Zettelwhat?
I checked out the Zettelkasten method, which appears to be German for something like a box of (index) cards.
The website for the method appears to be a marketing site, almost. It's not simply and plainly spelled out for you what the method really is, and it lacks clear, real-world steps and examples to get the most out of the method. I dug a little and finally found the gist of it, being:
- Write a note on a card for a single topic
- Give it a permanent ID
- Link to this note from other notes, via this ID
- Maintain links via a master link list
- Use the link lists to form associations between knowledge
- (Multiple link lists may be used to map your knowledge in different ways)
The grand goal is to have a well of knowledge that you can, eventually, begin to interact with and explore the limits of your own documented knowledge, which I think is an interesting distinction to make. One of the reasons we write notes is to externalize information in a form we can recall later, to offset the cognitive load of short-term memory. Then we only need to remember to come back to our note(s) to be reminded of what we already know.