A Brief Introduction to the Zettelkasten Method

Org-roam provides utilities for maintaining a digital slip-box. This section aims to provide a brief introduction to the “slip-box”, or “Zettelkasten” method. By providing some background on the method, we hope that the design decisions of Org-roam will become clear, and that will aid in using Org-roam appropriately. In this section we will introduce terms commonly used within the Zettelkasten community and the Org-roam forums.

The Zettelkasten is a personal tool for thinking and writing. It places heavy emphasis on connecting ideas, building up a web of thought. Hence, it is well suited for knowledge workers and intellectual tasks, such as conducting research. The Zettelkasten can act as a research partner, where conversations with it may produce new and surprising lines of thought.

This method is attributed to German sociologist Niklas Luhmann, who using the method had produced volumes of written works. Luhmann’s slip-box was simply a box of cards. These cards are small – often only large enough to fit a single concept. The size limitation encourages ideas to be broken down into individual concepts. These ideas are explicitly linked together. The breakdown of ideas encourages tangential exploration of ideas, increasing the surface for thought. Making linking explicit between notes also encourages one to think about the connections between concepts.

At the corner of each note, Luhmann ascribed each note with an ordered ID, allowing him to link and jump between notes. In Org-roam, we simply use hyperlinks.

Org-roam is the slip-box, digitalized in Org-mode. Every zettel (card) is a plain-text, Org-mode file. In the same way one would maintain a paper slip-box, Org-roam makes it easy to create new zettels, pre-filling boilerplate content using a powerful templating system.

Fleeting notes

A slip-box requires a method for quickly capturing ideas. These are called fleeting notes: they are simple reminders of information or ideas that will need to be processed later on, or trashed. This is typically accomplished using org-capture (see (org)Capture), or using Org-roam’s daily notes functionality (see org-roam-dailies). This provides a central inbox for collecting thoughts, to be processed later into permanent notes.

Permanent notes

Permanent notes are further split into two categories: literature notes and concept notes. Literature notes can be brief annotations on a particular source (e.g. book, website or paper), that you’d like to access later on. Concept notes require much more care in authoring: they need to be self-explanatory and detailed. Org-roam’s templating system supports the addition of different templates to facilitate the creation of these notes.

For further reading on the Zettelkasten method, “How to Take Smart Notes” by Sonke Ahrens is a decent guide.