Entry Points in a Zettelkasten Help Navigate Departments and Topics

This is draft from my upcoming Pattern Language of Zettelkasten.

Problem

Your network’s complexity is growing. You have a good time traversing notes for things you’re currently working on, but your mental map of what is in your Zettelkasten in other places, and how to find it, is getting worse over time.

Solution

Design entry points as doors into departments of your Zettelkasten. They should stand out so you know an entry point when you see it from a distance, as an affordance to enter here.

Now literally every note is an entry point into your Zettelkasten in some way. Every search query in an app, every slip of paper you pull out, can be the start of a process of research and writing.

The problem that entry points solve is not to access your actual (physical or digital) archive of notes. That’s a tooling problem.

It’s not about getting into the tool, it’s about getting into the ideas and context of what’s represented: the content, and any information that’s relevant for your inquiry.

So when we’re talking about “entry points”, we’re talking about entering a department in your Zettelkasten. A topic, or a cluster.

These things don’t actually exist outside your imagination. You make them real by drawing borders and enacting rules: this note belongs here, but not there, for example through tagging, or by linking to it from one place, but not from another.

Where you draw borders around sub-systems to create clusters, to say: these things now belong together and are a new thing!, entry points help to get inside them.