We got a question here from John. John asks, "What does your general knowledge management look like these days?" John, that's a good question because I've been thinking about this recently. So here's what happened. A listener mailed me a book, "How to Take Smart Notes." Now, this book is about four or five years old now, but it's already an underground classic because it really helped introduce to a broader and English-speaking audience this Zettelkasten note-taking system.

Now, I knew a little bit about this. I've talked about it on the show. We've had some guests on the show, like Srini Rao, who swears by it and talked a little bit about it, but I wasn't really deep into the details. So I read this book recently. This is actually one of my five books for January that I'm reading.

And it was interesting. It was interesting. So here's the foundational premise of this book, the narrative motivation for this book, is that there was a sociologist, he was German, his name was Luhmann, and he came to sociology late. And the idea was, it's too late for you to get a dissertation and become a sociologist, it's kind of late in life, I don't think it's going to work out.

And he did, he got his dissertation like that and became incredibly productive as an author. All right. So then there was a team from some German university that studied this guy, Luhmann. How was he so productive? How did he get his dissertation so fast? But also, how did he publish all of these epic papers, this huge quantity of epic papers throughout his lifetime?

This is the story that's told in this book. And what they discovered is he had a crazy note-taking system, the Zettelkasten system, and it was built around what's called a slip box. And I'm not going to get into all the details now, but it's a box in which you put these slips of paper on which you have notes.

And the way it works is when you're taking notes on a particular topic, you put that, first of all, you take the notes kind of standalone, like you think about it before you take the notes. The thinking is happening when you take the notes, right? You're not transcribing, you're taking notes.

You try to put it behind an existing relevant note in your box, in the slip box, or a box full of slips. And then you can also link. So these are numbered, and so you might then literally just write links on the paper, like this is also associated with this, this, and this.

The idea is you give all these ideas you've thought about, and they all exist in this big linked system. And what Luhmann supposedly did, and this is the promise of what we could call pure or hard Zettelkasten, is that it made the actual process of writing papers easily because he would just discover, he would just discover by surfing these links and connections in his slip box, these interesting new ideas that would emerge, and these ideas would become papers.

All the thinking was largely done. The ideas were done. It was all there in the slip box. That's how you could just write, write, write, write, write. And the author of this book, "How to Take Smart Notes," argues that, yeah, writing should not be hard, note-taking should be hard, but if you do this right, it should just be easy to write.

Like the ideas are all there, and you'll just discover like, oh, here's an article, here's a paper. All right. Well, here's where I stand on this. First of all, that idea that writing can be made easy and all the hard works and the note-taking, and then you'll just discover articles.

I don't buy it. I mean, I'm a professional academic, I'm a professional writer. It's just not the way it works. It's not the way it works. I mean, if you're writing a New Yorker piece, you're not just wandering through your slip box and have this interesting collection of things.

You make some observations that just doesn't work that way. It's you're looking at what's going on in the world and what your specialty is, and just honed through your instincts of having read a thousand of these articles and written a hundred yourself. You come across an idea, like, I think there's something here.

And then you kind of work backwards. What do I already know that could support this? And you have to go out and gather a lot of information on its own. That's really how articles come together. I don't buy this idea that they're going to emerge from the system, but I am taken by this idea that this is an interesting way to store notes, that it's not just a hierarchical system of directories and subdirectories and sub-subdirectories and so on.

But that there's these connections back and forth. You have starting points. So in a Zettelkasten system, you have an index that goes to some starting points and then you can follow those starting points, have notes all connected to it, but then they jump over to other collections of notes and then from there you can jump over, I think that's actually not a bad way to organize ideas.

And I do like the homogeneity of the note-taking process that like any thoughts that might be relevant, go into a certain format and go into a certain system, you put them in a certain place and you throw some links to them and it's all in there. All right. So all this background is to say that I am messing around with a more Zettelkasten style approach to organizing my notes.

I'm using Rome Research's online tool right now, which I'm really enjoying, I think it's fantastic. And I'm trying to do more of this. Just get everything that's related, mainly right now for like my writing, my non-academic writing, my non-academic, so New Yorker articles, blog posts, my books, podcast or podcast related ideas, so things related to this or my newsletter, trying to actually file them away in a Zettelkasten style.

I do not think that I will be able to do hard Zettelkasten and just have book ideas emerge from the system or blog posts ideas emerge from the system. But I think it will allow me to do more thinking upfront when I take notes. And to go back and rediscover more sources already when I'm working on something as opposed to having to find everything from scratch from working on.

I think it is going to help. And I think it is going to feel like a closed system. Like all these different ideas and thoughts and things I've encountered are all in a system where they're accessible and in a way that is interesting. So I'm trying that. And I'll report back actually.

I mean, John, who asked this, it's pretty new for me. I might even write a, like a New Yorker piece on this whole, the promise of the second brain, et cetera, et cetera, that it's something I pitched my editor. But anyways, that's where I am right now. I am messing around with the Piero Zello Cast and Style system.

If you want to find out more, do the book, how to take smart notes. It's a cool, weird, interesting book. And again, I don't buy the theory that writing can be made easy, but I do buy the theory of having a consistent approach to taking and storing notes that can handle everything, something I think going on there.

So we'll see how that goes. And I will report back.