Thinking and Doing in 2025: Zettelkasten and More

Some reflections on composition and productivity in the past year

Fireworks from a Ski Jump | Flickr Commons

Just like that, we’ve lost another one. It’s gone. Goodbye, Year! Happy Trails! We’ll never see you again! Thanks for all the work you did for us, 2024! Enjoy your new job at who knows where! Reach out to us on LinkedIn! We hope you get to play plenty of pickleball in retirement!

A (Microscopic) Year in Review

I’m going on one year of running this Substack. My first post, written 1/18/24, was a movie review of Paul Roland’s Exemplum (a movie worth watching, by the way). It was both the first and the last movie review I wrote. Funny how you think something is a good idea until you start doing it. I’m not altogether interested in writing movie reviews on a regular basis. If you’ve been reading this Substack, you probably know that by now. Since then, I’ve tried to write things that interest me (to keep me writing) and that I think might interest you. It’s not always easy.

Be a pal and request that I write about something specific one of these days, will you? You can leave a comment on this post, message me through Substack, or simply email me.

Some of the more popular articles on this site from 2024 have included “Writing as Thinking: What We Lose with Generative AI,” “The 10 Most Helpful Tips for How to Read a Book” (a joke), “AI and the Tech Idiot Framework” (not a joke), and this existential quiz.

In today’s article, I want to share with you some of the more interesting intellectual delicatessen I have stumbled upon over the past year.

You already have way too much to read, watch, or listen to. I know. I’m aware I’m not doing you any favors by giving you more to consume. However, in doing my duty as a human alternative to an algorithmic recommendation, I’m going to offer you some unsolicited advice on how to cultivate some thoughtful reflection, do your own thinking, and grow intellectually in 2025.

A Note on Productivity and Hustle Culture

A brief comment before getting started. I often feel the urge to satirize hustle culture and the cult of productivity as an outgrowth of the self-help movement. I’m certain that Walker Percy would. In many ways, the drive to be more productive is an expression of what Josef Pieper (following Max Weber, I believe) calls the world of total work (WTW).

In the WTW, you’re not real unless you’re working or producing something. The WTW makes work an idol. It is a very dangerous and altogether taken for granted presupposition in our society today.

Nevertheless, we’re not called to be totally unproductive, either. St. Thomas Aquinas refers to teaching as a spiritual act of mercy. When we move someone from a state of ignorance to a state of knowledge, we’re doing something good for them (and likewise when they do the same for us). If I want to be a good teacher, I have to be productive, at least in some sense.

With the goal of teaching, delighting, and moving (especially for the sake of The Good), then, allow me to recommend resources related to productivity in a digital age that I’ve found helpful in 2024. If you like them, maybe you’ll use them in 2025, as I plan to do.

Zettelkasten

Luhmann Being the Luh-Man | Credit: Universitätsarchiv St. Gallen | Wikimedia | CC BY-SA 4.0 | Cropped

If writing is a form of thinking, then so is writing notes and correlating them with one another. In many ways, taking notes is an art. I didn’t fully comprehend this fact until learning about Zettelkasten.

A Zettelkasten is an instrument for encouraging non-linear composition and intellectual discovery. Zettelkasten is a fun German word (as many German words are) simply meaning “slip box.” The book that everyone seems to cite related to Zettelkasten is How to Take Smart Notes by Sönke Ahrens. On the whole, Ahrens’ book gives you an overview of how to make your own “slip box,” whether that be digital or analogue. Ahrens and others interested in Zettelkasten/evergreen note taking really seem to understand writing not necessarily as a way of getting pre-formed thoughts onto a page but as a form of thinking.

Niklas Luhmann, an oftentimes impenetrable German thinker, allegedly used a Zettelkasten to write scores of articles and books. Per Ahrens, Luhmann published 58 books and hundreds of articles. His slips functioned as notes. He wrote something like 9,000 notes (or six per day). Ahrens does quite a bit of reflecting on how Luhmann did what he did (and the theory behind it). But why would you want to do something like build your own slip box filled with thousands of notes?

Per Ahrens, when you write a note, you have to elaborate. Elaboration facilitates learning. Using a Zettelkasten also requires you to relate your new notes to old notes you’ve already taken. This process of relating one note to another necessarily shifts ideas into new contexts, which can produce insights. You begin to say, “I didn’t realize how the problem of bureaucracy could be related to the role of images in Homer’s Iliad.” I know it sounds strange, but this insight is something currently brewing in my own slip box. Projects will begin to develop from the bottom up if you look in your Zettelkasten for topics to write on.

Keeping a Zettelkasten could also help make your reading (and not simply your writing) more coherent. Luhmann himself said, “I always read with an eye towards possible connections in the slip box” (as cited in Ahrens 73). If your reading feels scattered, it is probably because you’re reading without a purpose. Before you pick up yet another new book, take a peek in your slip box. What do you need to be reading to develop your thoughts along this, that, or the other line?

Essentially, if you want to make your own Zettelkasten, you need three things: fleeting notes, source material notes, and “main notes.” Both Ahrens and Odysseas (linked below) make these distinctions.

Fleeting notes are things you capture on the fly (e.g., in a little notebook you carry around). These are ideas you have throughout the day. These more evanescent notes then may or may not crystallize into “main notes,” which must relate to other main notes in your slip box. Main notes are evergreen (or “atomic”) and relate to one another. Source notes are precisely that: Notes you store in your Zettelkasten about the books (sources) you’re reading.

Andy Matuschak’s website gives you an idea of what a digital Zettelkasten might look like in addition to having very helpful notes explaining concepts behind higher-level note-writing (NB: Matuschak says he’s doing something different but related to Luhmann). One of the most helpful things I learned from Matuschak is the relative uselessness of tags and the importance of context in linking one main note to another.

You can also learn more about Zettelkasten at Zettelkasten.de, the Zettelkasten reddit community, or Bob Doto’s blog.

In case you’re wondering, I use Obsidian (a free tool) for my own Zettelkasten. I used this video by Odysseas to get the thing up and running, but I have since made a few alterations to the system based upon reading the work of Matuschak and others in the Zettelkasten community (i.e., discovering the need for outlines, the uselessness of tags, the necessity of referencing other main notes in-line, etc.).

The constant danger with this whole note-taking movement is procrastination, as this Substack post by Sasha Chapin points out. If you don’t eventually turn your notes into written artifacts and/or if they don’t actually help your own thinking to develop, you’re wasting your time. You’re deluding yourself into thinking that you’re doing something important. Don’t do that to yourself.

At present, I think of my Zettelkasten as an experiment in thinking. I’m not sure what will become of it. I started it back in August. Here I am four months later, still tinkering with it. If you choose to make your own Zettelkasten, just make sure it is functional for you (i.e., make sure it is actually useful). If it’s not useful, then be a good utilitarian and can it.

There are plenty of other ways to profitably spend your time, such as compulsively checking your email and letting it control your life. Only kidding.

Email with Merlin Mann

If you want to spend less time in 2025 reading emails, except for emails from my Substack (of course), then look no further than Merlin Mann’s Inbox Zero series for inspiration.

Mann’s website has been going strong for almost 20 years. Mann helped me better understand why a certain person I really admired would send me the equivalent of a 16-character Morse code message: This person understood email gobbled up his time like nothing else. He wasn’t trying to be rude. I just didn’t realize (at the time) how much strain email can put on your mind. Now I do.

It is uncharitable to write a long email when a short one would suffice.

What else does Mann help you recognize? Every time you look at an email and put it off until later, just letting it stew in that inbox of yours, you’re doing yourself a disservice. Despite his occasionally irreverent tone, Mann provides actionable advice for making email figure less prominently in your day-to-day routine.

Getting Things Done (GTD)

David Allen | Photo By: Vera De Kok | Wikimedia | CC BY-SA 4.0 | Cropped

Finally, I’ve been relying on David Allen’s Getting Things Done and the Todoist app to work through what I need to do on a regular basis. Allen’s book is all about how to cope with information overload at work. By themselves, calendars, daily to-do lists, inboxes, and priority codes cannot cope with the new information environment. We need something more: a methodology for getting things done in an information-saturated digital milieu.

Our minds torture us with things we need to do, especially when we can’t do them. Thanks, Mind!

Allen observes that simply writing down what we need to do can have the same effect on our phenomenological experience as actually doing it. Otherwise put: Writing down what you need to do has the same effect on your anxiety level as actually doing it. This insight may sound like common sense. But how do we write it down? Where to write it? When?

Allen’s five steps (Capture, Clarify, Organize, Reflect, and Engage) help you, as the title of his book suggests, get things done. If you can do your task, whatever it is, in under two minutes, then do it. If you’re writing one or two word entries in your to do list, you need to change these to imperative sentences that specify next actions. Insights like these have been particularly useful for me. Altogether, his book takes you beyond the calendar and unrefined to do list into a deeper meditation on how to structure your work (and do it) in a digital age.

What Has Worked for You?

So now, as I bid you adieu, I ask: What did you find especially helpful in 2024? Was there anything that helped you write more, think better, or get things done? Occasionally, we need to reflect on our reflection, write about our writing, and pause to consider how we’re going about our day-to-day tasks.

I say this not as your self-help guru but simply as a fellow traveler, a poor wayfarin’ stranger, a castaway on some weird, digital, deserted island. Be a friend and write back.