Using the zettelkasten method to produce written work

Last updated Dec 17, 2022

1. Always externalize your thoughts, inputs and interpretations in written form, as a collection of notes that will form the external scaffolding needed for your brain to generate ideas
   1. Use fleeting notes to capture any thought that comes up to the mind. Note them down very roughly and process them later
   2. When consuming media (books, articles, blogs, podcasts), take down literature notes. Always write it in your own words
   3. Remember to write down the reference to the media being consumed
2. Go through all the thoughts you have collected thus far, and create permanent notes.
   1. One idea per note
   2. Keep it short, concise and as general as possible so that the original context is not needed to understand what this note intends to say.
   3. Think about how the idea links to other ideas already present as permanent notes and make links to them
   4. Make sure that you will find this note later by linking to it from an index, or from another note that is tied to an index
   5. Throw away fleeting notes, and put literature notes into a reference system
3. Develop your ideas from the bottom up
   1. Look for missing links, generate questions or insights from your notes
   2. Follow the path of greatest interest and insight
   3. In due course, you would have developed enough insights and related notes around a particular topic
4. Convert your notes into a draft article
   1. Look through your links and collect relevent notes
   2. Organize them in what you think is a meaningful order at that time
   3. If you see missing pieces of the puzzle, go back and generate more notes to fill the gaps
   4. Generate a first draft, proof read and finalize
5. Additional tips
   1. You will encounter ideas that seem irrelevant to the problem you are working on. Nevertheless make a note of the ideas you encounter.
   2. Although the extra time spent on seemingly irrelevant note seems wasteful, the power of this method does lie in building up a large interlinked web of ideas
   3. You will follow different lines of thought at once, so with this method, many different lines of thought will develop concurrently. That is the power of zettelkasten.

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