At the center of the system is the zettelkasten—an object and a practice—a thing and a way to do things. The term comes from German, usually translated as “slip box” or “note box,” less often, “card catalog,” terms with which you may be familiar.

To enhance the value of captured facts, it’s best to rephrase them in your own words.

Whenever you have an idea that’s built off of, or speaks directly to what someone else has said, bring the quoted passage into your main note. You can accomplish this by either pasting the entire quote into your note, or by referring to the reference note where it can be found.

link to another idea—are so important that if your notes were to contain nothing else, you’d be well on your way to writing reams of prose.

These two elements—a single idea and a

Once we attempt to put our ideas on the page, words that previously strutted self-assuredly across our synapses become sheepish and soft-spoken.

Any notes that seem hard to process, but are still relevant to your thinking, should be moved to a “Sleeping” folder.

“The mind is for having ideas, not holding them.”7 Taken from David Allen’s seminal text on productivity, Getting Things Done, this idea, above all others, binds lawyers to Luddites, helping thousands who struggle to put ideas into action.

A zettelkasten is a method. In addition to being an object, a zettelkasten is a methodology—a way to capture ideas in notes, establish relationships between them, and leverage both for knowledge work. The formula is relatively straight forward: Capture ideas in the form of fleeting and/or reference notes. Turn these captures into individual main no