On Thursday, I hit a personal record — 5000 words written in a day. On Thursday, I backed this up with another 4000 words. I’ve been trying to finish a chapter of my thesis before I leave for conferences in Europe — I quite like this as a deadline, as it means I won’t feel guilty not writing when travelling, as I am waiting for the feedback to come in. On the other hand, it got to Wednesday last week, with one week to go before I left, and I had no document that even said “thesis” on it. How was I going to pull this off?

Of course, I haven’t finished it yet, but the odds are looking good (I think another 2-3000 words for the first draft, which takes me over the 10000 word goal I had set myself but will come down in the edit). Of course, this means that over 2.5 days of writing I would have written the entire chapter. No doubt some of you reading this are shaking your heads in disbelief, wondering what the secret is. ChatGPT?

No, actually — it’s all pure hard work. I had spent the first part of this year compiling my Zettelkasten. If you don’t know, that’s a slipbox system where every note contains one single idea, and links out to other relevant notes. I went a step further and gave every note a unique alphanumeric code which denotes where it sits relative to every other note. For example, 2.2a1 is the note that follows on the same train of thought from 2.2a. This makes it really easy to see my trains of thought when making the zettelkasten, and to figure out how everything fits together. In total, I had over 700 notes in this zettelkasten, derived from about 85 sources. I could – and plan to – expand this further still, but this was a great start.

The real benefit of the zettelkasten system is that it pre-arranges themes, and notes are not bound by their source. Because the alphanumeric system already links trains of thought, I just need to find 1 entry point into the train of thought (or theme) that I’m writing about, and I have all the sources ready to go. And because notes aren’t bound by their source, so you could have notes from all over the place linked together, everything close together is more closely related. For example, inside a book on Indonesian religion I might have some really relevant ideas on Balinese gamelan, but if those aren’t separated from their source I wouldn’t necessarily think to look at the first book since it isn’t directly related to my main topic.

The endpoint of all this is that the Zettelkasten is my secret weapon for writing fast. I can find every note related to the theme I’m writing about and open each of them in a new tab. Then I arrange these into an order that makes sense, and away I go, essentially linking all of these disparate ideas together into something coherent. Each note has its bibliographic reference too, which makes citing as I go a breeze. The downside is, of course, that nothing is free — the Zettelkasten has taken me the better part of 3 months to compile, and it requires constantly adding to it for it to be useful long-term. But I also think it is quicker to add as you go, or in batches, than doing 85 in one go!

Have you used a zettelkasten? I’d be keen to hear from others who use them in the comments below.