The issue isn’t that you’re not taking enough notes. It’s that most systems are built for archiving , not exploration. They encourage collecting over engaging. You highlight passages, copy quotes, or jot down insights, but unless you do something with them, they just sit there—gathering digital dust.

My old belief was that storing all these links in a souped-up database would lead me to magically generate new insights about the topics I write about. After several years of banging my head into a wall, I realized that to generate new insights from these links I would need a new approach.

That led me to Zettelkasten, a technique for creating webs o... See more