Well if you want to acquire some knowledge, there is one of two approaches you are probably going to take, you either gonna watch some visual content or read some kind of written information(book, article, etc). I can say that reading is the more effective approach at least that’s me ,but reading can be tedious sometimes especially when you are having a bad day, so one must follow some strategy to get the most out of his efforts, one strategy I might suggest is taking notes but, not the kind of notes we are used to take in classes, instead, I mean using a proven note-taking system like Zettelkasten.

What is Zettelkasten exactly

Zettelkasten is a note-taking method that the german sociologist Niklas Luhmann developed , the word zettelkasten itself is german that roughly translates to “file box” or “slip box”, it refers to a system that consists of a storage( physical like a box or digital ) and notes or zettels stored in the former, these notes are not an individual texts or even a collection of texts, they form an interconnected network of notes, each note has the ability to reference other notes(zettels) to complete or give more insight on a single thought or idea, meaning that zettelkasten is a nonlinear system where each zettel is a single thought and these zettels are connected with each other to form a bigger picture and this system is considered to be a personal tool so you would write your thoughts in the exact manner you would think about them.

How to write a zettel and create your own zettelkasten

A zettel is structred note, it has three components:

• Unique Identifier
• Content
• References

The Unique Identifier

Each zettel must have a unique identifier, but there is no correct way to construct it, but there is couple of identifiers that are a bit more popular:

1. alphanumeric identifiers: Niklas Luhmann actually used an alphanumeric identifier in his zettelkasten, and it is the recommended method when it comes to paper-based zettelkasten.

2. time-based: a unique string that is constructed from some kind of time-stamp, it is the most used method for digital zettelkastens.

The Content

In the content section, you will capture the thought(knowledge) are trying to deliver vai that zettel and contain in that zettel, there is no rule against having some kind of a quote at the top, but the content must be written with your words because anything else will be defeating the purpose of using zettles in the first place.

The References

References are written at the footer of the zettel, and it reference the source of information used to write that zettel.

How to Create Your Own Zettelkasten

Here I will demonstrate how I created my own version of the digital zettelkasten, first of all we need to find where the zettels are gonna be stored, I preferred using a Github repository for that purpose, Github has a built-in search engine that will be huge when your zettelkasten grows naturally, and you also have the ability to put a license for the repository to protect your content from plagiarism if you want to make it public(please don’t store anything of value inside GitHub private repositories), for the unique identifier a time-based identifier makes the most sense scine it is the easiest to contruct and we have GitHub’s search engine to find a specific zettel in the place, finally for writing the content using markdown is the best option to organize your zettel, markdown is a relatively easy language to learn and has full support in GitHub’s built-in editor.