The Zettelkasten Method - LessWrong

[Epistemic Status: Scroll to the bottom for my follow-up thoughts on this from
months/years later.]

Early this year, Conor White-Sullivan introduced me to the Zettelkasten method
of note-taking. I would say that this significantly increased my research
productivity. I’ve been saying “at least 2x”. Naturally, this sort of thing is
difficult to quantify. The truth is, I think it may be more like 3x, especially
along the dimension of “producing ideas” and also “early-stage development of
ideas”. (What I mean by this will become clearer as I describe how I think about
research productivity more generally.) However, it is also very possible that
the method produces serious biases in the types of ideas produced/developed,
which should be considered. (This would be difficult to quantify at the best of
times, but also, it should be noted that other factors have dramatically
decreased my overall research productivity. So, unfortunately, someone looking
in from outside would not see an overall boost. Still, my impression is that
it's been very useful.)

I think there are some specific reasons why Zettelkasten has worked so well for
me. I’ll try to make those clear, to help readers decide whether it would work
for them. However, I honestly didn’t think Zettelkasten sounded like a good idea
before I tried it. It only took me about 30 minutes of working with the cards to
decide that it was really good. So, if you’re like me, this is a cheap
experiment. I think a lot of people should actually try it to see how they like
it, even if it sounds terrible.

My plan for this document is to first give a short summary and then an overview
of Zettelkasten, so that readers know roughly what I’m talking about, and can
possibly experiment with it without reading any further. I’ll then launch into a
longer discussion of why it worked well for me, explaining the specific habits
which I think contributed, including some descriptions of my previous approaches
to keeping research notes. I expec

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