The Zettelkasten method makes reading complicated texts less frustrating. You’re not necessarily trying to understand the whole text. You’re just hunting down ideas to incorporate into your Zettelkasten. Who cares if you don’t understand everything? As long as you’re extracting some ideas, you’re growing your knowledge base and the text is being useful to you.

Reading doesn’t magically increase your knowledge. Just because some text has entered your eyeballs and visited your short-term memory, that doesn’t mean you’ve learned from it. In fact, if all you’re doing is reading — and you’re doing so for any purpose other than entertainment — then you’re wasting your time. What has only entered your short-term memory will eventually be forgotten and is useless in the long term. Years later, it’ll be as if you had never read that book or that article.

The Theoretical Stuff on Note Taking & Zettelkasten Communicating with Slip Boxes by Niklas Luhmann http://luhmann.surge.sh/communicating-with-slip-boxes Luhmann on Learning How to Read https://takingnotenow.blogspot.de/2007/12/luhmann-on-learning-how-to-read.html C. Wright Mills, “On Intellectual Craftsmanship,” from The Sociological Imagination. Oxford University Press. 1960. https://archivingthecity.files.wordpress.com/2011/01/mills_on_intellctual_craftmanship.pdf The How-To Stuff on Note Taking & Zettelkasten Chapter 4, “The Work Plan and the Index Cards” in Umberto Eco, How to Write a Thesis

Posts from the Zettelkasten blog: Create a Zettelkasten for your Notes to Improve Thinking and Writing https://zettelkasten.de/posts/zettelkasten-improves-thinking-writing/ Making Proper Marks in Books https://zettelkasten.de/posts/making-proper-marks-in-books/ Create Zettel from Reading Notes https://zettelkasten.de/posts/create-zettel-from-reading-notes/ Manage Citations for a Zettelkasten https://zettelkasten.de/posts/bibliography-zettelkasten/ Extend Your Mind and Memory With a Zettelkasten https://zettelkasten.de/posts/extend-your-mind-and-memory-with-a-zettelkasten/ Preparing Fragments Helps You to Ease Into Writing https://zettelkasten.de/posts/ease-into-writing/ The Collector’s Fallacy https://zettelkasten.de/posts/collectors-fallacy/ Learn Faster by Writing Zettel Notes https://zettelkasten.de/posts/learn-faster-by-writing-zettel-notes/ You Only Find What You Have Identified https://zettelkasten.de/posts/add-identity/ Reading Habits: Putting It All Together https://zettelkasten.de/posts/reading-putting-it-all-together/

The basic idea behind Zettelkasten is to build a repository of the knowledge you gain through the years. The idea is similar to what Paul Jun, of Creative Mastery, writes about keeping a Commonplace Book, or Ryan Holiday’s notecard system. Zettelkasten adds the powerful idea of linking notes to create a web of interlinked knowledge.