things, as a follow-up to our previous episode with Sönke Ahrens, I’m very glad today to welcome the esteemed Bob You can listen to Sönke’s episode before or after and you enjoyed this one. You don’t have to go back and listen to Sönke’s before you would take on today’s episode. There’s enough context at the front of this episode with Bob that you can dive straight in on this one even if you haven’t caught the previous installment. But if you enjoy this and you want to find out more about Zettelkasten, you probably want to go back and have a look at the Zettelkasten introduction episode with Sönke as well. It’s more about the principles, the why, the history, and then today’s episode is okay, great, we’re on board, we’re excited for the potential of the idea, how do we actually put it into action, how do we execute?

There’s probably one better to help us with that question than today’s guest, Bob Doto. Bob has been using Zettelkasten in his own writing his life. He’s been a prolific writer all his life. And more recently, he’s done a huge amount to codify the methodology and start to teach it to others. Among many things, he is the author of a very popular book called, System for Writing, how an unconventional approach to note making can help you capture your ideas, think wildly, and write consistently. The book’s been really, really popular is widely regarded as the of the go-to primer for the actual, nuts and bolts, mechanics of putting Zettelkasten to work for you. So I’m excited to dive into some of his big ideas today. And he’s also the moderator for the Zettelkasten subreddit, the largest community for Zettelkasten enthusiasts around the world a subreddit that’s frequented and writers worldwide every single month.

One small administrative note on this episode, in recent months, some of you may have already noticed, we’ve been experimenting with putting out a proper video with me and my interviewee, actually on the camera, out on YouTube and that’s been getting a good reception. So we’re going to continue that as an option for people who like what they’re seeing and like to see who’s talking. A podcast of course is an inherently audio first medium so whether you’re listening to the podcast or whether you’re watching us on YouTube, it doesn’t really kind of make any difference to your experience. We are going to very slightly break that rule today. And at one point, Bob is going to screen share some actual examples of the technique he’s talking about in action. I thought this was quite a powerful way to bring to life some of the ideas he’s talking about so you can actually see.

I’m not going make a habit of doing this as part of my podcast episodes, but I did want to give us this one-off opportunity to, you know, particularly as we’re kind of relatively new on YouTube, to help perhaps encourage a few of you to come over to the YouTube channel and check us out there as well. So was happy to make an exception to include a little bit of visual content. It’s relatively brief. It’s about one or two minutes out of the entire episode. So it’s not a lot, but a nice little Easter egg for those of you who are actually watching video version, perhaps might be interested in checking us out over on YouTube by this episode in now or in future. So we’ll put a link to our YouTube channel in the show notes or you just search Exam Study Expert in YouTube. We should pop up. are at Exam Study Expert everywhere, including on YouTube. And so with that little bit of housekeeping out of the way, let’s dive right into today’s conversation.

And we’re going to kick straight off. For those of you who are still wondering, particularly if you didn’t listen to the episode with Sönke Ahrens as I mentioned, I started by asking Bob just exactly what Zettelkasten is exactly. Here’s Bob to explain.

[William Wadsworth] What is a Zettelkasten? What are we talking about?

[Bob Doto] It’s actually a great question because depending on who you ask, you’re going to get a variety of different granular and nuanced answers to this question. I do believe there is a core, at least a very basic definition that we can start with. And a Zettelkasten is essentially a note taking system comprised of a number of different kinds of notes that have different functions.

It is unique in that the structure of this note taking system is non-hierarchical. That’s very key to the Zettelkasten world. we who use a Zettelkasten are very proud and protective of that aspect of the, of the practice. And what I mean by that is that typically when you take a note or you

Take in information that you’re going to, that you want to you know, certainly the way I learned it is you store it in a category folder or topical, topical folder. You know, this is a note about ecology, so I’m going to put it in my ecology folder. A Zettelkasten as it was practiced and kind of introduced by a social scientist called Niklas Luhmann out of Germany. we don’t do that. Instead, we connect ideas across topics. So this idea may come in, I write it down or type it into my note taking platform and it may have to do with ecology, but it may also have to do with economics. It may also have to do with religion. ⁓ It may also have to do with farming, agriculture, immigration, to whatever extent you can make a case, you would connect this idea to other ideas that inform it.

As you can see, we’re already kind of like jumping into the kind of minutia of the practice, but it’s important because that non-hierarchical way of understanding information or at least organizing or disorganizing information is really key. But at its heart, it’s a note-taking practice allows you to do this, right? And we have, you can store it physically, like with physical note cards in kind of card catalogue form. Or you can use one of the many different digital platforms that allow you to link files back and forth. So that’s the basics. And then from there, we get into the weeds very quickly. But maybe that isn’t basic enough, you tell me.

[William Wadsworth] … the basics.

We will get into those weeds very shortly. I’m sure. I’m sure. well, that’s what we’re here to do. We love weeds. We love weeds. so you’ve been teaching Zettelkasten for a while now. I was just curious, by way of a bit of you know, what’s been your experience of using it, first of all, and then particularly in more recent years, you know, your kind of experience teaching others.

[Bob Doto] … hard not to.

[William Wadsworth] And, you know, I’m particularly interested in kind of the interest you might have had from people So maybe using the strategy for help with research projects or dissertations, that kind of thing. Yeah. How have those sorts of use cases found it from, you know, from the kind of teaching work you’ve been

[Bob Doto] Sure. I mean, I’ve been a writer since I was a kid. I started putting out my writing into the world when I was in my early teens. I used to play in bands and stuff out of New Jersey. And there was a very popular, a very vibrant zine culture. We call them zines. It’s like handmade magazines, basically. And ⁓ I was writing from early age, making those little magazines. My mom would photocopy them at her job, which was fascinating. I couldn’t believe you could do that.

And I would staple them and send them out. And I had been writing for so decades when I came across Zettelkasten and my system, I put it that in quotes, for writing was just something I never really thought about. just wrote and I figured out how to do it every time I did it, right? Almost like reinvented the wheel every time I went to write something. And when I came across Zettelkasten about six or seven years ago now, it really brought things into focus for me, brought the practice of writing into focus. On a very basic level, it gave me a place to store my ideas. So as ideas would come in for different projects, now had a place to put them. in the past, I would just kind of think, well, I’m writing about this. I’ll just type this quickly into this file, this note file, this manuscript I’m working on, or whatever the case may be, and then forget about it usually.

With Zettelkasten, it allows me to forget about it, but not feel stressed about that. ⁓ Because when you bring new ideas into the Zettelkasten, you’re relating them to other ideas. So they’re always findable and And it made it so that the ideas that I was coming across, either in books or in the world or just my own thoughts, they kind of had a context, right? So when I was talking before about this like, you know, so-called hypothetical ecology note, when I would have, I would have the idea, now I knew to write it down, so to capture the idea somewhere in a note. And it immediately gave me an opportunity to relate this idea to something else. And as a writer, that’s incredibly important, incredibly helpful, because it means you’re sort of automatically generating more ideas, you’re generating copy, the actual physical writing, but you’re just starting to see your ideas come to fruition because they’re starting to relate to other ideas, which is what writing is essentially, right? You’re bringing ideas, sometimes disparate, sometimes complimentary, into a single place and trying to work out a way to make sense of this. And Zettelkasten really helped me do that. I…

I studied creative writing, both in undergrad and in graduate school. So poetry mainly, but also different forms of kind of more experimental writing and the Zettelkasten in its like kind of nebulous, networky kind of way really, really leans into that or can help a writer lean into that. But when I teach it, I’m not just teaching weird punk rock creative writers, you know, I’m teaching other kinds of people, academics who can also be weird punk rock creative writers, but maybe people aren’t interested in experimental writing or seeing how three very disparate ideas connect. Maybe they have a particular project they’re working on there and if they’re doing their PhD or in graduate school, that’s almost always the case. In fact, it is the case. That’s the point, So for them, I talk about Zettelkasten, in a few different ways. And for them, I often have to talk more about project-based writing, right? So as ideas come in, yes, you want to see how they relate in these ways you didn’t expect, but you’ve got a project you’re working on that may be a one-year project. It may be if you’re younger, just to get to the end of the term, maybe a shorter paper or even exam. And if you’re doing PhD work, then of course we’re talking years, right? And so with a Zettelkasten for them, yes, we’re bringing ideas into this kind of network-y space, but we’re also finding ways to really build on our ideas with a very specific trajectory going forward.

[William Wadsworth] really, really of feedback have you had from people using a Zettelkasten in academia? How have they found it? Have they liked it? What’s it kind of been able to unlock for them? What are some of the response you’ve had from people who’ve adopted it?

[Bob Doto] The response I get across the board is that it’s somewhat counterintuitive. There’s a bit of a learning curve or really an unlearning curve, which has to do with this, you know, bottom up. We call it bottom up versus top down organization, right? So the top down again, going back to what I’ve said earlier, that this kind of category thinking, here’s an idea about this, it belongs in this category. And then we, so we try to teach and emphasize this idea of bottom up. So, connecting ideas at the level of the idea, right? An idea can speak to many different topics. That’s a learning curve or an unlearning curve that ⁓ goes across academic, non-academic, poetry, whatever. Some understand that or take to that more quickly than others. But with academics, know, writing, I emphasize writing because academics are almost always required to produce something in writing form. Writing is inevitably top down. At some point you are, you have a topic you want to write about it. You need to find ideas that fit that topic. So with Zettelkasten and with academics, I have to teach both, right? I have to introduce them to what’s called the main compartment of the Zettelkasten, which is where all these single idea notes find themselves. It’s where they’re networked, it’s where all your kind of connections are making, regardless of the projects you’re working on. But then I have to show how that works with the more top-down approach, which is here’s the topic I want to explore.

Here’s the notes I have on that topic in this main compartment. I’m going to bring them over here into this new file or this new document or wherever you’re working. And then we start talking about structuring our ideas, structuring our arguments, structuring our building concepts, et cetera. So with academics who have a very typically clear agenda of what they need to do, we need to work with this very unique note-taking system in a specific way that helps them, right? And that means focusing on outlines and development of ideas and ⁓ structuring of ideas. They can do it. just, you know, it takes a minute to get all those points across.

[William Wadsworth] Yeah, yeah. I’m curious, you use the term unlearning quite quite specifically there. So what are some of the things that we’re, I mean, you hinted at it, but I’m just curious, what are some of the big things that we’re trying to unlearn, like habits we’re trying to break? Why do you choose that term?

[Bob Doto] Yeah, I mean, I use it and I talk about it because it’s very strong, you know, with a lot of people. And it was certainly strong for me. When I first read Sönke’s book, who you interviewed recently, which is kind of the gateway for many people with Zettelkasten is coming to his book, How to Take Smart Notes. If you look inside that book, you’ll see in the margins, but where do the notes go? So there’s no folders. Like there’s all these questions like where, what’s happening? What is this? You know?

[William Wadsworth] Yeah.

[Bob Doto] to his credit, I, and I, I have found that a lot of people, certainly at the very beginning, ⁓ have that experience. So you’re, you’re kind of unlearning this idea of where do things go? You know, ⁓ I see this question. So I run or moderate a Zettelkasten sub Reddit. That’s something like 33,000 people at this point. It’s large.

You see same questions come up time and time again. And one of them is where do things go? You know, what, where should I put this note kind of thing? What should this note connect to? And they’re inevitably asking about what topic they’re, they come, they say, I have this note. It speaks to so many different topics. Which one should I put it under? And then we all come in, we rush into the comments and say, don’t right. You want to.

Let the, don’t put the note in a folder. That’s a topic. Put the note in the main compartment and connect it to where you think it would inform other ideas it would inform. And then from there, you, you start pulling and working with those connections to develop something more presentable, so to speak, right. Something more structured for yourself or for your readers. but yeah, that unlearning it’s, it’s very knee jerk to, for a lot of people to want to create a lot of folders that have a lot of topics. Start with the academic disciplines or something like that and start collecting ideas and putting them in there rather than connecting them at this more beneath level.

[William Wadsworth] Well, I wonder if we could maybe just walk through the journey almost step by step. And I know the steps is not necessarily linear and there’s kind of backflow and feedback loops and I’m sure we can mention that. know, looking at the way you kind of set out your excellent primer on kind of putting Zettelkasten into action, you sort of talk about the process of sort of start with the fleeting notes, transfer to main notes, then ideas, high level views and then finally the writing. Can you maybe just give us an overview of the steps in that process and then maybe we can start to get into some of the detail in specific steps. But maybe if we just start with that overview.

[Bob Doto] Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, the broad strokes may even sound similar to any other note taking system. You have an idea, you write it down, right? You have an idea, you write it down so you don’t forget it. That’s the so-called fleeting note. ⁓ You’re doing something and an idea comes to mind that you don’t want to forget, you write it down somewhere. The difference between working with a Zettelkasten and really any personal knowledge management system, but Zettelkast in particular. The difference is that we don’t stop there. In the past, I would have written that down. It would have gone on the counter somewhere in a folder, who knows where it would have gone. And then hopefully I stumbled upon it. This is, know, if you carry a notebook around, which I did for years and still do to some degree, I’ve shelves of them. It’s all just thoughts. You know, I have this thought, have this thought, and hopefully I stumble upon it.

With a Zettelkasten we say, that’s not the end of that note’s lifespan. We’re going to take that fleeting note, take the idea in that fleeting note more so, and put it into something that’s a different container, what I call a main note. Some people just call it a zettel. This is a note that is now going to be integrated into the network of the system. That note will have often, you know, it’s really user’s choice. But for the most part, you’re going to see a title. You’re going to see the body of the note, which is kind of the main idea. You’ll see a link to something else, right? So it’s saying, hey, check out this other note. You’ll give a reason why. So you’ll say, this idea relates to this for this reason. And you’ll put, if you’re using the digital platform, you will put the link to that other note, there, that other idea there. So it’s clickable. You open this note and there’s links to other notes telling you why you might want to look at them. In a physical Zettelkasten, which a lot of people are fond of, you’re using note cards. I have a bunch here, but I have something balancing on them right now. But there are note cards, index cards. And you would just write. your notes with a physical Zettelkasten, you would have to have some sort of alphanumeric identification and you would refer to it and say, Hey, check out this other note on. the flow is you have ideas, you take them, you write them down and then you go back, you bring them into your main note compartment. So you make the note a little more presentable and a little more usable. And from there, you pull those notes as you need, or as your interests heightened, you pull those notes into some other area to work on them to explore the connections a little more deeply to start your rough draft of your writing. That’s one workflow. The other workflow is very similar, only it starts with media. So what Sönke refers to as a literature note, what I call a reference note, but they’re basically notes you take while engaging with some form of media. So whereas before it’s just kind of an idea you have as you’re walking the dog, the literature note or the reference note is a note you take while, for our purposes, engaging in reading. You’re reading a book, and as you read, you say, page 21, the author talks about this. This is interesting to me for this reason. Page 24, this. Page 36, this. And you’re kind of creating a little personal index. Just like with the fleeting note, we don’t leave it as that. We would then go back to this reference or literature note and say, you know what?

These four ideas are still really interesting to me, I’m going to turn those, each of those into their own main note. And then we start that process, the networking, the linking, as ideas and connections start to get more interesting to us, I often say they have legs they want to move, or they want to be written about, and we take them into some other document and start writing or exploring the connections more deeply.

[William Wadsworth] That’s So the first process is either capturing these fleeting notes, as we call them. So that might be just an idea while walking the dog, as you were saying, a thought related to your project. we combine that with the reference notes or the media notes, the things that we’ve been making a note of as we’re engaging with other people’s work, you know, in an academic context, especially doing reading, you know, books, articles, papers, et cetera. One of the little details that I quite liked about the kind of the way you teach, you talk about the intray is almost like this kind of staging ground between the fleeting notes and the literature notes, the things that you’re capturing, your ideas, and from what you’ve been reading, and then it kind of goes into the intray, and that kind of helps you, stay on top of that transfer from the kind of notes as you’re capturing them from your ideas and your reading and kind of bridges that gap between writing those up a little bit more formally maybe as the main notes. Maybe just talk to us a little bit about the role of the in-trait and how that works.

[Bob Doto] So in the book I call it an inbox, which I’m assuming is the same as your in tray. No, that’s fine. Is that the term in England, in tray?

[William Wadsworth] Inbox, sorry. Well, we talk about an in-tray for, I guess the reason I’d got confused in my head between the terms is I’d get, think of an inbox in my, I have an inbox in my computer for my emails. I have a physical in-tray behind me for bits of paper coming in. So I suppose if we’re in a paper Zettelkasten ⁓ framework, I’d kind of probably naturally just sprung to thinking of in-trays rather than in-boxes, but similar kind of idea, I’m sure. All means the same thing.

[Bob Doto] Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. They they all terms work here. It sounds like, yeah. Intra inbox. We’re looking like this is particular. The inbox or the intray is, is particular to fleeting notes. And that’s because fleeting notes are just notes. There are notes you’ve been taking.

As I described in the book, the notes you’ve been taking your entire life before you had any interest in Zettelkasten walk the dog, turn off the lights. ⁓ surveillance capitalism is a problem, you know, any level of thinking, right? That you just need to capture because you want to remember it is considered a fleeting note. Only those fleeting notes that are ideas useful for your thinking useful for your writing useful for whatever writing project you’re working on your academics, whatever the case may be only those make it across the threshold, so to speak, and into the Zettelkasten. And an inbox is just ⁓ basically a staging ground, a place or a waiting room. Some people refer to it for triage. I hear these terms now and again, waiting room for triage, where you triage your notes. go through your, notes you’ve been capturing throughout the day or the week, whenever you get to them and say, okay, what if these are useful for my Zettelkasten? What if these have I, were tasks maybe that I did already and don’t need to be here anymore?

And you kind of just make decisions, right? You make decisions on the fly where you just look at these notes and say, well, this is useful. This could be useful for this writing, or this is, this reminds me of this other note I already have. And you bring them into the Zettelkasten as main notes, right? You transform them into something more useful. With a literature note, this is a little different. Literature notes live in your Zettelkasten.

I call them or refer them often as personal indexes of the books you read. So where you’re the books you read have an index in the back that’s created by the publisher or the author. There’s also your own index, you know, the things that are particular to you that may be found in the index and may not be found in the index. Regardless, these are the things that were interesting to you as you were reading, reading the book. And we tend to keep those in their own compartment, a literature note or a reference note compartment. Some people call them a bibliographic note, whatever your title, it’s the same thing. And you keep them there and it’s a reference back to what you read and what you found interesting. My reference notes tend to have all the ideas that I found interesting and then a link to the notes that they became. Right, so each of those ideas as I get to them turns into its own main note and I put a link there so I can find it quite easily.

[William Wadsworth] So we’ve sort of explored a little bit, you know, capturing those ideas, the fleeting notes, the intro. You’re talking there about, you know, all reference notes go straight into your Zettelkasten. Just give us a little bit more colour maybe. So we’re going through our reading. We’re going through our reading. What are the sorts of things we’re capturing? What are the sorts of things we’re writing down? There’s a really interesting bit in your book you talk about like, ⁓ you know, how you might use a margin and how you might be used to kind of not shutting things in margins and … and how that can kind of interplay with the new ideas in Zettelkast. And yeah, just talk to us, if we’re engaging with a book, like what are some of the nuts and bolts of kind of what we might be writing, how we might be writing it?

[Bob Doto] Yeah, there’s a few ways. mean, people engage with books. it’s a very personal thing. I’ll say for me, I really like to read hard copy and I really like to write my books. read with a pen in hand. So I’m often creating marginalia notes in the margins, underlining things, circling, drawing arrows, the whole bit. ⁓ for other people, they just go right to a literature note. They have a piece of paper or their computer open while they’re reading. And as things they come across seem interesting, they’ll kind of go right there. But for me, I like to start with marginalia. So I’m reading. This is what I like talking about because there is a difference here between the academic approach or the academic context for Zettelkasten and me, right? I get to write about kind of whatever I want at this point. I’m out of school.

So I have a little more freedom maybe when it comes to reading. I’m reading a book. It may be very important for a book I’m working on or an article I’m working on. But as I’m doing that, I’m also underlining lots of things, things that just strike my interest. As I do that, or after I do that, I’ll go back and say, let me pull this into a literature note or a reference note. So I go to page 22, first I bring up my Literature note, whether it’s paper or digital. I say page 22, the author said this, this reminds me of this. And just like I said before, and I just kind of start, how would you say it? Like transcribing essentially, I’m transcribing my marginalia into a literature note. What that does is it allows me to have something very convenient to come back to.

 So when I come back to how to take smart notes or I’m looking at books on my shelf right now, biblical literalism, you know, by, by John Shelby Spong, whatever the case may be. If I have a literature note for that, I can pull it out or pull it up on my computer and just see everything that caught my attention. And for what reason now for someone who’s kind of, if you’re getting your PhD and I know a lot of people who have either had their gotten their PhD or unfortunately in the midst of it, as they would describe it finding it very stressful. I’m thinking of a few people off the top of my head right now. You know, they’re reading other stuff, but they’re reading other stuff kind of as like a palate cleanser. You know, they, they’re kind of in the grind of their research. And when that’s the case, they’re really kind of project focused. They’re reading lots and lots of literature for very specific reasons. But the process ultimately is the same, right? They underline, they do whatever mechanisms they’ve been taught or they developed on their own to highlight or make note of things in books. And if they were to use a Zettelkasten, which the people I’m thinking of don’t, I would instruct them to then bring that information into a literature note so it’s very retrievable. Right? So you have it’s high accessibility when you when you use a literature note. And then from there, down the down the line, just like we’ve been talking about over time, bringing those notes into your main note compartment.

[William Wadsworth] Can you give us any examples of what’s a good, not even a good, what a sort of main note might look like? So, you know, in terms of what kind of goes into like what it would look like when it’s there. So we could have got a bit of a picture of what the end product, well, not the end product, but the kind of the main body of your notes system might be comprised of, so to speak.

[Bob Doto] Absolutely. Absolutely, Okay, I’m going to share my screen. So can you see this note essentially is what it is here? Systems should work for you and not against you.

Yeah, this is essentially a main note. ⁓ it made it is a main note. It has a title systems should work for you and not against you. So this, this idea comes from, in fact, it comes from Sönke Ahrens, or at least it’s a take on something Sönke Ahrens was writing about in his book. ⁓ and what you see here, you have the title at the top, you have the

The main idea here, you have a couple of tags, which are useful or not useful. It really depends if you like using tags. ⁓ There’s a quote, so where this note, what inspired the idea that I have there. And then you have a link back to something else, and you have a link out to something else. So the link here refers back to another note, so a note that came before this one.

And down here is another note that sort of takes this idea and brings it into a different context. So when I took this idea or when I came across this idea from Sönke Ahrens I had an idea, had a thought. I related it to something that was sort of immediate, top of mind.

And then I gave it another pass and thought, does this relate to something else? And there’s a link here to another note that has to do with writing. So it’s taking this idea from Sönke Ahrens and referring to something else, essentially.

[William Wadsworth] How important is this this element of linkage then? It seems like quite a key part of the whole system.

[Bob Doto] link it. It is literally the system in a way. is, is, linking is a digital mechanism. Connectivity is really what we’re looking for, or relationships. So Niklas Luhmann talks about the idea that the value of an idea comes not from the idea itself, but comes from its relationship to other ideas. That’s where we determine the value of an idea. We … we determine the value of an idea by the context we put it in. The example I always use is thou shall not kill, right? You hear this, you probably have a sense of where it comes from, but if all you had was just that statement, thou shall not kill, that’s fine, right? Until you leave the house and you go to the restaurant and you sit down to order something and maybe you’re not a vegetarian and you think, well, I’m going to order a burger. I didn’t kill it.

But am I participating in that? Is that something I need to think about? Well, sort of I am, but I’m not. So where does thou shall not kill? How does it function here? Almost immediately, any idea, no matter how great it is, it needs other ideas to work with. It needs context. It needs situations. And with a Zettelkasten, that’s kind of the whole thing, right? We bring an idea in and we say,

How does this idea, what’s the value of this idea in this context? So the note I showed just a few moments ago about systems should support you rather than work against you. That’s great, sure, that makes sense. I understand kind of what that means, but it needs more. So then I relate it to another idea that’s kind of in the same vein. And all of a sudden that idea about systems should support you starts to build out. I start to get a better understanding of what.

What that context or the value of that context, but it’s not the only context that that idea can be used. So I link to something else and I say, this idea could also inform this whole other train of thought. And now the value shifts. So that’s, you know, if you never wrote a single thing, if you used a Zettelkasten, but never wrote a single thing, the linking and the connections are what hold it all together.

It’s the basis, it’s the whole reason why we don’t, what’s sometimes called silo information into their topics. We want this cross-pollination.

[William Wadsworth] Yeah, and that’s so often where interesting juice and insight comes from, isn’t it? That cross-pollination effect. So I wonder if there’s a way to maybe just give us a flavour of the… We’ve maybe got a sense of kind of capturing these notes, capturing the kind of inflow in the first place. We’ve had a little bit of flavour of organising, and I’m conscious there’s a whole load of detail we might get into on organising and linking strategy, which may not make for the best podcast content in the world, I don’t know, maybe there is something we should talk about. I’m always conscious to draw the, to get the balance right between sort of being accessible and useful. ⁓ But I’m certainly interested in hearing more about the end game. So when we come to set pen to paper or finger to keyboard, ⁓ as is increasingly the case of us today, and we’ve opened up that blank word document or wordpress or whatever your choice.

How do we take what we’ve been working so hard to capture and organise in our Zettelkasten and use that ultimately to produce interesting writing?

[Bob Doto] All right. Well, one of the great things about Zettelkasten, and again, this goes for other note taking systems as well that kind of maybe were built off of this or have Zettelkasten in back of mind, is that you never have to start with a blank page. If nothing else for writers, especially, is, that’s all you like. That’s the whole thing. If you can find a system where you don’t start with a blank page that is highly coveted.

[William Wadsworth] Yeah.

[Bob Doto] And Zettelkasten and other personal knowledge management systems, ⁓ that’s one of their major strong suits, right? So you have this cache, this network, this archive of information that’s already been linking. You’ve been pulling in notes. Maybe you haven’t even thought of the project you’re working on and all along you’ve been pulling in notes saying, you know what? It reminds me this. I’m going to establish this connection. I’m going to statewide. And then you forget about it. You close your Zettelkasten and go about your day. And then next day you do more and … you just sort of building it out and at some point you say, you know what, there’s, I’ve collected a lot of notes that are kind of dealing with this one topic or this one area of study that I’m interested in. Let’s see what I have. And you pull those notes out. If it’s physical, you like physically pull them out and then you’ll rewrite them somewhere else. Just as you would with any other paper, right? You take notes somehow, right? Everyone’s taking some form of notes, whether it’s just marginalia or just on note cards and not doing any linking.

But at some point you gather what you have and you look and see, do I got here? What do I have? What do I need? And with the Zettelkasten, it’s really no different. The only difference is that we’ve already been establishing relationships between the ideas by the time we start to write. So when I pull the ideas into a new writing document, some of those relationships are there. I just need to now get into them more explicitly. I’ll give you another visual example so you can sort of see here.

So this is a very short literature note, again, what I call a reference note. The book title is You Are What You Read, A Practical Guide to Reading Well. I found one idea that I wanted to really save from this book.

I captured the quote here. You can see the page number. So before I describe, there’s a page number, there’s links out. Here’s the page number. It came from page 16. This is a definition that DiYanni gives for deconstructivism or the deconstructive criticism or deconstruction as we call it. So there’s a quote here. There’s relevance. have a column I often list as relevance or connection or something like that. And it just gives me a quick sense of like, why, why did I even capture this?

And then there’s the note that it became. So when I hover over it, you can actually see that note. If I were to click on it, this is another main note. So very similar to what I showed before. You have your title. You have your main idea, which in this case is the title. There was nothing more I needed to say about it in this case. So I titled it the main idea it was. Here’s the quote.

Here’s a link to another note that it relates to. And I give, you can see in this white text here, is context. Why am I establishing this relationship? When I have enough of these, I create either a right, I go right towards writing. I am a writer. I’m always writing. So I often jump right into the rough draft of writing. Or I create something called a structure note. So a structure note looks very much or can and often does look very much like a rough draft of an article or a rough draft of an outline for something larger. The SN here just means structure note, so it’s just telling me that’s what this note is. Meaning is derived from context. So I’ve been talking a lot about context. Context is a big part of the research I, the topic that I research quite often is context and relevance because.

I deal with ideas and I want to help people understand why some ideas are more relevant than others. So I write and think a lot about context. So this is a ⁓ structure note on context. if I scroll through it, you’ll see this blue type here. This blue type is links to other notes in my Zettelkasten. And so if I clicked on this, it would take me back to the main note that I was referring to just a moment ago, or a main note.

Here’s another one here. There’s another one here. There’s another one here. Here. And you can see all these blue links are just links to main notes. So what I’ve done is essentially bring these links into this document. And then I open them up. I start unpacking them. OK, what’s the idea in this note? What’s the quote that made the idea, gave me the idea? And I start writing about adding copy, the connections. What’s really going on here? What am I actually trying to say? Yes, these connections are interesting, but are they interesting to anyone else? Do I need to give history? Do I need to give examples that the reader would help the reader better understand? Another example, structure note for Louise Rosenblatt. She’s a ⁓ reader response theorist. She actually is part of transactional theorists, if anyone’s interested in those sort of things.

She has these ideas about afferent and aesthetic reading. Structure note, there’s some subheadings here. There’s notes, links to notes. You can see the white text is me talking about how these ideas relate to one another. And basically, I’m just building out or establishing or deepening my understanding of the ways in which these ideas relate. Over time, if I wanted to write about this,

I would do that, right? I would simply start taking this copy, this text matter, and build it into something that looks a lot more like writing. Here’s another structure note. Here’s a structure note where I haven’t done any of the sort of establishing of relationships in more detail yet, right? So this is a structure note. This is a structure note. This is a structure note that I’ve had an opportunity to kind of expand on the connections.

This is a structure note where all I did was bring the ideas in, sort of organize them how I think they would go together, but I’ve done nothing else. So this is still in somewhat of an infancy. Taken over here, you’ve seen a zillion of these, I’m sure. These are just writing drafts. So it doesn’t look much different than a structure note, only far fewer links. The links are now gone.

The quotes are there maybe because I want to show the direct quote or want to represent the direct quote from the author I’m writing about. And it’s an article, or it’s the beginnings of an article. Another one, similar, right? You can see they’re sort of taking the form of, or the form of the article is built off of what the structure note looks like, right? In the structure note, I start to organize things according to subheadings. And in the final product,

I do that even more so, but make it a little more clear. So if I had to just describe it, the whole flow, ideas come to mind, fleeting note, put them into main notes. Ideas while I’m reading, capture them in a reference note, transfer them or transcribe them into a main note. As ideas start to, connections start to build up.

[William Wadsworth] was a really nice example.

[Bob Doto] Take those connections, bring them into a structure note, start to organize them, start to unpack them, get into it. That can take days, months, years. You know, I have structure notes in here that are years old, right? I just started and never finished them, whatever. Start working on them and then being a writer, I’m going to eventually turn that into writing someday. So then I start taking those links out, just leaving the copy and creating something that’s like an object, right? I fully believe the writing reproduces an object.

It has aesthetic qualities. This has intellectual qualities. I create the object, right? It’s where the artistry comes in and then you’re done. And then rinse and repeat over and over again for the rest of your life.

[William Wadsworth] Well hopefully not too many over and overs if it’s a PhD thesis. Once in a lifetime is probably enough.

[Bob Doto] yeah, if it’s PhD, just do it once. Yeah, once and get out.

[William Wadsworth] Those are really nice examples and it really illustrates what you were talking about earlier. You know, you’re not starting with that blank page. You know, you’ve got some really foundation stones to kind of drop into place. And then you can kind of flesh out the context and the links and the examples, et cetera, in between and around that to turn it into something that’s going to kind of flow really nicely. Yeah, amazing. Is there anything that you feel would be, you know, from all the things that people ask you, you know, over the years, like, is there anything you feel would be particularly helpful to mention that we kind of haven’t covered already? I mean, I know there’s a tonne detail around all of this, but is there anything that particularly sticks out in your head as being an important kind of point that you think people might benefit from hearing that we haven’t touched on yet?

[Bob Doto] I can, and it’s more of a meta right statement, which is the Zettelkasten can often be presented and it can sometimes look very complicated. There’s all these different notes and they go here and they go there. And there is some truth to that, but in reality, it’s actually a quite simple, almost minimalist system. I’m using that term very loosely. Once you have a sense of how these notes function. You never think about that again. Or you don’t have, I think about it all the time because I have to teach people, but it really becomes second nature, right? Fleeting notes. There’s nothing special. They’re just the same notes you’ve always take. The only thing different is that we just turn them into these main notes. And when you’re ready to write or when ideas, you know, you’re kind of pouring out of your brain and your ears, you’re just like, have to express this or I have to unpack these relationships. You pull from it.

Just as you would any other matter, any other material, textual material. So for people who are watching this or people who hearing about Zettelkasten and they’re seeing fleeting notes, reference notes, structure notes, hub notes, indexes, it’s not as ⁓ complex as it sometimes comes across. It’s actually quite simple and quite natural feeling. The stages that I … sort of laid out for you, they’re really quite natural, right? You have an idea, you capture it, you put it somewhere, you make relationships and you write about them, Or you think and write about them. No different. It just gives a bit of form to something we’re already doing, right? We’re already doing that, especially if you’re in academia or especially if you’re a writer or someone who just loves thinking and working out problems. You’re already doing this. A Zettelkasten gives it some shape.

[William Wadsworth] Yeah, yeah, no, it’s a really nice comment. Thank you. And as I said towards the end of recording this a few weeks after I had a conversation with Sönke you mentioned his work a couple of times. You know, for me personally, I’m still really fascinated with the idea of this system. haven’t dived into it yet, partly because my time for research and writing has been quite limited the last few weeks. But as I do, I’m really excited to give it a well. think it should be … can exactly see how it works, I can see the benefits people get from it and you know I’d love to love to love to get started so I’m keen to give it a go and dear listener I will report back on how I get on with it in due course. For now though …

[Bob Doto] I will say I will help you. I’m giving my accountability on record. If you have questions when you’re starting, I would be happy to sit with you and just go through it and get you started.

[William Wadsworth] Very kind, or I’ll pop up in the subreddit and be your next question asker. Yeah, some of those questions are like, whoa, that’s a pretty high level. Look at the kind of standard of questions people are asking and you’re yeah, blimey right. I’m very much beginner Well, thank you so much for today, boy. It’s been such a pleasure to chat and I hope it’s been helpful to people listening. I’m sure many of us will have got.

[Bob Doto] Into the lion’s den. We take those two.

[William Wadsworth] got a lot out of it. So thank you once again. If we’re inspired to learn more, kind of curious to find tell us where we can learn a little bit more about you, your work, subreddit, you know, where would you signpost people to look next?

[Bob Doto] Sure. would suggest you look here. This is the book I wrote. It’s called A System for Writing. The reason I bring that up, not just to promote it, is that I wrote it for people who really want to know what to do. I see so many repeat questions and for years I saw so many repeat questions with so many different answers and things that were misleading. And I really, really wanted to just give some … give people a book that they can say, this is where you can start. Where you take it is completely up to you. so if you’re interested in Zettelkasten, I recommend the book. It’s the book I wish I had when, when I was starting out in addition to Sönke’s book. if you want to learn more about my teaching, I do have a website as everyone should apparently these days, it’s bob.doto.computer. that is my website. I am of course on the, Zettelkasten sub Reddit, which is r/Zettelkasten on Reddit. am there more, more hours than I wish to admit on this podcast. I’m full time job. and I lurk, I lurk. I love, I absolutely love this topic. I love talking about it. and people can email me.

You know, my information’s out there. You can contact me through the website. If you have a question, I can point you in hopefully a useful direction.

[William Wadsworth] Amazing. Well thank you so much and yeah I’ve really been enjoying the book. It’s really well put together, really well structured so I’d add my endorsement to that too. We’ll put all those links in the show notes for people as always so you can follow up as you wish and I just wanted to say once again thank you so much once again for joining us today and we look forward to catching up soon.

[Bob Doto] Same. Thanks for having me.

[William Wadsworth] I hope you enjoyed today’s episode. Thanks again to the brilliant Bob Doto for breaking that down for us. And if you’re going to try Zettelkasten, I would definitely recommend grabbing yourself a copy of Bob’s book, as he mentioned. Perhaps also take a copy of Sönke Ahren’s How to Take Smart Notes as well. Both really excellent books and often recommended together. If you’re only going to get one out of the two, then I would be remiss not to recommend Bob’s after today’s episode, particularly on the kind of the practical side, but many people take a copy of both and really helpful works to keep on your desk as a reference as you’re getting started. We’ll put the link to both of those books down in the show notes for you today. Let me wrap up today with a little suggestion, a bit of signposting to further listening you may be interested in, particularly if you’ve enjoyed today’s episode.

So my recommendations today are particularly aimed at anyone that is involved in an academic research or writing project of some form, particularly if you’ve only found the podcast relatively recently, perhaps through Bob’s or Sönke’s episode, I know some members of the global Zettelkastlen community have found us recently through these episodes. A very warm welcome to you, it’s great to have you here. If you are, as I say, involved in academic research or doing a big piece of academic writing of some kind,

We do a lot of content on exam prep as part of the podcast, but we have covered a fair bit on academic writing and research over the years as well. You might in particular like to check out the following episodes. I’m going to signpost these now. I’ll also put the links in the show notes for you. So episode 165, we met Jorge Orango, who was talking about his book, Building Your Note-Making System.

Jorge is another very well-known voice in the world of note making and he offers some kind of different perspectives on how to think about note making, capturing your notes, organizing your ideas. A lot of it is quite comparable ⁓ even compatible with some of the Zettelkasten framework too. So that could be another really interesting episode on note making. Episode 191, stop procrastinating and finish your dissertation slash essay with Dr. Alison Miller.

For those of you that don’t know Alison, she runs the academic writers space, a really amazing community for academic writers of all kinds around the world, focused around co-working sessions, an amazing community. She’s not sponsoring or anything, I just think she does amazing work. And she gave a brilliant episode as well. She absolutely tore the force when it comes to the mindset challenges that so often accompany progressing big bits of academic writing. A really practical episode for helping you make progress when you feel the doubt or the overwhelm or the de-virtuation or the procrastination setting in. A really great episode that was. Episode 192 followed it. That was on academic writing or an academic writing masterclass. So, you know, we got our head in the right place to engage with the work, to make meaningful contact with the work, as Dr. Allison so beautifully puts it. Episode 192 that followed it is about the nuts and bolts of actually doing really good academic writing. To make it  better quality, to be able to produce it faster and to be clearer in getting your points across. This is with Dr Alix Hibble. Dr Alix is  our very own in-house academic writing coach here at Exam Study Expert and she offers one-on-one support with students who come to us wanting a little support, a little guidance with academic writing at both undergraduate and also postgraduate level.

I help with the exam prep, so if you want to talk about your study strategy and how to prepare for exams, how to do a lot of learning memorization, I’m the lead coach for that. I’m the only coach for that, it’s me. But the writing piece is not my expertise, which is why Alix is so brilliant, and she helps students with that side of things. Sometimes people have both a bit of writing to do and an exam, in which case they might see both me and Alix. Other times they might just be focusing on the writing and they’ll talk to Alix.

And Alix, her work for Exam Study Expert is a side gig for her. It’s not her day job. Her day job is actually Director of Studies at Oxford University, where she teaches this stuff for a living to students at one of the world’s top universities. So we’re very lucky to have her and her expertise on the team. If you are interested in finding out more about the service she offers and how a little bit of one-on-one help with your writing process breaking down the question, how to really kind of be bold and original in your ideas, how to streamline the whole process. ⁓ If you’d be interested in kind of a conversation with her about that, the link to find out more is examstudyexpert.com forward slash writing. I’ll pop that in the show notes as well.

And then finally, as we’ve signposted a couple of times already in this episode, we also spoke to Dr. Sönke Ahrens, a very appropriate follow-up episode for this one. Really, Sönke’s kind of regarded more than anyone else is kind of the person that kind of really got the word about Zettelkasten out there. know, many, many people have read his book, this is the seminal book on how to take smart notes. And he gave a really nice introduction to the technique back in episode 199, the logic behind it, the history, the benefits and so much more. So as I said in the introduction, that could be a really good compliment to this episode.

And so we’ll put all of the links to those episodes and I’ll put a few more as well related to kind of PhD top tips and a couple of other little goodies as well. So it’s a nice little playlist of things that you’ll find interesting, I think, if you’ve got value from today’s episode. So check all those out in the show notes. And with that, I wanted to say thank you so much for tuning in today, whether you’re a long time listener or whether you’re relatively new to joining us. It’s been such a pleasure to have your company.

I hope you found it helpful and I will look forward to seeing you again next week when we will continue our mini-series that I’m doing at the moment, a trio of bite-sized tips, installment number two coming up next week, all about how to accelerate your studying and actually get your work done faster. So three little tips over three installments, installment number two on its way to you next week. And it’s going to be a good one, very useful one. I will look forward to seeing you then for that. For now, wishing you every success as always in your studies.