There's this idea called zettelkasten that's been going around in the outlining world. It's like a "second brain" another term they use.

The thought is that if you get all the info and ideas out of your brain and onto a computer something magical will happen, you will attain a sort of super-humanity.

I'm not sure why but I hate the term zettelkasten, but I love to say it. It sounds like something goofy and idiotic at the same time. It's not an English word. I do not like it.

But then I decided to look it up. I found that one of the early pioneers of zettelkasten was my ancestor, Arno Schmidt, a fantastic but fringe German writer of the mid-20th century. He was my maternal grandmother's brother, my great-uncle.

In his case zettelkasten made sense because:

1. He was German and zettelkasten is a German word so it isn't icky or pretentious.
2. He had a legitimate use for one, he was writing a complex novel with lots of characters and plots. And this was before personal computers, in the 1940s and 1950s, so he did it with index cards.

Around the time Uncle Arno died in 1979, I started working on my first outliner, which is the ideal tool for creating and managing a zettelkasten on a personal computer.

I've attached a picture of Arno with his zettelkasten.