Digital note-taking & ZettelKasten for mere mortals

Your first brain is like no-one else’s, why should your second one be?

Digital note-taking, Personal Knowledge Management (PKM) and Zettelkasten are having a bit of a moment right now, if you are interested in productivity or creative work, you may have stumbled across many resources discussing their benefits and discussing some variation or customization of this system, but many of its advocates make the set-up sound like a a complicated process that would take a lot of time and require a steep learning curve involving new complex software and tons of customization including ones you need to learn to code in order to use, I found all of this to be a little intimidating at the start, I understand it is much cooler to say the Zettelkasten method, but isn’t that a bit an overkill when you just mean slip-box? It just makes you wonder whether this was meant for everyone…

Let’s start by discussing why PKM is a good idea for everyone

Our brains have a limitless ability to learn and interact with information, solve problems and come up with new ideas and yet, in order to prioritize all that learning, creativity and problem solving, it has to let go of other tasks or severely cut down resources. Of those resources, attention and short term memory are the most affected. just like a computer’s RAM, if we try to focus on too many things at the same time then we slow ourselves down and degrade overall cognitive performance, but unlike a computer which is not allowed to take a call on discarding any information being used to accomplish a task, our brains don’t ask our permission to reduce the load, they just discard the information or shift the attention away from something you had intended to do, sometimes at the most inopportune moments. This means that relevant pieces of information, interesting ideas, pending tasks can all be conveniently lost or forgotten ( well conveniently for the part of the brain that needs to reduce mental load not for you).

Even if you manage to somehow hold on to the information that you need to remember and are able to keep paying attention, the mental load of having to do that leaves far less room to get creative in your thinking and therefore you might find yourself unable to engage with the information, to critically think about it or use it to solve a problem

How does a PKM solve for that?

By assigning the task of remembering and storing information that we feel is relevant to us in an external system, we free up both our attention and memory for the more rewarding tasks of creating ideas and problem-solving. Regardless of the domain, this is a very useful system to follow rather than tying up all of our mental resources simply trying to remember and keep track of ideas. It is a myth that this is only applicable in writing or other arts-related domains only. Any activity that involves coming up with a new way of thinking about, relating to or doing something, is a creative activity that will benefit from having a PKM system. You could be a teacher coming up with new ideas for lesson plans, a business executive trying to master your presentation skills, a parent figuring out the best methods to ensure your child’s growth and development, an athlete/ musician/ enthusiast who’s learning and testing new ways to enhance your performance, the examples are endless and each and every one of them would benefit immensely from setting up a PKM.

So why isn’t everybody doing it then?

The idea of a personal knowledge management system is very enticing, so much so, that the first time i was introduced to it, my first reaction was regret that i did not start sooner, my second reaction was, why does it have to be so complicated? How much time and learning will i have to invest in order to set one up and keep it going? I’ll freely admit that i had quite a few false starts, the only reason i kept trying to make it work was my belief that the results will be worth it. What i found out is that the approach to PKM has shifted from the essence or the “Why” of having a PKM and into the “How” to set it up and within this “How” the process was being viewed through the lens of the expert who was sharing their knowledge and therefore colored by their experience.

What were the lessons that I learned?

• You do not need to know how to code, or use Notion or Obsidian or any other specific software: Luhmann, the sociology professor who pioneered the ZettelKasten method which is at the heart of PKM, used a pen, some paper and a cardboard box. of course we could benefit immensely from digitizing this process, but it was the quality of the content that was the driving force behind his productivity not any software, and not even how organized he was ( have you seen his hand-writing?). The only task of the software is to help you save, search and retrieve the information in your notes, anything else is a useless distraction
• Bi-directional links are not always the best idea for creative thinking: I know this sounds like blasphemy but trust me, I’m speaking out of experience here. Links dictate a path for the idea to follow by deciding beforehand what is the next thing to explore, and because you are the one who decided the links in the past, it is almost like you are instructing yourself to go down a familiar well-trodden path, from one link to the next. This is excellent for creating a Wiki or expanding and mastering your knowledge of existing information but it doesn’t help you come up with new connections, it just keeps emphasizing connections you have already made. Using tags or keywords is a much more flexible way to create clusters of thought without limiting yourself to a one-to-one link. Try using Bi-directional links for a while and you’ll discover that your writing and thinking has become very predictable. The only exception here is if you’re working on a project and you already have a clear idea how all or most of the notes are related. if you’re forcing yourself to use Notion or Obsidian or Roam because of their support for Bi-directional links and finding them frustrating, then please give yourself the permission to try other options, you can use any text editor you like as long as are able to organize your notes in a way that is meaningful to you and have a method to search for what you want
• Don’t be tempted to store unrelated reference material in the same place as your notes for active projects: I made that mistake when i was first starting and even though i was pretty organized in terms of layout and formatting, the other information I was storing; my research for an upcoming trip to Zanzibar, my niece’s butterfly drawings, my low-carb recipe collection etc… the approach of just clipping, highlighting and saving everything I liked spilled over into my note-taking section and I started saving a lot of things there that were not really advancing my understanding or helping me think. Those other notes i saved for reference were important for other reasons but they should be kept separate because their purpose is very different. Check out Tiago Forte’s method “Building a Second Brain” at fortelabs.co for ideas on how to organize your digital life, the course is quite expensive but the site itself contains a wealth of information that is totally free. He also has a book coming out in 2022 which I have already pre-ordered.
• Put in more effort to fully process your notes before saving them: Luhmann was writing his notes by hand, meaning that he was not just clipping things he liked and throwing them into the box, each note that he wrote represented a thought or idea that he had pondered and wanted to expand on, it was relevant to the work he was doing, it contained enough detail for his future self to come back and read it and be able to understand it and engage with it, this takes some serious thought and effort but will exponentially increase the value of your saved notes. I would highly recommend a book by Sonke Aherns called How to Take Smart Notes if you want to take your note-taking skills to the next level.
• Pause before you capture: if you need to process your notes to make them useful then not everything you like belongs in your PKM, some interesting notes or ideas are nice to learn but will not do much to advance your learning and thinking, these belong in you reference material not in your PKM, the ease of clipping and taking screenshots can sometimes become a disadvantage if you are less discerning about what you capture.
• It’s Personal: A lot of the ideas presented for PKM are a little case-specific and should not be generalized, for example, Luhman was a social scientist and an academic writer, his PKM consisted of a system to capture and store the bibliography of the sources he was using, and another to write his own notes and ideas, this is typical in an academic setting where you need to cite the living daylights out of everything you write but is not particularly useful outside of this domain. Similarly, many productivity experts who advocate the use of Notion for PKM like it because they are also entrepreneurs who need the collaboration and database tools of Notion even though Notion is not a particularly writing-friendly app, it has value to them because they are using it as a task manager along with managing their knowledge base, this may not be relevant to you at all and might even discourage you from starting because of the complexity of the initial set up.

So now that we know all that, how do you set up a system that works for you?

Here i will deliberately use an example of someone who is not planning on being a writer or creating content online, just to try and avoid the bias that those domains have created, let’s say that a person is a marketing manager for a consumer product and part of their work is to come up with marketing campaign ideas for the product and present them for approval, what would this person’s PKM look like?

First off, let’s say that they can only use tools provided at their work, and therefore probably either Google apps or Microsoft office. Let’s use Microsoft office for this example. In this case they can use Onenote to build their system, one notebook for references and the other for note-taking. The reference side of the PKM would possibly contain articles about marketing and branding, maybe examples of successful campaigns by competition and draft slides that can be repurposed for future campaigns, templates for successful campaigns that were done in the past… etc. Some of the items can be directly embedded into a note, but for example, it is a lot easier to save slide templates in a folder on their own. In that case, they can create one indexing note with links to specific folders and then save the reference material itself in a dedicated folder. The note-taking side of the PKM would include, notes about potential campaign ideas, scripts for future campaigns, analysis of past campaigns showing what worked and why. each note would have a descriptive title and a list of tags right at the start to make it easier to search for it later.

Now, whenever a new project comes along, all they need to do is go to the reference notebook and click on the link leading to the templates folder, select the template that most closely matches the project they’re working on and then use it as a starting point, then they’ll go to the note-taking notebook, browse through the ideas and scripts and decide on a few that can be used for this new project. This does not eliminate the need for coming up with new ideas or new formats, it just provides a really good foundation from which to launch them.

Your approach to PKM could be similarly minimalist and utilitarian. Think about how the knowledge will be used, and try to make it as easy as possible for your future self to access this knowledge and produce something with it, the most important thing is to find a way to get started and keep going. if you later need to upgrade your system to use more sophisticated tools any inconvenience you experience in migrating your notes pales in comparison to the loss you will experience if you’re too intimidated to start and end up having no system at all.