The Zettelkasten Method from Niklas Luhmann is one of the most infamous strategies for managing knowledge.
When first developed, Luhmann wrote index cards by hand, an atomic idea on each, and placed them into wooden containers for easy future reference.
Over time, most people who still use the system took it to a digital environment, using apps such as Obsidian, Logseq and others.
Now, whilst many people still swear by the Zettelkasten, lots try their hardest to make it work without success.
In this piece, we’re going to go over the benefits and drawbacks of Zettelkasten as well as my experience with the method and how to make it more usable…
My experience and solution to work with the Zettelkasten Method
Back when I started building a system to manage my knowledge, the Zettelkasten was just one thing I tried, but one that I had high hopes about. It turned out, though, that the system on its own was not quite what I was looking for…
I had other things I wanted to do aside from writing my thoughts and ideas into new notes.
This called for additional structures in place rather than something just designed to link ideas together. But I didn’t want to lose the benefits of what Zettelkasten is good for — connecting ideas and spawning new and deeper ones.
Eventually, I came up with the solution of PARAZETTEL — a system I developed incorporating Tiago Forte’s PARA Method alongside Zettelkasten.
And I recommend checking it out or taking your own approach to using Zettelkasten in a similar way to me. I’ll explain how to do so now…
What you can do if you’re struggling to make a system with just the Zettelkasten
You have a couple of choices.
One is to use different tools for everything that you have to do, for example project management, content writing and more.
This is quite a good solution — you don’t have to confuse yourself by combining everything in one app. Plenty of services out there nowadays have free options for using them so long as you aren’t going all-out liberally using every single feature they offer.
Anyway, I dislike this solution simply because there’s more friction inherent in a system that glues many services together. There’s more room for things to fail to work well together or go wrong within integration or synchronisation.
The other option is to try to change the Zettelkasten into a system that can be all-encompassing in terms of work function. This was the solution I used myself, as I mentioned above, and it’s something that I encourage all people to try out…
Building a unique system for PKM
Be brave and dive into trying new things out. You don’t have to come up with a perfect system for yourself from scratch — this would be a waste of time. Start with something you believe works — as I did with the PARA Method and Zettelkasten, and turn this base into something unique.
This is how I always teach people to build their own PKM system. You don’t appear with a perfect point to operate from. It takes working in the apps and structures you’ve got and making iterative changes before you end up with something that you feel comfortable using.
Something rarely comes straight out of the box, ready to use with little changes. I’ll also point out that it’s very transparent of me to admit this as someone who offers an Obsidian vault to purchase and suggests that it works for people.
But I’ve taught within the vault and outside of it that the best way to go about building a system is to aim to make something unique in the long run. You might start with someone else’s template or system but in the end, you’ll end up with something truly your own.
I mention that there are templates that are better than others and serve as good places to start from and that’s what I attempt to provide with PARAZETTEL. But they’re not the be-all and end-all…
It’s much better to have a bespoke system that you’ve carefully crafted over years of working on your projects and perfectly matching your setup to what you’ve spent your time doing.
This means not entirely Zettelkasten, not something completely different. You end up with something yours, suited to your work.
That’s the problem that many face when it comes to Zettelkasten’s functionality, and how you can go about solving or avoiding it.
Zettelkasten is an amazing system after all and although it might not be everything you need inside your PKM system, you’ll likely want to use parts of it.
Thanks for reading!
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