## Summary A Zettelkasten (German: "slip box") is a personal tool for thinking and writing. It has hypertextual features to make a web of thought possible. The difference to other systems is that you create a web of thoughts instead of notes of arbitrary size and form, and emphasize connection, not a collection. ## Origins The Zettelkasten method was created by social scientist Niklas Luhmann, who published 50 books and over 600 articles. He had a collection of notes on paper slips that had links (unique alphanumeric addresses) to other notes. In essence, it was hypertext. > What are we to do with what we have written down? Certainly, at first, we will produce mostly garbage. But we have been educated to expect something useful from our activities and soon lose confidence if nothing useful seems to result. We should, therefore, reflect on whether and how we arrange our notes so that they are available for later access. -- Niklas Luhmann Source: https://zettelkasten.de/introduction/