It’s taken me a while to gather my thoughts on this subject as it’s a microcosm of a much larger idea I want to elaborate on. 

But there’s a point I want to hammer down.

It was something I couldn’t put my finger on when the Internet went crazy over note taking systems and specifically, Zettelkasten. For those reading that word for the first time, it’s German for slip box. It has been appropriated today to mean a technique by German academic Niklas Luhmann, who credited his low-tech interlinked note system (using a slip box) for his prolific output. 

The discovery of this process has spawned numerous programs to replicate its process. Now, while I can appreciate these programs (especially Obsidian) as a wonderful digital note-taking tool, there’s still a bigger problem.

Luhmann remarked that his slip box was his thinking partner. 

Key word: thinking.

He is a product of his time when thinking was valued more than cramming as many cited sources into a paper as possible. In other words, during his time, it was okay for people to have thoughts. I fear that academics have rushed to his process without consideration for the jump that’s happened and might want to take a step back.

Yes, he was prolific, but he wasn’t just taking notes, filing them and calling it a night.

He was thinking about his work, engaging with it and writing about it constantly. When you have an obsession, you have no choice but to feed it. When you don’t, you’re just wearing the costume pretending to be the character.

The solution to gaining clarity in our thinking is to not adopt a system that worked for a particular academic, but rather to engage in the process of thinking and showing it to others.

There’s no shortcut around it.