“Zettelkasten” is a system of learning and organizing personal knowledge. The word is German for “box of notes” - the method used by a famous sociologist named Niklas Luhmann to organize his thoughts. He wrote over 70 books and 400+ scholarly articles, and was prolific for how he consumed knowledge and organized his thoughts. Zettelkasten started as a physical note taking method but can be represented in a number of ways in software. Roam is probably one of the most well known of those tools.

As we move into a default-remote workspace, it’s increasingly important to build better systems of reading and writing together. Methods like Zettelkasten provide hints of what this world could look like for personal and networked knowledge management.