Cliff Guren

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Loosely Organized Notes and Creative Thinking

Cliff Guren

This is the fourth article in my series on working outside your brain. The previous article in the series (“Organic Notes and the Zettelkasten Method”) introduced Niklas Luhmann’s Zettelkasten note-taking method and the six types of notes used in his system. The Zettelkasten (note-box) method provides a good starting point for developing a vocabulary for discussing notes, note-taking, and working with notes. This article focuses on organizing and linking notes, and is also based on Luhmann’s Zettelkasten method.

The articles on Luhmann’s Zettelkasten method in this series on working outside your brain are not meant to teach you how to implement his system. They are introductions to Luhmann’s thinking and method, and the many ways his ideas have affected how we talk about and organize notes, and the tools we use.

Although Luhmann primarily used his system to write about sociology and systems theory, the principles that inform his thinking about taking and using notes closely align with the latest research and insights on creative thinking. There are excellent books, websites and videos on setting up and using a Zettelkasten system. A short list follows at the end of this article.

In his essay “Communicating with Slip Boxes,” Luhmann argues that his collection of notes is not a passive archive of his thoughts, but a “competent” conversation partner capable of surprise. Luhmann isn’t a mad scientist imbuing his inanimate creation with human qualities, he’s stating a fact. The organization of his note-taking system allowed him to pose a question, then follow his branching and linked thoughts to unexpected answers. The “conversation” is the result of an open, loosely organized system designed to surprise. Luhmann writes:

If a communication system is to be maintained over a period of time, a path must be chosen either of highly technologized specialization or incorporating chance and ad hoc generated information. If we apply this to collections of notes, you can take the path of thematic specialization or the path of open ground. We have opted for the latter alternative, and after 26 years of successful, only sporadically difficult cooperation, are able to confirm its success—or at least the viability of this path.

—Niklas Luhmann, “Communicating with Slip Boxes”*

Unlike organizational systems that are based on preconceived models of thematic classification, Luhmann’s Zettelkasten system embraces randomness and ad hoc organization. It’s based on three principles: internal branching, linking, and keywords.

Internal Branching

Luhmann was suspicious of top-down organization because it imposes preconceived categories on your still emerging thinking. Instead, he focused on what he called “arbitrary internal branching,” an approach that allowed him to file a note wherever it makes sense when it’s created. The location of a note in the system was not a sign of its importance, only Luhmann’s current sense of its relevance to the surrounding ideas The long-term value of the note was determined by its links, not its location.

The numbering system that Luhmann developed freed him from the obligation to maintain a continuous stream of ordered notes. Arbitrary branching enables the system to grow internally: wherever there’s material rich enough to support a new branch of content. Luhmann did not dismiss sequential ordering, he just didn’t adopt it as his primary organizing principle. He recognized that linking was a better way to connect and sequence his thoughts because it enabled him to breach boundaries and integrate ideas from any discipline.

Sample note card from Luhmann's Zettelkasten courtesy of the Niklas Luhmann Archive

Linking

In the first article in this series (“Working Outside Your Brain”) I wrote:

Our minds have limited capacity. The note is the tool we developed for focusing and externalizing a thought so we can see it in relation to other thoughts, refine it, and use it to develop more complex, multi-faceted thoughts. The atomic unit of written thought is not the word, sentence, or paragraph, it’s the note.

Physical atoms combine to create molecules. Similarly, notes (the atomic units of thought) combine to create more complex thoughts, which continue to combine and develop into evermore substantive expressions of thought. Physical atoms bond to one-another; atomic notes are linked to one-another.

Creativity is problem solving. It’s piecing together a puzzle. To solve a puzzle, you need puzzle pieces—in this case, notes. As you create your puzzle pieces, you can explore how they fit together. You can begin linking.

A link is a bridge between two ideas. Links on a web page, in an ebook, or in a document are usually colored blue. This simple convention makes it easy to recognize links, but it’s insufficient in many contexts. A blue link conveys nothing about the nature or quality of the connection between the two endpoints.

Like the links between atoms, links between notes have different characteristics. A link between two notes is usually one of the following:

  • A common link - The two notes relate to a common idea and the link continues a line of thinking.

  • A contrasting link - The ideas in the two notes challenge or negate one another.

  • An associative link - The two notes are distinct ideas and the link creates a bridge between them.

  • A transformative link - The idea in one note transforms the meaning of the second note, leading to the creation of a new, transformed note.

When we’re lucky, the context in which the link appears will clarify the intention behind the link, but that’s not always the case, especially in the links we create in our own notes. Too often we think that our future selves will know exactly what we meant when we created the link a long, long time ago. Luhmann is emphatic that you need to add your reasons for making the link to the note so that you always have the context for the link.

One way of gaining insight into how a note is related to other notes is bi-directional linking. Unlike the one-way links you’re used to on the web, bi-directional links show you all the other pages that are linked to the page you’re looking at. Bi-directional linking would be unmanageable on the web, where a page can be linked to thousands and thousands of other pages. But in your note-taking system, bi-directional links make it easy to traverse the paths of your emerging thinking. 

Luhmann stressed that the quality of a note is determined by the quality (not quantity) of its links. The highest quality links are associative or transformative—they don’t simply connect information, they create knowledge.

Keywords

One of the challenges of a loosely structured system is finding entry points to key ideas. It’s not always easy to find the start of a thread or gather related notes that are located in branches across the collection. Keywords (also known as “tags” in digital note-taking tools) help solve both problems. 

Luhmann added keywords to each note, but only a few… His focus was not on categorizing per se, but on discovery—the circumstances in which the note would be most useful. Generic topic keywords (such as “politics” or “creativity”) are too broad for discovery. Phrases are much more useful: “the game of politics”or “stoking your creative fire,” for example.**

Disorder Is a Feature

Internal branching, links, and keywords are tools for developing and managing a loosely organized collection of notes. Luhmann was keenly aware of the fact that loose systems invite a certain amount of disorder:

The entirety of these notes can only be described as a disorder, but at the very least it is a disorder with non-arbitrary internal structure. Some things will get lost (versickern), some notes we will never see again. On the other hand, there will be preferred centers, formation of lumps and regions with which we will work more often than with others. There will be complexes of ideas that are conceived at large, but which will never be completed; there will be incidental ideas which started as links from secondary passages and which are continuously enriched and expand so that they will tend increasingly to dominate system. To sum up: this technique guarantees that its order which is merely formal does not become a hindrance but adapts to the conceptual development.

—Niklas Luhmann, “Communicating with Slip Boxes”

Loose systems of organization can be messy, but messes increase the odds of random and surprising collisions, the spark of creativity.

Leaping Between Your Notes

Associative and transformative links are similar to the leap that occurs in many works of art—the leap from the conscious mind to the realm of the unconscious, from the known to the unknown, from the perspective of one domain of knowledge to another. In his book “Leaping Poetry,” the poet Robert Bly writes:

... a great work of art often has at its center a long floating leap, around which the work of art in ancient times used to gather itself like steel shavings around the magnet. But a work of art does not necessarily have at its center a single floating leap. The work can have many leaps, perhaps shorter. The real joy of poetry is to experience this leaping inside a poem.

Everything Bly writes about poetry applies to creative thought. Luhmann designed his note-taking system to produce the leaps of thought that Bly describes. The connections are the intended output of his system—the sparks that illuminate the ideas they connect. Like flares shot into the air, they draw the surrounding land masses out of darkness and connect what would otherwise be solitary islands of thought.

The articles on note-taking in this series have focused on three key ideas:

  • The note as the atomic unit of thought.

  • The value of loosely organized notes and bottom-up, organic organization.

  • The art of linking.

I’ve focused on these three ideas because together they create the conditions for sustained creativity. We spend an inordinate amount of our time filling out forms and completing structured task—actual forms when we go to the doctor’s office or file our taxes; standard operating procedures (SOPs) and checklists that are often part of daily our work; template-driven documents, spreadsheets, and presentations. These standardized approaches are how we deal with the complexity of modern life. They are unavoidable, but structured thinking becomes a habit and creates a disposition toward ordered thought. Creativity is the by-product of chance. The environments we create for our creative work must allow for, even advocate for, random connections. Here’s Luhmann, the systems theorist:

We may ask ourselves whether these results of such a communication are thus, not also chance products. This would be a too compromised assumption. Within scientific theory, chance holds a questioned position. If we follow theoretical models of evolution, chance virtually plays a leading role. Without it, nothing is possible, or at any rate, nothing moves forward. Without variation of the given amount of thought there is no possibility for examining and selecting the innovations. The actual problem thus shifts to the creation of coincidences with enough condensed chances to make a selection.

—Niklas Luhmann, “Communicating with Slip Boxes”

There are many ways of implementing Luhmann’s system, especially now. Digital note-taking tools eliminate a lot of the arcana associated with Luhmann’s paper-based note-box. The numbering system he developed to track sequences of notes, link notes, and manage keywords is unnecessary when you’re using note-taking applications like Notion, Obsidian, Roam, Hypernotes or Evernote to manage your notes.

Surprising connections are the byproduct of lots and lots of notes. Whether you implement Luhmann’s note-box system, choose another organizational model, or develop your own system, make sure it’s easy to capture and develop your thoughts, add structure as your thinking evolves, and create bi-directional links between your notes. Your future wildly creative self will thank you!

Footnotes

* The quotes from Luhmann in this article are from his essay "Communicating with Slip Boxes." The essay, written in German, was translated by Manfred Kuehn. I can’t vouch for the accuracy or quality of the translation. There are a few times when the English translation is awkward and opaque. I’ve corrected the obvious mistakes (spelling and punctuation errors). But even with the rough spots, Luhmann's intelligence, enthusiasm, and sense of humor shine through.

** Some note-taking tools don’t allow spaces in tags. These tools require you to add hyphens or underscores between the words in the tag phrase. For example “stoking_your_creative_fires.”

Selected Resources on Luhmann’s Zettelkasten System and Smart Notes

Books

Websites

Articles