Lightning Talk: Zettelkasten - A way to create a second brain & publish content you are passionate about

by Alli Zadrozny

In her lightning talk at Blue Ridge Ruby 2024, Alli Zadrozny introduces the concept of Zettelkasten, a method to create a digital second brain and effectively publish content one is passionate about. She begins by addressing the common struggle of retaining and organizing information from the vast amount we consume through reading, watching, and listening. Zettelkasten, which translates to 'slip box' in German, is presented as a solution to this issue.

Key points discussed include:
- Understanding Zettelkasten: Zadrozny shares that Zettelkasten was popularized by sociologist Niklas Luhmann, who used this method to organize his prolific output of 70 books and 400 articles. A 'Zettel' is a single note containing a discrete idea or quote, which can then be linked to other notes in the system.
- Types of Notes: The method categorizes notes into three types: fleeting notes (quick thoughts), literature notes (quotes), and permanent notes (combinations of insights).
- Organizational ‘Hubs’: Zadrozny uses hubs in her own Zettelkasten to categorize her notes by context, such as events and regular meetings, enhancing her ability to retrieve information when needed.
- Workflow Transformation: She contrasts traditional content creation methods—starting from a topic, gathering information, and slowly building a talk or article—with a new workflow facilitated by Zettelkasten, where users can directly generate content from their notes by developing a bottom-up approach. This involves recording individual notes and then extracting topics from them, leading to an organic and interest-driven development of ideas.
- Practical Application: An example of her Zettelkasten in action includes notes on Annie Kelly’s presentation, where she illustrates taking atomic notes that focus on specific phrases and ideas rather than general reflections.
- Backlinking and Literature Notes: The importance of making connections between notes and referencing literature is emphasized as a way to deepen understanding and provide context for content creation.

In conclusion, Zadrozny effectively demonstrates how Zettelkasten can streamline the process of organizing knowledge and creating content in a manner that leverages personal interests and insights. By adopting this approach, individuals can enhance their creativity and intellectual productivity, ultimately leading to more meaningful engagement with their ideas.

Through vivid examples and practical advice, this talk serves as a compelling introduction to the Zettelkasten methodology for anyone looking to improve their information management and content generation skills.

00:00:11.920 How do you all, oh my gosh! Does somebody know about Zettelkasten? How many people know about Zcon? Oh, you guys are brilliant! Um, okay for those of you that don't, I'd like to evangelize.

00:00:19.119 I’m going to tell you about Zettelkasten, which I found last year. It is a way to create a second brain and publish the things that you're excited about. We all have a problem: we read a lot, we watch a lot, we listen to a lot. There are things that people say, like the 'Jurassic Park syndrome', that are interesting and light bulbs in our brains. But how do we keep track of those things in a useful way? Why do they matter? How do I write blog posts? How do I publish these things and sound smart sometimes?

00:00:34.520 Because sometimes you're like, 'Oh, what’s that thing that I thought was really cool?' And you think, 'Oh yes, let me pull out my Zettelkasten.' It’ll look really cool, not just for pulling it out, but you know. So, a possible solution that I posit is Zettelkasten. I'll show you, for those of you that are pretty bored with this already, what an actual example looks like. This is my Zettelkasten graph from last year at Blue Ridge Ruby. You can see all the tabs at the top—those are all the things that I'm thinking about right now: tech debt, code churn, business logic. But yeah, this is from last year.

00:01:12.680 Let’s zoom in specifically to Annie Kelly's talk. This is the talk I attended last year, and these are the notes that I took along with links to different things that I've quoted back to it. I read 'Atomic Habits' and 'Deep Work'. Goals versus systems is a big part of his philosophy, and I was thinking a lot about that when she gave her talk. I also created a new coding project checklist: what are the things, what are the systems that we need in place? I got a lot of really great insights from her talk last year—thanks to Annie! That’s an example of a small note. It’s an atomic note, not a long journal entry where you're spouting out all of your thoughts. It's really tiny pieces.

00:02:29.920 For those of you that have seen me sitting in this conference on my phone the entire time you're doing your talk, I’m not ignoring you; I’m literally writing a ton of notes, like individual atomic notes. So, I’m not a jerk! Now, why should you listen to me? I've tried them all: Evernote, Dropbox Paper, Notion, Roam, bullet journals—all of this stuff. And I really like Zettelkasten. I also use Obsidian; you can keep a copy of your markdown files.

00:03:13.320 Okay, here’s how it works. Zettelkasten is German for 'slip box'. It was—I've done more research, and I don’t think it was created by Luhmann, but he is one of the first people who had a prolific career with 70 books and 400 articles. He outputted a lot, and the way he did it was through his method with Zettelkasten. A 'Zettel' is a note, and he would write a unit of an idea or a quote from a book and give it an ID, matching those ideas to other subsequent notes. This is all very manual. You’d put them in a box (Zettelkasten) into two categories.

00:04:05.360 There are different types of Zettels at different boxes: fleeting notes for those shower thoughts, literature notes with quotes, and permanent notes which are a combination of all these different things. I have some bonus ones in my Zettelkasten. I use hubs to organize my Zettelkasten. For instance, there’s a hub just for Blue Ridge Ruby and another one for meetings where I meet with people often and want to remember what we discussed. I also have one for Ruby gems.

00:04:48.520 Why is this useful? In the old workflow, you would consider what to write about and maybe come up with a list of topics to potentially talk about. From that list, you would pick something, do a bunch of reading and note-taking, and slowly put together your talk. Some time would pass, and then you might publish that thing. The new workflow gets rid of those three spaces completely and goes straight from your notes to the content.

00:05:31.760 You just read the things that you care about or write down the things that somebody said that you thought were interesting, and you record small atomic notes. Then you mine your Zettelkasten for topics. It’s a bottom-up approach instead of a top-down one. You produce your content by starting with an idea, and the work comes from the bottom up. You follow up with research to build your corpus, similar to traditional PhD work, but in reverse: you're not compiling a massive reading list based on a topic. Instead, you read what you're interested in and get excited about those things, building them into your Zettelkasten.

00:06:39.040 Then you can find and connect those things that are interesting to you because those connections are the most important element, not just the ideas themselves. Okay, moving on—I just want to give you one more example.

00:06:44.830 I've been reading Copeland’s book, and this is just one little section from the beginning. I had never heard of 'fan-in' and 'fan-out' before, and I thought it was really interesting. So, I wrote a little note—it's a literature note—so I don’t have opinions about it; it’s essentially an explanation in my own words. I also included some backlinks to it in CodeTurn and referenced the book itself for a bibliography if I ever want to write about this stuff. To measure health, you count relationships among organisms—this is what Jeremy shared last year—and remember, every intellectual endeavor starts with a note.