Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: The Zettelkasten Method, published by abramdemski on the LessWrong. [Epistemic Status: Scroll to the bottom for my follow-up thoughts on this from months/years later.] Early this year, Conor White-Sullivan introduced me to the Zettelkasten method of note-taking. I would say that this significantly increased my research productivity. I’ve been saying “at least 2x”. Naturally, this sort of thing is difficult to quantify. The truth is, I think it may be more like 3x, especially along the dimension of “producing ideas” and also “early-stage development of ideas”. (What I mean by this will become clearer as I describe how I think about research productivity more generally.) However, it is also very possible that the method produces serious biases in the types of ideas produced/developed, which should be considered. (This would be difficult to quantify at the best of times, but also, it should be noted that other factors have dramatically decreased my overall research productivity. So, unfortunately, someone looking in from outside would not see an overall boost. Still, my impression is that it's been very useful.) I think there are some specific reasons why Zettelkasten has worked so well for me. I’ll try to make those clear, to help readers decide whether it would work for them. However, I honestly didn’t think Zettelkasten sounded like a good idea before I tried it. It only took me about 30 minutes of working with the cards to decide that it was really good. So, if you’re like me, this is a cheap experiment. I think a lot of people should actually try it to see how they like it, even if it sounds terrible. My plan for this document is to first give a short summary and then an overview of Zettelkasten, so that readers know roughly what I’m talking about, and can possibly experiment with it without reading any further. I’ll then launch into a longer discussion of why it worked well for me, explaining the specific habits which I think contributed, including some descriptions of my previous approaches to keeping research notes. I expect some of this may be useful even if you don’t use Zettelkasten -- if Zettelkasten isn’t for you, maybe these ideas will nonetheless help you to think about optimizing your notes. However, I put it here primarily because I think it will boost the chances of Zettelkasten working for you. It will give you a more concrete picture of how I use Zettelkasten as a thinking tool. Very Short Summary Materials Staples index-cards-on-a-ring or equivalent, possibly with: plastic rings rather than metal different 3x5 index cards (I recommend blank, but, other patterns may be good for you) as desired some kind of divider I use yellow index cards as dividers, but slightly larger cards, tabbed cards, plastic dividers, etc. might be better quality hole punch (if you’re using different cards than the pre-punched ones) I like this one. Blank stickers or some other way to label card-binders with the address range stored within. quality writing instrument -- must suit you, but, multi-color click pen recommended hi-tec-c coleto especially recommended Technique Number pages with alphanumeric strings, so that pages can be sorted hierarchically rather than linearly -- 11a goes between 11 and 12, 11a1 goes between 11a and 11b, et cetera. This allows pages to be easily inserted between other pages without messing up the existing ordering, which makes it much easier to continue topics. Use the alphanumeric page identifiers to “hyperlink” pages. This allows sub-topics and tangents to be easily split off into new pages, and also allows for related ideas to be interlinked. Before I launch into the proper description of Zettelkasten, here are some other resources on note-taking which I looked at before diving into using Zettelkasten myself. (Feel free to skip this part on a ...