Month: January 2026

Niklas Luhmann’s Zettelkasten Method One Pager (1968)

The internet is now rife with what I call “zettelkasten method one pagers” that describe what many people rightly (or very often wrongly) think that Niklas Luhmann’s zettelkasten method entails. 

While doing some research about Luhmann’s numbering system’s antecedents, I recently came across a “one pager” (typescript) written by Luhmann himself in the form of some lecture notes from 1968 that folks may appreciate.

Luhmann, Niklas. 1968-01-13. “Ms. 2906: Technik des Zettelkastens.” Münster, Germany. Lecture Notes. Niklas Luhmann Archiv, https://niklas-luhmann-archiv.de/bestand/manuskripte/manuskript/MS_2906_0001.

Seemingly everyone with a blog that ran across the idea of Zettelkasten in the last decade or so wrote up their own description of what it is.  If you know of other blog posts about zettelkasten, let me know for my collection.

Of special note to those who are still under the misapprehension that Luhmann “invented the zettelkasten”, in the closing section of his 1968 notes he writes “In conclusion: from personal experience, others work differently” by which one understands that he’s aware of others who use similar systems and admits that they’re all idiosyncratic to their individual users. I would suspect that he gave this lecture while at Sozialforschungsstelle an der Universität Münster (Social Research Centre of the University of Münster) to students about how to arrange and do their own sociology research work.

Book Club: Steven Pinker’s When Everyone Knows That Everyone Knows

Dan Allosso has been hosting a regular book club since Autumn 2021, centered around sense making, note taking, and topics like economics, history, sociology, and anthropology. (See our list of past books to get an idea of topic coverage.) Our next iteration over the coming month or so will focus on Steven Pinker’s most recent book on knowledge:

Pinker, Steven. 2025. When Everyone Knows That Everyone Knows . . .: Common Knowledge and the Mysteries of Money, Power, and Everyday Life. New York: Scribner.

The first session will be on Saturday, January 10, 2026, and will recur weekly from 8:00 AM – 10:00 Pacific. Our meetings are welcoming and casual conversations over Zoom with the optional beverage of your choice. We’ll cover the first three chapters in the first meeting and the book will likely consume three meetings in all over the coming month.

To join and get access to the Zoom links and the shared Obsidian vault we use for notes and community communication, ping Dan Allosso with your email address. 

Happy reading!

A clever affordance of card index filing cabinet drawers

Someone recently mentioned to me that the small, portable 1,000 index card capacity cardboard box with lid that they use as a zettelkasten felt more like it was for deep storage rather than daily use. Perhaps it’s a result of the fact that this is how most people have been using these cheaper cardboard boxes for the last 30+ years? They said they’d prefer to have a drawer or a box with an attached lid. 

It dawns on me that I’ve never mentioned one of the great affordances of many of the older card index cabinets is that they’re designed to be able to completely remove one or more drawers at a time and use at your desk. On an almost daily basis, I pull out at least one drawer from my cabinet and place it on my desk and it allows me to actively work with collections of over 7,000 cards at a time. This means that while the cabinet itself may seem like deep or “cold” storage, it’s really ongoing active storage that I can quickly and easily interact with depending on the range of projects I may be dealing with on a given day. Working on a different project for a bit? Put one drawer away and pull another…

Several of my cabinets have not only pull handles on the front of the drawers, but also have cut-out handles in the rear to be able to easily pull them out and move them around. This feature was also the reason many cabinets also had card rods. The cards could be physically held into the drawers to prevent the user from accidentally tipping the drawer and loosing all the cards into a random pile on the floor.  Robert Pirsig describes a sad affair similar to this in his book Lila: An Inquiry into Morals (Bantam Books, 1991).

Angle on a Steelcase card index drawer and chassis. The back of the drawer features a hole just large enough to put one's hand through to make carrying the drawer as a tray easier.

Of course at the end of the day I can quickly slot the drawer right back into the cabinet for that clean desk look. And because today is the one year anniversary of the Eaton Fire, I’ll mention that it’s also pretty easy to pull a few of your favorite drawers out of the filing cabinet for fleeing your home office, evacuating your town, and being able to work for four months remotely. (Just remember to seat belt those drawers into the back seat if you don’t have card rods!)