Niklas Luhmann wrote 70 books with a Zettelkasten. The internet condensed this into "if you also use a Zettelkasten, you'll write 70 books."

You won't.

Luhmann read for six hours and wrote for six hours every day, with the Zettelkasten as part of his profession. Your card box is a weekend hobby. The two are not comparable.

The trickier issue: cards are not knowledge — they're indexes to knowledge. If you haven't actually read, thought, and written about those topics, the cards are just metadata wrapped around air.

What I do now: fewer cards, more complete paragraphs. Markdown files as source of truth applies here too — one full argument is worth more than twenty interlinked atomic notes.

Comments

Comments are moderated. No email, no IP collection.