Curate your Zettelkasten by Refactoring Notes

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Niklas Luhmann’s statement that he spent most of his time curating his Zettelkasten¹ should be no surprise to those who have garnered a few hundred notes or more. A Zettelkasten is, after all, an archive comprised of notes taken from reading materials reformatted into our own words.

As any writer knows, these reformulations² take time, and even on a good day, I can spend an hour or more with a quickly passing thought trying to capture the method and mood of a phrase. Once captured, the writing doesn’t automatically become a finished product but a literary residence of my archive to be winnowed and parsed with others into the final creation.

Yesterday, while reviewing an old Zettel note regarding a fitness-tracking software program called TrainingPeaks, I realized I had yet to refactor the notation by copying some of the original Zettel parts into new Zettel statements.³ If you are new to the Zettelkasten methodology, a quick review of refactoring might be in order.

In the Zettelkasten world, a Zettel note attempts to adhere to The Principle of Atomicity,⁴ i.e., one idea, one message. I like to use T-A-P⁵ in the refactoring process. Do I have a Topic, an Angle, and a Point that should be its own story?

My article on fitness-tracking software held a new Topic in the name TrainingPeaks, and numerous Angles to explore in the form of various data tracts the software uses. The data track I mentioned in the original article is the “Chronic Training Load” (CTL) or fitness line.

I create a new Zettel note with the Topic (TrainingPeaks), Angle (Chronic Training Load (CTL), and Point (42 days of Training). CTL is the section of the original article I want to write about, and I have started gathering reference notes regarding Chronic Training Load.

I found seven reference notes that address the point I am trying to make in this new article, i.e., that TrainingPeaks uses a rolling 42-day average of your daily TSS. That CTL is an indicator of your current load capacity. A podcast pointed out that CTL reflects the “absolute load applied” over those 42 days. Finally, I found references I had captured on using CTL to help estimate intensity in future workouts (a different Point altogether) and how CTL is used to determine Training Stress Balance (TSB) (a different Angle).

I still need to write the Zettel note; however, I gathered enough references to add the notation to my writing list, and in one of my morning writing sessions, it will appear for further consideration.

Creating a web of information is accomplished by refactoring notes through your exploration of an idea breaking out new and exciting points discovered along the way.

Thank you for reading.

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Footnotes and References

1. Rohrer, C. (2020, January 24). Zettelkasten Hubs: A Collection Of Resources On The Zettelkasten Method. Retrieved from https://zettelkasten.de/posts/zettelkasten-hubs/
2. Luhmann, N. (n.d.). Learning How to Read (977363719 757655603 M. Kuehn, Trans.). Retrieved October 11, 2020, from http://luhmann.surge.sh/learning-how-to-read
3. Fast, Sascha (April 18, 2023) “Why the Single Note matters.” Zettelkasten.de. https://zettelkasten.de/posts/why-single-note-matters/
4. Ibid.
5. Widenhouse, Kathy. “How to Develop a Story Idea.” Medium February 12, 2023. https://medium.com/writers-blokke/how-to-develop-a-story-idea-b8d42576808f