- [Dan Sheffler's adaptation](http://www.dansheffler.com/blog/2015-08-11-going-from-reading-to-notes/): is this bit of information worth remembering? [[one thought or idea per note]] - invented by [[Niklas Luhmann]], a German scholar; he invented hyperlinks before the invention of the [[world-wide-web]] - [[modularity]] - different from [[commonplace book method]] - like [[democracy]] and [[decentralization]]: divide up the labor (knowledge) into separate parts and unify them as a whole - frees up [[working memory]] so you can focus on developing rather than remember your thoughts and ideas # Idea [[modularity|Modularity]]: Each note should only contain one thought/idea. Focus on elaborating connections instead of hierarchy, which emerges later on. Summarize the key idea in my own words below (i.e., this section), which can change based on changing connections (section above). # References - [Excellent Reddit reply on how it speaks with you](https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/hl7y07/how_is_this_supposed_to_work/fwyboac/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x) - [Another Reddit post on the "pure" method](https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/gzlfzv/what_is_luhmanns_zettelkasten/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x) - https://zk.zettel.page/z-index.html - http://www.markwk.com/smart-notes.html - [Dan Sheffler's reading notes](http://dansheffler.com/blog/2015-08-10-reading-notes/) - https://leananki.com/zettelkasten-method-smart-notes/ - https://sometimesright.com/2020/08/22/zettelkasten-bear/ > You can say that the Zettelkasten creates permanent mental scaffolds for thinking. > Anyway, because there were no categories, there were also no hierarchies — or more appropriately, hierarchies didn’t form until they made sense. In other words, hierarchies were emerged instead of established from the start. That allowed new ideas to form — not to mention high-level insights that wouldn’t even cross anyone’s mind. > It’s as if Luhmann was deliberately countering the flow at which specializations emerged from disciplines. Instead of starting from the top — a predetermined specialization — he starts from the bottom, the content, and then builds them back up into new topics. > If you can’t imagine it yet, here’s a simple example of how topics emerged: > If you had the notes “cat”, “dog”, “duck”, “mouse” — a new hierarchy would emerge to organize them, called “animals”. “Animals” didn’t exist at first. Heck, it wasn’t even predetermined. But because you recognized the meaning lurking in those four notes, that higher-level hierarchy emerged. Put simply, topics would come from the patterns you recognize from your notes. > In a Zettelkasten, the hierarchy where the note “belongs”, is emerged rather than predetermine > if your Zettelkasten app has a network graph that shows links between notes (like Obsidian, Roam, Stroll, TiddlyRoam, Tinderbox and others) you’ll start to see ‘unexpected clusters’ form (I.e., a small network of links between a group of notes, which you had not noticed before. That is often the Zettelkasten’s way of “telling you” that these notes need a ‘summary note’ to glue them together, or that there is a topic there waiting to be discovered.