• Dec 26th, 2025
• by Sascha

Dear Zettlers,

Here are some universal questions for any note-taking system.

What do you want to build for your future self? The ability to store a note quickly, for example, benefits your present self. Possessing a valuable note is what your future self will be grateful for. Since the Zettelkasten aims to be a lifelong partner, it is a future-oriented tool. This orientation is methodologically correct, since you are not keeping notes for yourself, but for your future self. Your actions should therefore not be aimed at making it easy now, but valuable, and first and foremost, to create value in the future.

What is the nature of a good note? One of the core ideas of the Zettelkasten Method is to ask this question. There are two parts external, such as the title, tags, etc., and internal, which is the actual content. I put a heavy emphasis on this issue because of experience. All too often, I felt betrayed by my past self, creating a bad note. A more meta-perspective on the difference between bad and good notes is that a bad note is a task for your future self. A good note is an accomplished task that your future self can then build on.

What are the tools you want to create within your system? In my opinion, there is too much emphasis on retrieval in the domain of personal knowledge management. Yes, sometimes you need to retrieve a piece of information from your system. But the bigger and more complex your system is, the less you know what you retrieve. Imagine you are searching for a new pair of hiking shoes because your old ones are giving up. You cannot retrieve information. You also shouldn’t just search for shoes and filter through a big list of all shoes or all hiking shoes. The best way is to find a page that explains what makes a good hiking shoe, then offers you a limited number of options. So, you want an entry point that offers a limited number of options, guided by concise information. When I, for example, want to think about the hero’s journey, I don’t just want to retrieve my notes about the hero’s journey. I want an entry point that informs me, at the same time, about the most important lines of thinking. The Zettelkasten shouldn’t just offer a set of notes but provide a space for notes (mathematically speaking). Why? Because it is way more valuable and scales to large sets of notes. That is why I ask myself when processing notes into my Zettelkasten: What structures can I build that serve as tools for my future self? I don’t just store notes but create entry points to topics, thinking canvases, and spines for later lines of thinking.

What am I doing that is scaling to an infinite number of notes? This is a critical question, since the number of notes will be huge if you stick to one system for the rest of your life. Using tags to create connections, for example, doesn’t scale. The more you use a specific tag, the more you dilute already existing connections. Connections through tags are basically pointers from a particular note to a growing tag cloud. Direct links are not changing. However, if you make it a habit to leave the links unexplained, you burden your future self with the explanation. You will forget why you connected these notes, and your future self will always have to put in the additional work of (re-) understanding the connection when it follows a link. Therefore, to manage uncertainty, you should create direct links with a diligent explanation/description of the connection of the ideas/thoughts in the notes.

Live long and prosper

Sascha