Zettelkasten

Build knowledge from many atomic, densely-linked permanent notes — one idea per note, written in your own words, connected to others.

How it works

Three note types feed a growing "slip-box":

Fleeting notes — quick captures, disposable (10 - Inbox/Fleeting-Notes).
Literature notes — your paraphrase of one source (20 - Literature).
Permanent notes — one self-contained idea, linked into the web of existing notes (30 - Permanent).

The value is in the links: structure emerges bottom-up as you connect notes, rather than being imposed by a folder tree.

Niklas Luhmann's working method, popularized by Sönke Ahrens, How to Take Smart Notes (2017/2022).

Keshav's Three-Pass reading maps directly onto the three note types — Pass 1 → fleeting, Pass 2 → literature, Pass 3 → permanent. This is the signature bridge of the whole system.
MOC indexes clusters of permanent notes into navigable maps. See [[Map of Content (MOC)]].
LLM Wiki treats the permanent notes as durable context an LLM can read. See [[LLM Wiki]].
CeReBro/CODE uses note-writing as its Distill phase. See [[CeReBro (CODE)]].

Example 1 — Promoting a capture. A fleeting note "agents need memory to act over time" is rewritten as an atomic permanent note 30 - Permanent/31 Concepts/..., stated in full sentences, and linked to two existing notes — it now has inbound links and is no longer an orphan.
Example 2 — Splitting a fat note. A note mixing "evaluation metrics" and "statistical tests" is split into two atomic notes, each with its own address, joined by a single explicit link — each can now be reused independently.