What kind of top-level categories do you have for your notes?

If you’re doing knowledge management you might use or adapt Tiago Forte’s PARA system:

  • Projects
  • Activities
  • Resources
  • Archive

Or you might consider using Bob Doto’s four-folder approach:

  • In-box
  • Sleeping
  • References
  • Main

Tame the chaos with just four folders for all your notes.

Prolific German sociologist Niklas Luhmann’s second collection of notes, his second Zettelkasten (ZKII) was arranged according to eleven top-level categories, based on subjects or themes associated with his singular major project, a theory of society.

  1. Organisation theory
  2. Functionalism
  3. Decision theory
  4. Amt: office, post, job, duty
  5. Formal / informal order
  6. Sovereignty / State
  7. Isolated/individual terms, problems
  8. Economy
  9. Ad hoc notes
  10. Archaic societies
  11. High cultures

In his lecture on Luhmann’s Zettelkasten, researcher Johannes Schmidt of the Niklas Luhmann Archive at Bielefeld University observes that these headings are hardly comprehensive. Instead they strongly echo the progression of Luhmann’s scholarly interests over many years.

“Looking at these you quickly see that this does not describe a certain body of knowledge to work through like in the first Zettelkasten. If you know a bit about the development of Luhmann’s theory you quickly recognize this as a historic record of research interests.”

Schmidt claims the first five sections are an organised summary of Luhmann’s research interests in the 1960s, while the later categories are less organised and more ad hoc. But even in the supposedly more systematic sections, there is a marked unevenness to the amount of material. For example, section 21 of category 5. Formal/informal order is labelled ‘Functionalism’. This section contains between 15,000 and 16,000 notes out of 67,000 total. On marked contrast, there are other sections that are almost empty.

So should all Zettelkasten note-makers create a top level of categories under which to file their notes? And if so, what would it look like?

If you don’t know what you want to study and don’t have a clear thirty-year research program the way Luhmann did, you might consider throwing everything into the mix and using a comprehensive knowledge classification such as the Universal Decimal Classification (UDC), first created by bibliographers Paul Otlet, Henri La Fontaine, and their collaborators (Wikipedia). This framework has ten top-level headings to encompass all of human knowledge.

  1. Science & knowledge, organization (with numerous related categories also contained in this section)
  2. Philosophy, Psychology
  3. Religion, Theology
  4. Social Sciences
  5. [currently vacant]
  6. Mathematics & Natural Science
  7. Applied Science, Medicine, Technology
  8. The Arts, Recreation, etc
  9. Language, Linguistics, Literature
  10. Geography, Biography, History.

That’s all very well but the categories are pretty general and the chances are you won’t actually use most of them. Furthermore this approach may give you the misleading cue that your collection of notes, like an encyclopedia, is going to expand to rival Wikipedia or your national library.

It isn’t.

You have your own peculiar and necessarily limited interests and instead of spreading the net too widely, maybe its worth keeping a bit focused on these.

I’m a fan of working from the bottom up, which means I don’t create the higher level elements until I’ve had a good go at creating the lower level elements. The idea here is that by writing fairly modest notes I gradually discover what categories I’m actually interested in. Instead of adopting a priori a theoretical classification system, I let the notes themselves tell me what they’re about and what they’re not about. By writing notes, then gradually clustering them around hub notes and structure notes the higher levels of organisation gradually emerge.

From simpler elements more complex assemblies arise.

This approach is inspired by the work of W. Brian Arthur on the essential modularity of technology. All technology, he claims, is made from less complex components, which themselves are made from less complex components. My claim is that the same is true for written ideas. You start from the simplest components, letters, words and sentences, and combine them to form paragraphs, sections, chapters and eventually whole books. And the same may be true for the categories of your notes. You don’t have to start with clear categories if you don’t want to. Instead you can let them emerge gradually, so you don’t so much decide what you’re writing about as simply discover it.

So what does this actually look like? For some clear answers, keep reading:

Does the Zettelkasten have a top and bottom?

I’m the author of Shu Ha Ri: The Japanese Way of Learning, for Artists and Fighters, available now.
And if you found this article interesting you might like to sign up to the Writing Slowly weekly email digest. You’ll receive all the week’s posts in that handy email format you know and love.

References

W. Brian Arthur,2009. The Nature of Technology: What it is and How it Evolves. The Free Press and Penguin Books.

Johannes Schmidt, ‘Der Zettelkasten als Zweitgedächtnis Niklas Luhmanns’. The video of this lecture is on Youtube, while Roy Scholten has provided a rough English translation.