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

Hello and welcome to the Exam Study Expert podcast. Today I want to introduce you to what I think for many of you might be a relatively new academic technique, really a whole system if we apply it as suggested, and that is the Zettelkasten note-making method.

This episode follows in something of an annual tradition for us of thinking about our note making practices. Longer time listeners may remember last September, we met Jorge Arango back in episode 165 talking about digital note making methods. So continuing with that today and exploring other schools of thought when it comes to note making, I think few are as interesting and deeply thought out as the Zettelkasten method, which we’ll learn about today.

I consider this a relatively advanced topic. It’s quite a sophisticated methodology, but also very powerful, a very powerful way to organise your ideas, particularly when your goal is perhaps less about learning for an exam and memorising a lot of information, but rather you’re looking to organise your ideas when you’re reading and learning and researching with the final goal of perhaps producing a big piece of extended writing.

So for a younger learner, this could be an interesting technique to experiment with  for perhaps a more substantial coursework or homework assignment or essay. Maybe you’re drafting a college essay or application or perhaps you’re writing an extended project of some kind, for example, like the EPQ, Extended Project Qualification, we sometimes do here in the UK. And I’d say the technique perhaps comes into its own when we’re looking at its application to more advanced academic contexts, especially the undergraduate essays and dissertations, and beyond that the thesis, even the research paper, even the book that might come beyond that in your academic future. The idea in a nutshell involves collecting your ideas, each individual idea goes on an individual piece of paper, an individual piece, a slip of paper.

And then we want to look to kind of connect the dots, draw those links between those individual ideas represented on those individual bits of paper. The word zettel in German means slip, as in slip of paper. And the original Zettelkasten method was popularised by a remarkably productive German sociologist called Niklas Luhmann, which we’ll learn more about today. And he kept his note slips in order in a box, a slip box, a Zettelkasten, that’s what the word means. Zettelkasten means slip box in German. We don’t have to use the old school paper implementation of it in the modern times. Many people implement their Zettelkasten through digital note making methods such as the Obsidian note making tool. Now, there are many benefits to organizing your ideas using the Zettelkasten method. We’ll be exploring those as part of today’s conversation.

We can benefit our productivity, so get things done more quickly, more efficiently, overcome procrastination, be more time efficient. Our depth of thinking, our creativity, our ability to draw links and generate insights can sometimes improve. And also the quality of our writing that results at the end of the process can often go up. So my guest to help us explore the Zettelkasten method is Dr. Sönke Ahrens who is perhaps the best known advocate and educator in the world on the Zettelkasten method.

Sönke is a writer and researcher in education and social sciences and having had considerable success using the Zettelkasten method himself has now set out to teach it more widely and has become quite well known in doing so. He works out of Germany but is in demand all around the world as a speaker and a coach teaching the Zettelkasten method. And his book, How to Take Smart Notes, has sold over 100,000 copies in numerous languages, including English, the English translation, as well as in his home country language of German. So we’re going to get quite practical today in terms of how to actually apply and implement the technique, but we’re going to start with my kind of opening questions to Sönke in a moment by just understanding a little bit more about who the technique is for and what it promises and some of the successes that people have with the technique so that you can evaluate for yourself whether it’s something you might like to experiment with and then we’ll get into some of the practical details of how we actually do it and put it into practice. So without further ado, let’s welcome Sönke to the podcast to tell us more. Sönke, a very warm welcome to the Exam Study Expert podcast.

[Sönke Ahrens] Thank you for having me.

[William Wadsworth] I wonder if you might just start with a brief introduction to who you are and in particular your interest in the Zettelkasten method.

[Sönke Ahrens] Sure, I’m a former academic. I worked at university for a long time. And since a couple of years almost now, I’m independent researcher. write. And yeah, I use the Zettelkasten method to write my last books and fail to do something more people could benefit from.  while writing on my habilitation, which is in Germany, the second thesis after the dissertation, it was a bit of a procrastination project, to be honest, to write about writing instead of doing the actual writing, which of course is also writing.

Now I’m really pleased that a lot of people picked up on that and feel they benefit from the ideas, even though people  use it in very different ways for very different projects. I didn’t expect that. I wrote the book  primarily for students because I haven’t found a good study guide I could hand to my students and feel that’s really helpful. So I felt the need to write one I can hand to my students. But it turned out they were not the most interested audience, at least not the younger students. The interest increases the closer you get to your thesis and to having to write longer pieces. And I think the main interest comes from professionals, both academic and non academics.

[William Wadsworth] I was going to ask who is the Zettelkasten method for? You’ve half answered my question a little bit, but I suppose for those that are new to the method, it might be interesting to just hear a little bit about, I guess, the of the role this is playing for these various people. So you mentioned particularly interesting for  people kind of either in academia or otherwise working on substantial written and research projects. Kind of just give us a little bit of a sense of what the system is designed to do and how it helps us to achieve that goal.

[Sönke Ahrens] Yeah, I think it’s one of the things that are very simple, but not easy to do. It comes from a professor in Germany, Niklas Luhmann, who I studied with an interest in his theory, not with an interest in his writing method. But due to the fact that he was so incredibly productive, that some of his colleagues wished he would retire because they can’t keep up with the reading so fast he was writing.

[William Wadsworth] You mentioned in the book that he’s more after his passing through his works that were published posthumously than some psychologists are productive in their whole lifetimes.

[Sönke Ahrens] Yeah. That’s true. He had so many manuscripts in his office, half finished, almost finished. And then what’s in the Zettelkasten, which is the main body of his work, so to speak, because all his ideas are on notes, like index notes of classic index card size. And there were roughly in order to follow an idea. So some have the fantasy of using his Zettelkasten and to write more books out of it. But of course, you have to personally understand what you have written, you have to find your way around it. It’s a very personal thing. So it doesn’t work like that.

During his lifetime, he spent most of his time writing notes and writing manuscripts and publishing them. I wouldn’t say it was an afterthought, the main part of the writing process happened in this in-between space. Most people, I believe, neglect. They write notes, they read, they they polish their manuscript. But I think few people understand the importance of taking proper notes and organizing them in a way that a manuscript, an argument, chapter can evolve out of that. So that the work, when you face the blank page and want to start writing already filled with ideas. And the writing of the manuscripts becomes something very different. It becomes a rewriting of what you already have. And I think most of us know that just psychologically, it’s  much easier to rewrite something that’s already there than facing the blank page and  dreading the first words and starting all over again because it doesn’t sound right. So I definitely was one of people who had a lot of trouble getting into the writing process,  always rewriting the first sentences and feeling a bit worried that it might not lead to something. And then having already written pieces, you put an order, rewrite, lowers the threshold of this task considerably.

[William Wadsworth] I was trying sort of think about a summary of some of the kind of the big benefits of the method. And then you’ve just been alluding to some of them.  I guess I’m thinking there are, at least three really good ones. I mean, one is, you were saying, because you’ve got a clear step-by-step system to follow, it can make you more time efficient and in Luhmann’s case incredibly productive, you’re able to come up with a lot more output  in the time available compared to others. So there’s a time efficiency dimension. I think, again, because you’ve got that clear step-by-step process and something very clear and easy to do at each stage, that can be helpful in overcoming procrastination because no one stage of its own feels overwhelming, each feels very doable.

And then I guess the third one is how it facilitates coming up with original ideas and insights, drawing connections. guess some of that spice that undergraduate level, really elevate the quality of your work far beyond mediocracy and is really essential if you’re going beyond that and going into professional research and academia.

[Sönke Ahrens] Yeah

[William Wadsworth] Does that feel like a reasonable summary to you? Is there anything significant you think I’ve missed?

[Sönke Ahrens] I agree on the three steps. I don’t think it’s a step-by-step  method. I think it’s a scaffold. It provides you with, with structure,  but it allows you to follow the nonlinear process of thinking and writing. And maybe that’s even the main difference to many study guide methods, which are step by step and telling you you start research, then you read, then you do the summary, then you come up with an idea, etc. Working with a Zettelkasten is different because  thinking and writing is a nonlinear process. You start with an idea  usually or you get from your professor  a topic to write about and then you start reading about that and that usually changes your idea about what you want to write. What is the question here that’s interesting to follow? And then you start writing notes and you discover it doesn’t lead anywhere. So you need to read a bit more, then you write a bit more, then you take notes. So you go back and forth all the time.

And instead of being on a 10-step where you have trouble going back to step two because it feels like you’re going back. This is more like a dialogue between your notes and what you’re doing and  you go in a circle, a little bit like Gardamas’s hermeneutic circle with a better understanding and you come up with better questions until you reach the point where you feel, this is now worth sharing with others. So it’s more like you’re writing a manuscript, which is a snapshot of your current understanding of a topic. And your notes stay in the Zettelkasten. You never throw them away. So you’re absolutely able to continue that thought.

And I think that’s a better  idea of writing that you never reach the point where you know everything about something, you finally understood how things work, now you tell the world and then you move on to the next topic. Usually it’s more like, yeah, you understand something pretty well and you can tell others about it, but then you go back to the topic and understand it a little bit better and find new aspects taken to your consideration and the next publication is hopefully a better understanding of it. So I think it’s a iterative process. And one of the advantages is you don’t chuck the notes away when you’ve finished one project. They stay there. They’re ready to take part in your ongoing and  you don’t have to start from scratch again.

And maybe there’s another aspect to it that when you read something for one particular project, you usually encounter a lot of information that’s also interesting, doesn’t have anything to do with the project. But then it’s good to have a place where you can jot down that idea quickly, because it might be interesting for another project. So I wouldn’t say the Zettelkasten method is for everyone. And I don’t think it’s the best method to turn to if you are facing your exam next week, next month. But it’s a very good idea to build something like that long-term if you’re interested in continuing reading, understanding, writing, and maybe publishing more than just one or two  papers.

[William Wadsworth] Yeah, yeah, definitely, definitely. so I wondered if we could maybe use what you just said as a bit of a starting point. So maybe if you, one of the benefits is you don’t have to start from scratch each time, but you know, maybe we’re listening to this and, you know, kind of new to the, brand new to the method, know, never come across it before. If we are literally starting from scratch,  this is day one. What are the basics? How do we get started?

[Sönke Ahrens] Yeah, so, in a way, it’s simple.  But there is a structure that is important. And the basic structure is that there are different types of notes. And  I keep coming back to that because muddling up the different types of notes often makes things considerably more difficult. differentiate between fleeting notes, which are just the ideas you jot down on paper, on a napkin, or in your  journal, whatever is at hand. And we shouldn’t underestimate these  scribbled notes because almost all great books started with one of these ideas you scribble down in the morning or in a conversation with a friend in a pub.

But most of them don’t turn out to be that great. They usually, after a day, turn out to be quite mediocre. Or you discover you already had that idea a couple of times before. Or it’s not from you, it’s from someone else. And so it’s good to write them all down. But it’s also important to filter them out.

So you filter out everything that is not worthwhile proceeding. Fleeting notes are usually just reminders of what you have in your head. So you have a thought, and you write down a reminder of that. What is on paper is usually not a proper expression of the thought. So they need to be processed pretty soon, otherwise you forget to what more complex thought this fleeting note referred to. So you can call it an inbox where you put them. And the next step is to turn them into something that is worth keeping permanently.

This would be the second category, permanent notes. Permanent notes are what we usually refer to when we refer to the notes of the zettel in the Zettelkasten. In the Luhmann version it was analog on paper and usually there’s only one idea on one piece of paper and instead of adding these notes into a hierarchy of folders or sorting them by topics or questions or field of interest, Luhmann would put the first note he wrote in the front of his box and the second right behind that. And he numbered them, one, two, three, four, five. And if he then continued with a thought he has written on node number one. He would put the new node that explicitly expands on the idea of node number one right behind it, physically behind it, and branch it out with his ID numbering system. So between one and two, it will be  1A. Then he can continue with that thought. So you have one, 1A, 1B, 1C.

If you then branch this out, it becomes 1C1 or 1C2, et cetera. so in the end here, you have this vast amount of notes you have node sequences which are sometimes interrupted by hundreds of nodes in between. keep an overview, he also kept an index. So that’s just an alphabetical index where he referred from a term like complexity to the two or three notes which are most relevant for the topic of complexity. Not all of them, just the ones that give you a good entry into a discussion, into one of these note sequences. So that is the permanent note section, which is the main part of it all.

And then you have a third category in which are project notes. Project notes are all notes that are only relevant for one particular project, and you can chuck them after you have finished that project. But if you put that into the permanent notes section, you would dilute the permanent notes irrelevant ideas, which are only relevant for one particular project. Just as you don’t want to have fleeting notes with  first initial ideas in the permanent note section. Otherwise, you don’t trust what’s in the permanent note section. You want to trust that everything written on permanent notes is well thought through. That you write it as if you write it for someone else. Which is the reason when you look at Luhmann’s Zettel they almost like published pieces. So in his manuscripts you find a lot of sections which are almost identical to what he had in the permanent note section with quotes, with references, with proper citations. So you need to trust that this is well thought through.

And then of course you have another which is  literature notes. These are just notes you write to something you’ve read. like permanent notes, you can keep them forever. You keep them in a separate place. But like fleeting notes, you have to do something with them. So it’s not worthwhile writing a lot of notes on a book and then not doing something with that. What’s important is that you go through what you have written about something you read and think about it. How does this inform? How does this help with something I’m actively currently thinking about in the permanent note section. And then it’s usually not enough to copy and paste that into that. You have to think about how does an idea from the context of the book I read is relevant for the thought I develop in the context of my own Zettelkasten development, idea development. And that usually requires a rephrasing.  It requires sometimes more information. it is an active process of doing something with what you read.

And that’s very different to what most students and most everyone reads. And that is pretty passively, doing a little bit, like highlighting, underlining, writing some comments on the margins. But the problem with that is you don’t actually  develop your own thoughts or only in your head. But the head is pretty unreliable. It doesn’t hold too complex thoughts. If you want to think properly, I believe you need to write and you need to write your own words. You need to write your own argument. So as long as you don’t intend to hand over the process of thinking to AI or others, I think there is no way around writing for yourself. And the whole Zettelkasten method is about putting you in a spot where you need to write your own words, yourself, develop your own thoughts. And that is the reason why I said in the beginning, it’s not for everyone. Not everyone is interested in developing their own ideas. And it feels like a daunting task, but if you think about it, don’t have anything else than your own understanding of something. It is a process hard to delegate to others.

[William Wadsworth] For sure, for sure. I think it’s really interesting. we’ve talked on the podcast in recent times over the last year or so about the idea of cognitive load theory. this idea  one of the important implications of that being that we of only kind of think about or process so much information in our own brain, our own working memory at any one time. And what I find sort of really interesting about the method. And I think when I was sort of describing it as being step by step, I didn’t mean it so much as it’s sort of a linear strictly one, then two, then three, then four, and you can never go backwards. I think the aspect I was was kind of particularly kind of excited by was more that it’s very, it’s very sort of split up into separate tasks.

[Sönke Ahrens] Yeah. Yeah.

[William Wadsworth] You know, because, because so many of us will sort of look at that blank sheet of paper, you know, we might have, we might do the reading and maybe we’ll jot maybe something that looks a bit like the fleeting notes kind of, we’ll jot all that in a big workbook or digital file somewhere. And then we’ll go straight from that to writing up the finished product and almost by kind of adding those more steps and, know, adding, for example, that step of permanent notes, where we’re almost coming up with those little essay fragments, you know, you were saying that, you know, what’s on the permanent notes, you know, can often read quite like little fragments that are in the final thing. You know, it’s, in your own language, it’s in your own words. referenced. And then once you’ve done that, you’ve got these little fragments that you can, can reorder and organize and come up with a structure, come up with that argument. And then you can put the final thing together and then you can edit it. So we’re kind of breaking up what is, you know, kind of quite a big unstructured task and adding a lot of structure and kind of process along the way, breaking it down.

[Sönke Ahrens] Yeah, that’s well put.

[William Wadsworth] What from your experience of teaching this, what are some of the things that people find difficult about the method or maybe kind of points of friction, points of points of challenge in terms of putting this into action? And are there any ways to sort of overcome those those challenges?

[Sönke Ahrens] Well, there are technical aspects and there are psychological aspects. for the technical aspects, few people want to build their own Zettelkasten with pen and paper like Luhmann It just doesn’t make sense for most people. There are some who see the benefits of writing by hand as important enough to to not have the advantages of the digital. So you can’t do a full text search in your pen and paper version. You can’t copy and paste in your pen and paper version. And after amassing of notes, it becomes a logistical problem. So you can’t move any more as easily as before or travel with it. I have that problem when I lived Asia for a couple of I paid a lot of money to get all the notes moved. So that was one of the decisions to go digital. a technical aspect.

[William Wadsworth] Yeah

[Sönke Ahrens] Then there are apps available. And I think there’s more and more development that is from the mindset of folder structures, but from letting topic structure  ideas emerge bottom up, especially the apps that have bidirectional linking. That means if you link to one node, you see on that node where you link from. makes building a network quite easy and nice to handle. So there are Obsidian, are Tanner, there are Logsac, Roam Research, there are others. Because many people ask how do I do that exactly, I spent a lot of time developing this course where I teach to put it into practice with Obsidian.

I feel that’s the best app available at the moment and it’s the most future-proof. simple, markdown files, it’s not stored in the cloud, but you can if you want to, you have full control over your notes. You don’t have to pay a subscription and lose access to your life So I think there are a lot of reasons to choose that app, which is why I explained it on that example, and I use it myself.

That hopefully answered a lot of the technical questions. The psychological  hurdle for most people, and I’m not sure if that’s surprising or not, is the challenge of writing your own ideas. Many are trained in school to give a proper account of the ideas of others. So you write an essay about book you read or you expand on an idea or a question you’ve been given. But Zettelkasten forces you ask yourself what is worth writing about? What is the open question that is not answered in any of the books I’ve read and puts you in the driver’s seats of being a researcher? And I think students are researchers as Even if you discover later, okay, someone else has already figured that out. It’s a discovery that involves the same kind of journey of going out, seeking information and judging the information. this method really forces you to not circumvent the challenge of thinking for yourself. And I think that’s the most beautiful part of it, but it’s the most challenging. And so many people wrote to me saying, well, I really don’t know how to write notes, so I give account of my own ideas. And this is not to be misunderstood as writing opinions about something. It should be rooted in facts and proper information and arguments and it should hold up to scrutiny. But there is this misconception either writing about something that’s out there and reality and fact, or I write about my opinions about that. And that’s not what this method is about. It’s about immersing yourself in your best understanding of reality and  what a topic is about and then trying to push your understanding of it. And yeah, I think that’s challenging, but I think that’s the challenge we seek when we learn and do research.

[William Wadsworth] Yeah, no, it’s not not not an easy skill to develop. I guess the more we can  have a have a good structure which to which to practice that and develop that that’s only gonna gonna help nurture that that skill, I guess. No, it’s really interesting. Thank you. I’m just out of it. You mentioned you had made the switch to digital, I think yourself. So  do you now do you now use obsidian? Is that your tool that you use.

[Sönke Ahrens] Yes, quite a few years now. I switched three times and I don’t intend to switch ever again because it’s always a hassle.

[William Wadsworth] I bet.

[Sönke Ahrens] I started with app deliberately designed to as a digital Zettelkasten and set can three from someone I  know from university we were in a Luhmann reading group together and I liked it but it it’s a bit old-fashioned clunky and you never know if he is able to develop it further so when Roam Research came out I switched to that but it all always made me feel like I’m in a distance to my notes. So it’s a weird  feeling. Some people have the same feeling when they read books on Kindle, that you’re less immersed as if you read it printed. And Obsidian allows me to immerse myself, to forget the app.

So I don’t think about Obsidian when I write in Obsidian. I’m really focused on the writing itself. And it allows you to have multiple notes open at the same time so you can your ideas on note sequences, which is maybe the most important aspect of that because it’s contextualized. So yeah, I like that and  that’s the reason I explained the method on the example of Obsidian.

[William Wadsworth] So you’ve obviously, your work has been followed by many, people and had a big impact on a lot of people. I’m just curious, have you had any nice stories or kind of case studies and it’s sort of really clicked for them. I mean, we obviously had the Luhmann case study and how incredibly productive he was able to be in his lifetime. Any other kind of nice success stories you might be able to share with us about people that have adopted it.

[Sönke Ahrens] Well, it’s nice to see your name in the thank you notes of a dissertation  or  published book. And then there is  one coaching client of mine, used it not to write, but to develop ideas and keep notes about his own coaching practice.

[William Wadsworth] Wow, yeah, yeah.

[Sönke Ahrens] He used to send me an email whenever he managed to finish a contract for that many felt like that method helped him to secure quite a considerable amount of wealth just by having his ideas on hand if needed. that’s quite nice. My heart is probably in academia and when I feel that it helps people to develop new interesting ideas worth sharing. having said that,  it’s not for everyone. You can also, I think there’s also personality type, you maybe to like stuff and playing around with ideas, putting them together. think there are personality types which are much more straightforward. They like to put down an idea they have in their head, collect the stuff and not get distracted by possible other ways you can expand it to. So it’s good to think if you can imagine yourself  spending time in a dialogue with your own notes and tinkering around with ideas and hoping for this moment where something clicks because when you put things together sometimes  something magical happens and you realize something because you stumbled upon an idea you have written down a year ago and it resonates with something you’re working on right now.  You need to like that process, I believe.

[William Wadsworth] Yeah, yeah, really interesting. Really interesting. Well, thank you so much for being so generous with your with your time and your your wisdom on the the Zettelkasten method. This this this episode, know, is certainly big food for thought for me, you know, I’ve been sort of sitting here listening to this and thinking, you know, should I should I take the plunge and set up Zettelkasten in my world? Because, you know, as you as you might know, I teach to learn effectively and how to study effectively for exams. And that bit, perhaps you said you might not use a Zettelkasten for so much. That’s, that’s my specialty. And I’m thinking, you know, I have a lot of ideas on how to do it well. And I teach that a lot to my, own coaching clients and here on the podcast. And, know, I’m sure there’s things that I’ve thought about or read or kind of insights I’ve had that, have just kind of got buried because I never, never recorded them. And I’m thinking, you know, maybe, maybe this could be quite a a good thing for me. So I will reflect on that. And maybe in a few years time, you’ll be in the dedication section at the front of my next Sönke thank you so much once again.

If anyone is interested in finding out more about your work and the method, is there any way you might suggest we go next? And of course, there’s the book, which is up behind my left shoulder. You mentioned there’s the Obsidian course. Yeah, feel free to just point us in the right direction for where we might go for more information.

[Sönke Ahrens] Probably the website takesmartnotes.com. you as a student or an early career academic, if you’re interested in the course, scroll down to the bottom of the sales page and you find a small printed link where you can get students discount or early career discounts. So I try to make it available for everyone. Yeah, I think the best way to start. But what I hope to get across is that it’s all about your ideas. So this method doesn’t teach you how to think, it just provides a structure to get these ideas lingering somewhere in your head on paper and hopefully  better the world.

[William Wadsworth] Thank you for joining me for that installment of the Exam Study Expert podcast and I hope you enjoyed learning about the Zettelkasten method. If you’ve enjoyed today’s content, you may also want to take a look at some of our related material on note making and other elements of the academic research and writing process. In particular, I mentioned episode 165 back in the intro with Jorge Arango That’s a nice intro to some to the world of digital note making generally and kind of a nice compliment to what we’ve talked about today in the deep dive on Zettelkasten. I’d also highly suggest episode 192, an academic writing masterclass, a really excellent outline actually of the key steps to success in academic research and writing, helping you streamline and be more successful at the different points. I learned a lot from that. That was with exam study experts for our own academic writing specialist coach, Dr. Alix Hibble. Alix is also director of studies at Oxford University so safe to say she knows her stuff.

Please be sure as always to follow or subscribe to the podcast if you haven’t already and leave us a five-star rating in your podcast app. These small actions just take a moment or two after this episode for you and really really help new listeners find their way to us. The biggest way new listeners find us is the algorithm suggesting the show to them. How most people listening to this now, that’s how you found it originally. So thank you if you are able to just take that small action to help us continue to reach and help new students around the world and keep doing what we do and support students in studying smarter.

A growing number of including Spotify, now also let you leave comments and interact and we do read those and we often reply to them and it’s really, really great to see your thoughts there. So if you’re going to try out Zettelkasten and want to share that excitement or maybe you’ve already tried it and want to report back on how it’s been for you, for better or for worse.

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