How I created and use my analog Zettelkasten | Step-by-step guide

hey friends in this video I'm going to teach you how I created my own zaltin I'm going to assume that since you clicked on this video you already know what a zaltin is but in some case you don't uh there will be links in the description where you can learn a lot more uh but before we jump in I want to give credit where credit is due a lot of the techniques I learned and used come from this book anti-et zedon by Scott sheeper um I personally have made some tweaks and adjustments to suit my

own needs and purposes but the bulk of it really comes from this book and I could not have built this uh system without this book uh I put a link in the description to where you can check this out and get a copy and you really really need to get a copy of this if you are in serious about creating your own analog zetel ctin and just to be explicit and very clear here by analog I'm talking about a zetto costume with index cards and we're doing things writing things by hand we're not going to

be using any digital tools like obsidian or Rome research or anything like this we're going to do it um exactly very similar to the way that Nicholas Lumen um created it and used it himself so let's talk about the supplies you're going to need I'll have links to everything in the description so the first thing you're going to need is you'll need some index cards I prefer to use 4x6 cards but the standard 3x5 work just as well it honestly doesn't really matter um but the reason why I prefer the 4x6 is they provide more

room for you to write on you will also need a pen uh pen doesn't matter what kind of pen you use what color ink doesn't matter you can use a pencil whatever you want to use to write with but I prefer these Micron pens they have archival ink in them that will last a long time they don't bleed or smear and they dry very quickly they're very cheap and they also come in a variety of colors and nib sizes which is nice you're going to need a box to put your cards in and a set

of alphabetical dividers so the box is completely optional in the beginning but you will need one eventually to start you can use a shoe box or similar uh whatever you have kind of lying around the house you could even just use a rubber band to wrap this stack of cards initially um you can also pick up cheap index card boxes from Amazon or an office supply store these alphabetical card dividers are also optional in the beginning but I would recommend that you get them sooner rather than later the nice thing about this particular box which

I got from Amazon is it comes with four compartments one for each um section of the zetel ctin and it also comes with the set of these alphabetical dividers which is really nice to get started with so zocon has three main components or sections um the first of which is going to be your index then you're going to have your main cards and then you'll have your bib box and the bib box is short for bibliography box my fourth Z cin has a fourth component that I call the catalog and I'll explain what that is

in a little bit so for your zedel cin you'll need at least three main components index main cards the biit Box and then the fourth component which I call the catalog is completely optional and it's up to you whether or not you want to use it so the first component is the index and this is what you're going to use those alphabetical dividers for and the index acts like a map into your zetto costume here's we're going to take note of various keywords subjects and information in your ZL and so that way you can find

and retrieve your main cards later on so it's essentially a it's essentially a table of contents that allows you to quickly find the information that you're looking for and then the next section is the most important section these are your main cards right these are the heart and soul of any zetel ctin here's where you store the knowledge and information you have gathered created curated Etc these cards are the reason for creating your zedin in the first place and they are your thinking partner and that's really important and there'll be more on that in a

little bit um bib box so this is short for bibliography box this is where you store all of your bib cards and I will discuss what these are in Greater detail later on in the video bib cards are the cards that you create while reading a book for example and it will contain the page numbers like this and then a short description next to those page numbers describing the information located on that page that you may want to revisit later and potentially convert into a main card again I'll explain this process in more detail later

on and then this next part is something I created for myself and for my zocin specifically it is is entirely optional but I think you will find it useful the catalog is a place where I list and number all of the original sources that I use and reference in my main cards bib cards Etc so when creating main cards it's important to reference where the note originally came from and the catalog is my super simple way of tracking the various sources used and reference throughout my main cards and zedel ctin so for example um on

this main card here if you see in the bottom left hand corner I've got a number two and it's on page X II the number two is a reference to my sources catalog which is this number two here which is the intellectual Life by AG cange so now that we understand the components of a ZL ctin let's learn how to create one from scratch so the first thing we're going to do is create the index and for this you'll you'll need 26 index cards one for each letter of the English alphabet and a pen or

something to write with so the first thing you'll do is you'll take the first index card and you'll write the letter A in the upper left hand corner like so then the next index card you'll write the letter b and then for the third C and so on and so forth and then once you're done you should have 26 index cards each card having a single letter on it in the upper leftand corner one for each letter of the alphabet so for my zaltin I took a different approach when it comes to categor categorizing and

indexing um my main cards like I've done here Scott in his book recommends that you create five cards one for each academic discipline in the very beginning to organize your main cards I personally think this a pretty good idea if you don't have a project or rough idea of how you're going to be using your ZL ctin or the type of research you're going to be doing so I personally initially tried this idea but in the end it didn't work for me I didn't like having to constantly reference a Wikipedia article and creating arbitrary categories

in between my main cards uh it got really confusing to me and it frankly it kind of took to long to figure out what the categories were uh I wanted to create as little friction as possible and so for this method for me personally it kind of got in my way and I didn't find it particularly helpful instead I created a much simpler system and method for myself instead of imposing categories in a hierarchy from the start I let my main cards and the sources I was reading create the categories instead so this is a

bottom up approach rather than imposing a hierarchy from the top and then going down so you really have two options at this point one you can use Scott's method which he outlines in great detail in his book which you should get a copy of and that's really good if you don't know what research you're going to be doing or the projects you want to work on with your ZL ctin and then or two you can let the sources you read and the main cards you create kind of dictate the categories and organizational hierarchy that you

want since I took the second option I'm going to demonstrate how to do that in this video and because of that we don't actually have to create any hierarchies at this time since we don't have any main cards so we don't need any categories the third thing is a bib box which again doesn't require us to do anything at this time since we don't have any bib cards but once we have at least one bib card we can file it in the bib card section of our box which goes in the back like this so

wrapping up this section of this video you should have your zle cost and box and your index cards created with 26 index cards where each card has a single single letter of the alphabet in the upper left hand corner and then if you're using alphabetical dividers you will file each index card behind the corresponding divider like this it says the B divider and then B card Etc okay so right now our zaltin is completely useless it doesn't have any information in it at all it only has some index cards with a single letter on them

so what makes a zaltin really useful are the notes the ideas the quotes and information that we put into it and those would be on our main cards in order to do that we need to seek out this information from various sources the majority of your sources will most like likely be books but podcasts videos conversations with friends lectures anything at all is perfectly viable for this tutorial I'm going to show you how I use bib cards to take notes while reading a book and how I convert some of those notes into main cards so

once I've had a book that I'm going to read I create a bib card for it and and in this example I'll be using the book The intellectual Life by AG celange and I highly recommend you read this book if you haven't read it already and here is my bib card for this book um actually I have bib cards since there's I I have two of them since there was so much good stuff in located in this book but the first thing I do is I take a single index card like this and I write

on the side with the ruled lines and then the other side's completely blank so the first thing I do is I write the author's name last name first at the top like this then I write the title and the subtitle of the book and finally I write the copyright date of publication or something similar and this is just better help me know um which addition of the book it is that I'm using you will also notice that I have the number one circled in the typ right hand corner of this card and I only um

added this once I introduced the second bib card so this was not there originally when I first created this I only created a one once I had another one so I could tell which one was which and which order uh really great books like this one often times will take up more than one card if they have lots of great ideas insights and information that you wish to capture in them then on the opposite side I draw a straight line down the left hand side and the way that I do this is I use my

book to line up the red line on the other side which is printed on it if you hold this up to the light you can see you probably can't see in the video but if you were to hold this up to a light source you would be able to see that red line on this side through the other side and then I use my book as a straight edge and then I'll simply just draw that line like this and that'll create this nice line down the left hand side and then on the left is where

I'm going to write the page number um where I find the source the material that I want to reference and then to the right hand side I write a really quick description a little note about the content that's located on that specific page um I've also created my own little like conventions in shorthands for things so if you take a good a good look at this card you'll see this e exclamation point um that to me tells me that that's an excerpt so that to me is a quote that I want to uh write down

verba um I sometimes let's see if I have one here I don't have it here sometimes I'll do something like a capital S and an exclamation point and that tells me that there's a source either referenced in the main body of the text or down in the footnotes that I then want to go back and later um take a look at and possibly read later on so as I'm reading I will take notes of things that I find interesting and I will put square brackets around it um let's see if I can find a good

example for you so here's some here U the reason why I do this is for kind of a couple reasons one it makes finding the material much faster when I go back to review it so when I go back and look at my bib card here and I'm like okay I want to figure out and go look at the original source of um whatever this note is on this page then when I go to that page it'll just jump right out at me and I know exactly where it's located because I bracketed it the second

reason is you know God for bid I should lose this bib card or it should get destroyed or something like that I can fairly easily create this from scratch again because I've have all the important information bracketed in the book itself so I kind of have like two sources like a little bit of a backup so once I go through the entire book and I finish reading it and my bib cards are complete like this I put the book down and I don't touch it for two weeks often times even longer usually a month sometimes

in six weeks and I do this for a very specific reason the reason why is I only want the best material in my zetel and time is the best filter for that so as I'm reading I will often times make notes of things on my bib cards that I think are interesting at the time that I'm first reading them however after some time goes by I often find that they are not really that useful or interesting anymore so for example have out of two cards like this I might only make maybe eight cards 10 cards

maybe more but a lot of this stuff probably won't actually become a main card and letting things sit and rest so your mind basically forgets about whatever you have been reading gives you a really fresh perspective and it allows you to only pick and choose that which is really important that you want to create a main card and add to your zle costum so now we're going to assume that you've read at least one book and you've completed your bip cards for that book uh you you might only have one you might have several doesn't

really matter so you've waited at least 2 weeks to a month and now you're ready to create main cards from your bib cards I first like to read over my bib card or cards first um to kind of refresh my mind about the various notes and topics that I referenced on these cards again I haven't seen this material in about at least 2 weeks but for me it's really probably like four to 6 weeks after reading the entire card or cards I go back to the very beginning and I start looking up each note on

the page that was referenced so I can see it in its entirety in this context so for example I'll go to the very first page number which in this case is VII and I'll look it up and I'll look up that note which I have marked up um in the book and I'll read the actual context from which this note came from if I've determined that something is valuable enough for for me to add to my zal Coston then I create a main card for it so let's take a look let's take a look at

some of my main cards I've created already for this particular book the first thing we need to get into the habit of doing before we create a new main card and this is really really important is you first need to determine where does this card belong this is really the essential part of creating a zocin and it needs to be considered even before you even create the card so in our case since we're creating our very first card it should be rather straightforward there's only one place to put it and that's like right in the

main card section cuz we don't have any other cards but as you um incorporate more cards and add more cards to your zedel ctin you want to be going through them and finding out okay where does this note or piece of information where does it make the most sense in the cards that I already have and you want to be filing it as closely to its most related card card if that makes any sense um the first thing I did um was to create a category to file all of my main cards for the book

under first again I let the source material dictate the category and the hierarchy here and I created a simple card called mind with the number one on it in the upper right hand corner and I like to write it on the blank side on the back but you can do whatever you want I wanted the category to be pretty generic so that future sources can be nested underneath it how also it's however it's also important for you to know that I'm currently researching things related to the mind for my the intellectual life project which is

a newsletter and some YouTube videos and a bunch of stuff I'm kind of researching so having a project in mind though really helps make this whole process so much easier so I highly recommend you have a project and reason for creating a zle ctin in the first place before you go about creating one rather than just reading a bunch of random books and just creating a bunch of random notes it helps to actually be doing research and having a purpose for the books and the sources that you're you're reading you have to remember that the

whole point is not to just collect a whole bunch of random pieces of information which is one of the reasons why I like the analog way and not the digital way the Digital Way allows it too easy for you to just copy and paste and get a whole bunch of stuff and just shove it into a markdown file or something like that having a little bit more friction and actually writing things out by hand again furthers the selection process and remember that the whole point of a zle Conant is not to collect and store in

like personal Knowledge Management you're not managing knowledge here the whole point is to Output you're supposed to do something with all these main cards and all this research and create work that you're going to share with other other people and with the world so then I created a um another category underneath mind which is I'm just calling life of the mind or the intellectual life again this is a little confusing because that's also the name of the book but it's also part of a project I'm doing based upon the book um so I have mind

is a more General topic I put the number one and then I have another subtopic life of the Mind the intellectual life because again this is like my first source and then I do one/ one so the first one is for the Mind card and the parent card and then for the second card or the child card I'm putting this one SL one here um a lot of people get really confused by the numbering system in zastin and honestly it really doesn't matter the numbering system is completely arbitrary and you you can use whatever system

you want for now just use what I'm doing to get started you can always change it later like you could use letters you could do one/ a you could do one hyphen a you could do one do a 1.1 it doesn't really matter this is it's really important that you don't get hung up on the number numbers and try to get everything Perfect all in the beginning you should really embrace your mistakes and the chaos and Scott talks about that in his book as you gain more experience with all of this you will might most

likely change how you number and organize things and that's expected the reason why I can say the numbering system is kind of arbitrary and it doesn't really matter is that you have your index here and this is going to tell you where everything is located so the numbering system the reason why it can be kind of random and why you can change it throughout the course of your zost as you further develop it is that the index is your source of truth it's your map it's your table of contents and this tells you where everything's

located so seriously don't stress about the numbers just follow my example or use some of the examples in Scott's book just to get started okay so let's take a look at some examples from um my own zon here this will kind of help you a little bit I'm just going to take all of my main cards out okay so we covered in last section the Mind category the number one right and then here's like the child category of that so this would be the parent life of the Mind one/ one and then we get into

the first card so mind is one the next category is one/ one and so for my first card I filed it under 1/1 sl0 um in this case I used a zero um the reason why is that I'm pretty sure this was actually not the first card that I had created the first card I had created with the one so the first card I believe if I'm not mistaken was 1/1 SL1 um but then again like I was telling you earlier it's really important that when you're creating cards you're finding the best place to add

them and I felt like this card should go in front of this other card so in order for me to do that I just put a zero now if you already have a zero you could also use negative numbers too so if something wanted to go in front of this card I do one sl11 or something like that and this is what I mean by being flexible uh if you create your first card and find that one should go in front of it again use a negative number use a letter whatever kind of convention that

makes the most sense to you so let's break down kind of like how this works and all this information that's on this card the first thing I write in the top leftand corner is like a brief little topic or summary about what this card is actually about so this card is about the dangers of the intellectual life taken from the intellectual life book in the middle this is my note and so I've wrote and written the intellectual life can be a dangerous life and and C Lunch says certain vices and things that you can have

and why it can be dangerous and then down here again this is my catalog system this stands for sour Source number two which if I look on my catalog card is for this book The intellectual life right and then um the page number of where I got this so this is coming from the introduction which is why it's X II um you could see other cards like this uninteresting subjects and people um he's talking about the zone of silence and notice how these are like incrementing one by one you can see I made some mistakes

here this is the third card and now here's where things kind of get a little bit interesting I want to um introduce to you this concept of branching so you don't necessarily have to be creating cards sequentially just like boom boom boom boom boom one after the other sometimes you have a card where you want to go deeper and expand upon that thought and so that's what I call branching so if you look at this card it looks like a normal card 1 SL one sl3 but then if you look at the next card it

goes 1/13 hyphen one so I'm using the hyphens to denote that this card is not a a different card it's it's directly related and furthering the thought of this one so that's why I'm branching down like this and then you'll see the card behind it starts up 1/14 this is kind of a New Concept and a new idea that's not directly related to this one so again I've got card in front of this and then I've got this card here follow God step by step don't dwell on the past these are these two cards are

like the same thought which is why they've branched like this and then once the branching kind of stops I go into one SL1 sl4 so as you go through your bib card and your book and you're creating main cards always remember to review the cards that you already have and find the spot for your new card you want to put the new card card closest to the card that is most related or relevant right so this is why when I was creating these cards here this was the first card I created but then I felt

like this card should actually go in front of this one so I put the zero and then when I came across another piece of information the zone of Silence I thought was directly most related to this one so that's why I put it behind it and things like that you got to remember that proximity is really the key here don't just file your cards randomly and put random arbitrary numbers and just shove them in the box the whole idea is to keep all your closely related ideas as close to each other as possible and one

of the reasons why the analog zostant is so much better than some digital tool is because for each new main card you create you're constantly reviewing your other cards in your box so you're constantly refreshing your mind and memory of what already exists and you're doing that before you then file the next card and this is really next to Impossible digitally and it's nowhere near the same even if you could really do it digitally so this kind of like tactile physical handling of the cards is what really imprint these ideas in your mind and memory

and then of course you're physically writing the notes which there's been countless research I'm not going to go into detail now of how um memory retention is so much better when you physically write with a pen and paper rather than just typing on a keyboard um again showing um how things will change over time you let me show you how um I quote unquote made some mistakes using the um Zed Al costen numbering system from Scott way so originally my first cards were had to do with zeton kind of meta I have a zeton and

then my notes are about Coston I was basing um those notes and cards upon Scott's book which again get a copy of that and I was using his five um category system the academic disciplines um and so you'll notice here I have numbers one and one and then the zoc cin is like 4,225 and all these kind of things like this um this isn't really a mistake this is just I realized after trying this system it doesn't wasn't really working for me so then I created my own system and so the point of me showing

you this is that you can have different numbering systems and this is going to change over time as you get more comfortable and more experienced and that's okay because we have our index to tell us where this information is located at this point your zalasin should have your index cards right in the index section with your um dividers if you have them uh one letter per card and now we're going to learn how to actually use um our index so we need to First reference the categories in our main cards in our index so we

know where Define things so let's take a look at the my index for example um if you look at this C card this is when I was using Scott system you could see that I had a computer science and 4200 I had communication within information Theory and this is the address for that card um if I go to let's say um the letter M right remember I've got a category here mind with the number one so in my on my M card I'm going to write mind which is that category and then the number one

so this way I know when I'm coming back into my ZL cant I got to think oh yeah I have a section on M where where is that located I just go to the the letter M and then I pull out my M card and the index and it tells me it's the number one then um my next card my next category is one/ one right right behind the Mind card and it has life of the mind and the intellectual life so I kind of doubled this just in case I um thought one way or

the other so I created um on my L card if I go to L in my Index right you'll see here here's L life of the mind 1/1 and then also um I can go to I for the intellectual life and look at that card and then I've got the intellectual life 1/1 um I'm not keeping track if it has the' in the title I'm not going to track that that'll just get way out of hand so I'm just skipping the T forthe and just going to intellectual life which is why I filed it under

uh I and then the thing to remember is that you're not supposed to file um every single index card in your Z zaltin into your index so it's not like I have a reference in my index for every single card that I've got right here I only have some of the main categories right now and cards that I kind of want to call out or draw attention to but the basic premise here is that you basically just want to write down and keep track of things so you can easily find them in the future so

the next time I want to see cards related to the life of the mind and my project I will look for the L right I'll go to life of the mind which is L find my L card here it tells me it's in 1/1 and then I go to my main cards I find mind is one and then life of the Mind One SL one and then now I can dig in and find all the cards related to it and it's really that simple okay so now we have our Index right we have our main

cards but we still have our bib cards here and the catalog the bib cards get filed um for me in alphabetical order by the author's last name which is why I put the author's last name first on my bib cards you can file them another way if you want this is just the way that I've personally chosen to do it as you create more and more bib cards you'll probably want to purchase another set of these alphabetical dividers like we have in our index and use those for your bb cards but since my zocon is

fairly new um I don't really need one right now and neither do you so at least in the very early stages I just file my bip cards in the back like so and as you can see this is one of the reasons why I really like this box is that it has um four different compartments and one for each section of my zle Cen so now for the catalog system I've created it's very very simple in Scott's book he has you keep track of all your sources in a computer program called zoto which is a

really excellent program by the way but and it's completely free and open source however I wanted an analog system and did not want my zost to have any dependencies outside of it it's really important to me personally that everything is self-contained in this box I don't want to have to then open up a program and look at that and then God forbid that database of zetero gets compromised and then I lose all of my sources which are written down on my cards and I'm kind of screwed so I wanted everything self-contained you can do whatever

you want with yours and experiment and try different things my catalog again we've gone over this I take out an index card I write down each source and the number and that's it it's as simple as it can possibly get and then another added little bonus and benefit is this way too I can see how many sources are in my zle Coston not that that information is particularly uh necessary but it's kind of neat and interesting for me to know anyways okay so I hope you found this video helpful and hopefully you're intimidated and overwhelmed

is there's really like a lot of confusing information online about how to create and use a zedel ctin like I mentioned several times before already make sure to get a copy of Scott's books if you really want to dig into this and go deeper this book is well over 500 pages it's close to 600 pages and I can't possibly cover that much material in a single video uh in the comment section let me know if you have any questions and I'll do what I can to try and help you thanks for watching cheers