Merchants and traders have a waste book (Sudelbuch, Klitterbuch in German I believe) in which they enter daily everything they purchase and sell, messily, without order. From this, it is transferred to their journal, where everything appears more systematic, and finally to a ledger, in double entry after the Italian manner of bookkeeping, where one…
I'm just wrapping up a year of maintaining my bullet journal practice using index cards instead of the more popular notebook form factor. It's heavily inspired by the century+ old Memindex method. AMA
Over the weekend I had the good fortune to hear about a little stationery shop 10 minutes from my house. Baum-kuchen is a spectacular little space hiding over on Lincoln in Altadena with a warm, wabi-sabi (わびさび) charm. The business began in 2010, but opened up their physical location in 2019. Obviously not the most…
Back on April 7th on a visit to the Kinokuniya bookstore/Maido stationery shop in the Santa Anita Mall, I picked up an A6 size horizontal Flatty Works case #5460 (forest green, H4.8×W6.8×D1.4in) made by King Jim. It was listed at US$20.50+tax. The case is also available in mustard yellow, beige, teal, and a dark blue.…
Wilson Memindex Co., Rochester, NY It was fascinating to run across the Memindex, a productivity tool from the Wilson Memindex Co., advertised in a December 1906 issue of System: The Magazine of Business. Memindex seems to be an obvious portmanteau of the words memory and index. Let YOUR MIND GO FREE Do not tax your…
As humans we're terrifically spectacular at separating things based on perceived categories. The Dewey Decimal System systematically separates mathematics and history into disparate and distinct locations, but your zettelkasten shouldn't force this by overthinking categories. Perhaps the overlap of math and history is exactly the interdisciplinary topic you're working toward? If this is the case,…
Abstract Scholar and historian S.D. Goitein built and maintained a significant collection of over 27,000 notes in the form of a card index (or zettelkasten1) which he used to fuel his research and academic writing output in the mid to late twentieth century. The collection was arranged broadly by topical categories and followed in the…
Index Card "Notebooks"? Before I go the DIY route, has anyone seen gummed 4 x 6" index cards available for sale? I'd love to have a bunch of index cards temporarily glued together almost in notebook form for easy use and portability. I'm looking for something along the lines of traditional note pads or memo…
Filling up notebooks is great - but what happens when you need one obscure factoid that's stashed somewhere among dozens of notebooks? Searchability is Analog's Achilles heel.
Introducing Indxd
I wanted a simple, searchable index of all the topics in all my notebooks. So I built it, and you can use it too.
Indxd lets you quickly enter notebooks and their topics, then search and browse everything.
INDXD is a digital, web-based index tool for your analog notebooks. Ostensibly allows one to digitally index their paper notebooks (page numbers optional). It emails you weekly text updates, so you've got a back up of your data if the site/service disappears. This could potentially be used by those who have analog zettelkasten practices, but…
What do we mean when we say Zettelkasten? There’s a specific set of objects (cards and boxes or their digital equivalents), but there’s also a spectrum of methods or practices which can be split into two broad categories. TL;DR Historically, Zettelkasten as used to describe both Luhmann’s notes and his method is patently in the…
In "On Intellectual Craftsmanship" (1952), C. Wright Mills talks about his methods for note taking, thinking, and analysis in what he calls "sociological imagination". This is a sociologists' framing of their own research and analysis practice and thus bears a sociological related name. While he talks more about the thinking, outlining, and writing process rather…
Many people mistakenly credit Niklas Luhmann with the invention of the zettelkasten method, so I've been delving into historical note taking practices. I've recently come across a well known and influential book on historical method from the late 1800s that has well described version of the slip (box) method. Originally published in French in 1897…
There aren't many published copies of annotated books out there, but you can get a limited edition replica of Francis Ford Coppola's prompt book The Godfather Notebook for the movie's 50th anniversary. It includes Coppola's handwritten annotations on Mario Puzo's novel.
Given many of the misconceptions I see online of how to keep a zettelkasten, particularly given the focus on the arcane addressing system used by Niklas Luhmann, perhaps it may be helpful to dramatically reframe the question of how to keep a zettelkasten? One page blog posts from people who've only recently seen the idea…
I thought it might be useful to have a relatively complete list of cross linked topical headings in my digital notebook (currently Obsidian) which is a mélange of wiki, zettelkasten, journal, project management tool, notebook, and productivity tool. First, let's be honest that mélange is too poetic based on what I see of how others…
