Over on the Zettelkasten forums, Edmund Gröpl, in a post: “On Zettelkasten Productivity”, proposes to reframe the “how many books have I written” lifetime achievement number as “how many books have grown out of what I read”, showing how small the ‘tip’ of our productivity is compared to the huge foundation of what we read.

A writer who publishes one substantial book for every hundred they read is not inefficient; they are distilling, selecting, and discarding far more than they keep.

This flips a common obsession with productivity: instead of asking “How many books have I written?”, one might ask “How many have I truly digested deeply enough that a book could grow out of them?” Measured this way, high productivity is less about speed and more about the density of thought each finished work contains.

Using Luhmann’s Zettelkasten:

• ~67000 notes
• ~15000 literature notes that are merely bibliographic entries (mostly books and articles)
• books written: a bit over 70

From these numbers follow, roughly: Each book or article documented resulted in 67000/15000 ≈ 4.5 notes

Assuming he processed roughly 50% books, 50% articles, that’s 7500 books. So Edmund’s final ratio is approximately: books read per book written ≈ 7,500/70 ≈ 100.

“Productivity” expressed as output per unit of input: ≈ 70/7,500 ≈ 1%

That’s an interesting number to keep you humble.

And I was genuinely surprised how small the result of the ratios got with every step, even though I knew that 70 books is a lot of books and ~90k notes in total are a crapton of notes.

I don’t have a perfect record of everything I’ve read and not processed; I could pull in all links in my notes, all literature references, and bookmarks from my linkding database, then contrast these with the posts written here as publication. The innumerable articles, posts, documentation pages I’ve read will be lost to history. I need to write tools to do that counting now, brb.