Look at the highlights of your highlights and re-write the interesting ones in your own words. You're now turning your fleeting notes into a literature note. It's okay not to summarize every highlight. Only worry about the information you most want to learn or that you can foresee wanting to use in the future.

The way people choose their keywords shows clearly if they think like an archivist or a writer. Do they wonder where to store a note or how to retrieve it? The archivist asks: Which keyword is the most fitting? A writer asks: In which circumstances will I want to stumble upon this note, even if I forget about it? It is a crucial difference.

Choosing the right keywords or tags for your Zettelkasten allows it to work as a non-hierarchical database of your knowledge and ideas. As you collect notes related to a given topic, you start building the raw materials for a finished piece. But your first instincts for how to choose keywords for a note may hurt more than they help. This quote from

The four main contexts around which I’ve designed my own rituals are: active, lying down, reclining, and upright. This

Mind Management, Not Time Management

So, resist the urge to copy and paste. Even when you're recording an exact quote, take the extra effort to re-write it (very carefully!) You'll be surprised what you discover.

Associative thinking promotes a positive mood, so it shouldn't be a surprise how fun this task is.

Experienced academic readers usually read a text with questions in mind and try to relate it to other possible approaches, while inexperienced readers tend to adopt the question of a text and the frames of the argument and take it as a given. What good readers can do is spot the limitations of a particular approach and see what is not mentioned in

Unlike a card-catalog in an old library, the purpose of a Zettelkasten is not to find an individual note, but rather to explore the connections amongst notes.