Bob Doto’s book A System for Writing (my review) suggests setting up a Zettelkasten (a flexible collection of notes) with a small handful of folders.

These folders aren’t merely places to put notes, though. They suggest a specific workflow - a system for writing.

  • In-box

  • Sleeping

  • References

  • Main

Here’s a very brief summary of the process:

The In-box

Put your fleeting notes in the in-box so you know where they all are.

Make a regular time to process them into more permanent, polished main notes and move them to that folder.

The Sleeping folder

The ‘sleeping’ folder is a kind of in-box overflow. It’s for notes you just never seem to get round to processing. Put them in the sleeping folder and they’ll still be there when you finally feel like working on them (or you can just let sleeping notes lie). This keeps the In-box relatively small so you don’t get overwhelmed with unprocessed notes. Everyone has more thoughts than they can handle and probably makes more notes than they can handle too. It’s not a big problem - you just work on what you feel like working on and leave the rest. With this system you’ll at least be able to pick up where you left off.

The Reference folder

The reference folder is for reference notes. Let’s say you watched a movie and you want to make notes on it. Create a reference note with the name and all the details of the movie, then any notes you make can link to the reference note. This way you’ll never lose track of where a thought or idea or quote or image came from. You’ll have the details in the reference folder.

The Main folder

Main notes are a bit more polished than fleeting notes. They have a single clear idea, a title, a few links, and a unique ID.

Taming the chaos

That’s it.

Oh, and plenty of people think you need category folders or tags, like subject sections in a library. I admit this is a dominant way of thinking about knowledge. What else would you do, other than put it in categories? But this way of thinking is pretty much contrary to the spirit of the Zettelkasten. Sociologist Niklas Luhmann’s Zettelkasten was fertile because it broke down the established categories in sociology and re-constructed a major theory of society from the ground up. And art Historian Aby Warburg organised his Zettelkasten, a library and a whole institute against preconceived categories in his discipline.

Yes, chaos reigns, in a sense - but it’s structured, rhizomatic chaos.