Bob Doto

UPDATE | 03-16-26

It's not uncommon for new zettelkasten users to ask how to “find connections.” Unfortunately, they're asking the wrong question. Connections aren't hiding in your zettelkasten waiting to be discovered. Connections are established as a result of two or more informational units interacting with one another. What you're actually looking for are candidates for interactivity, informational units that can be brought into proximity and examined.

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BOOKS

• A System for Writing: How an Unconventional Approach to Note-Making Can Help You Capture Ideas, Think Wildly, and Write Constantly—A Zettelkasten Primer

• Sitting with Spirits: Exploring the Unseen World In the Margins of Christianity

• The House of I Am Mirrors: And Other Poems

• The Power of Stretching

• Acupressure For Beginners

2026 WRITING

• Serendipity and the Zettelkasten

2025 WRITING

• Reading Ideas as Information

• How I Start a Book Project Using a Zettelkasten

• Folgezettel Will Not Necessarily Create Discrete Topical Sections in Your Zettelkasten

2024 WRITING

• The Difference Between Hub Notes and Structure Notes Explained

• How a Collaborative Zettelkasten Might Work: A Modest Proposal for a New Kind of Collective Creativity

• What Do We Mean When We Say "Bottom-Up?"

2023 WRITING

• Inspired Destruction: How a Zettelkasten Explodes Thoughts (So You Can Have New Ones)

• Doing What Matters Most: Personal Project Management for the Burgeoning Homesteader

• Keeping the Zettelkasten in Mind When Creating New Notes

• Using Diaries and Journals as Source Material for Zettelkasten Notes

• How to Handle Facts in Your Zettelkasten

• There is No "One True Meaning" in a Text: Reading as a Communal Act

• How to Use Folgezettel in Your Zettelkasten: Everything You Need to Know to Get Started

2022 WRITING

• What is a Permanent Note?

• Don't Ditch Your Old Notes: An Argument for Holding onto Abandoned Ideas

• What is a Fleeting Note?

• Folgezettel is Not an Outline: Luhmann's Playful Appreciation of (Dys)function

• "I just finished reading a book and took lots of notes. Now what?"

• The New Convert and the Old Devotee

• What is a Literature Note?

• A Zettelkasten is Not for "Making Connections"

• Zettelkasten, Linking Your Thinking, and Nick Milo's Search for Ground

• Linking New Notes & Fearing Lost Ones

• Quotes are Not Notes: Creating a Zettelkasten of Ideas

• A scraped knee is never just a scraped knee

• Friction-free does not lead to more free time

• My former alter ego

• How I Use CLOGs to Organize My Writing Files

• User-Centric Means Labor-Invisible

• Decentralization is Inevitably Centralized

• The Spectacle Always Recoups Dissent

• Resonance over scale

• Misconceptions About the Relationship Between Permanent & Evergreen Notes

• Folgezettel is More than Mechanism

• Tensions Between Zettelkasten & the Productivity Scene

• Obsidian Publish Should Not Cost $198 a Year to Use

• How to Be a Good Teacher

• Is NYT's Acquiring Wordle the End of an Era?

• The Five Levels of Hype

• Mindsets that Prevent(ed) Me From Ever Making Money as an Artist

• Cars feeling creepy dystopian

2021 WRITING | still being uploaded

• The Spirit of Productivity: Channeling Inspiration Into Doing What Matters Most

• Hidden Relevance: Where Seemingly Dissonant Ideas Meet

• I Wanna See Writing Gangs!

• The Predicament of Bourgeois Anticapitalism

• Is "Conscious Capitalism" Still an Option? Was it Ever?

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