How Thinker enables Zettelkasten

How Thinker incorporates Zettelkasten

Atomic

• Thinker encourages you to create atomic notes. Atomic notes mean that you put down one idea per note and one only. Not only framing one idea per note also you are nudged to be concise as possible. Two or three sentences should be enough for you to describe an idea and how it potentially relates to others. Luhmann often made notes with few words. So overall, the shorter note, the better. Later, you will profit from the atomicity of the notes, which allows you to compose your notes to bigger ideas or lets you rearrange your notes freely when you get to the point of transforming your understanding into a coherent written piece of knowledge (academy, for example).

Folgezettel

• The thinker app makes it easy for you to add notes 'behind' one another, so your thought train is reflected without you having to do anything further. When you then think about your note and how it might relate to other notes, Thinker provides you with a simple but handy search feature so that you can easily connect related notes. Clearly, some notes will emerge very important to your ideas, resulting in many incoming and outcoming note links. Thinker visualizes that also in a simple way, where on the left side on the screen, the incoming note links are listed, and on the right side to outgoing ones. That makes traversing your graph, your mental model, quick and easy.

References

• When you eventually come back to your notes, for writing a paper, an article, or just for you to untangle your thoughts, having the original source at hand is convenient and important. For that, Thinker makes it effortless for you to add references to each note (free text, links are recognized and clickable). Your actual sources will not live in Thinker, though. I want to emphasize that Thinker is about retrieving your thoughts and mental model. Recollecting information is well done by other programs, such as storing your pdfs (for papers) or forms of storage. I personally use links most often for references and occasionally DOIs and Book Title (ISBN).

With that toolset, nothing can stop you from learning and understanding anything that catches your interest. And if you choose to, put it to paper (or screen).