Concept
Zettelkasten
Don't copy what others say. Write down what you yourself think about it, and collect those thoughts in one place.
- 1
Mark the passage
You read an article, a PDF or a transcript and highlight what grabs you. One tap on “Core thought” holds on to the passage.
Mark the passage
You read an article, a PDF or a transcript and highlight what grabs you. One tap on “Core thought” holds on to the passage.
- 2
In your own words
The quote sits at the top; below it you write what it means to you. What you put into words yourself sticks better than what you only underline.
In your own words
The quote sits at the top; below it you write what it means to you. What you put into words yourself sticks better than what you only underline.
- 3
Let it come back
You turn your core thought into the learning format you like, here a flashcard. In the Feed it quizzes you, and Mnemorya brings it back shortly before you would forget it.
Let it come back
You turn your core thought into the learning format you like, here a flashcard. In the Feed it quizzes you, and Mnemorya brings it back shortly before you would forget it.
Picture a box full of small slips of paper. Each one holds exactly one thought, in your own words. Over time the slips point to each other, and lots of small ideas turn into one big web. That is a Zettelkasten, German for “slip box”. It is not a storage room for copied text. It is more like someone to talk things over with.
It was made famous by Niklas Luhmann, a sociologist from Bielefeld in Germany. From the 1950s on, he wrote about 90,000 slips. In the end there were over 70 books and hundreds of articles, though the exact numbers vary depending on the source. Today his Zettelkasten is kept at Bielefeld University and you can look at it online. In 2017 Sönke Ahrens explained the method for everyone in his book How to Take Smart Notes.
Copying is quick, but your head barely pays attention while you do it. To put a thought into your own words, you first have to understand it. That reshaping is exactly what makes it stick. A well-known experiment found that typing notes word for word on a laptop works worse than your own notes by hand. A later, bigger repeat of the study, though, could not clearly confirm that. What is certain: your own words beat plain copying.
In Mnemorya you highlight a passage in your sources, whether it is a text, a video or a podcast. Then you write the thought down in your own words as a key idea. For podcasts and transcripts, the AI can suggest key ideas to you. But putting it into your own words is still the part that does the work.
The research behind it
The studies this method rests on. Each one is verifiable through its DOI — looking them up is very much the point.
Ahrens explains how Luhmann's Zettelkasten works and how you can use it to collect and connect your own thoughts.
How to Take Smart Notes: One Simple Technique to Boost Writing, Learning and Thinking. CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform.
People who wrote summaries in their own words while reading remembered more than people who only copied words.
Notetaking and depth of processing. Contemporary Educational Psychology, 4(2), 145–153.
doi.org/10.1016/0361-476X(79)90069-9People who took notes on a laptop wrote down more word for word and did worse on questions about understanding; a 2021 repeat of the study, however, did not clearly find this difference again.
The Pen Is Mightier Than the Keyboard. Psychological Science, 25(6), 1159–1168.
doi.org/10.1177/0956797614524581
Keep watching
See the idea in motion.
Selected videos for going deeper. Each link opens the original creator on YouTube.
