stamp 202505212104
Sascha Fast defines Zettelkasten in one of his videos this way: “it’s a thinking environment that makes your past thinking efforts available”.
Interestingly enough, this definition lacks any specific terms like atomicity, bottom-up approach, interconnectedness, etc.
Related
- What is a Zettelkasten? - It’s not a well defined term, although we all have a “feeling” about what it is.
- What can you add or take away for it to still be a Zettelkasten.
- Scott Scheper is very orthodox and very exclusionary about the definition of a Zettelkasten.
- Ironically, the T in ANTI-net is “tree-structured” which a Zettelkasten is definitely not. This is one of the reasons Scott’s ID system made it hard for me to get comfortable in my Zettelkasten.
- The Zettelkasten reddit defines Zettelkasten this way (as of May of 2025): “Niklas Luhmann’s zettelkasten method, a bottom-up, emergent, rhizomatic approach to writing and thinking.”