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Why Categories for Your Note Archive are a Bad Idea • Zettelkasten Method

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A friend of mine recently asked for help with getting started. It was very hard for him to overcome initial uncertainty: how do you know you’re sufficiently prepared to start filling your note archive? Which categories should you prepare before you begin? My answer surprised him and was dead simple: don’t. Don’t prepare. Don’t invent categories. Just let it come. When you start out, taking the first dozen notes is an adventure. No path is paved, everything is possible. Also, things take a lot of time and effort in the beginning. With experimentation, this will change, and you’ll be faster. You’ll have settled on conventions and rules for yourself by the time you reach note #100. But until your very own note-taking conventions have developed, you’re confronted with making a conscious choice on every step. To reduce the initially overwhelming complexity by a magnitude, a quite popular move is to flesh out categories before taking notes. With categories in place, filing notes and retrievi

A friend of mine recently asked for help with getting started. It was very hard for him to overcome initial uncertainty: how do you know you’re sufficiently prepared to start filling your note archive? Which categories should you prepare before you begin? My answer surprised him and was dead simple: don’t. Don’t prepare. Don’t invent categories. Just let it come. When you start out, taking the first dozen notes is an adventure. No path is paved, everything is possible. Also, things take a lot of time and effort in the beginning. With experimentation, this will change, and you’ll be faster. You

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