07.08.2026
Where the card file comes from
For forty years I read every day. Whole books, many times over, underlining and going back.
And one day I realised I couldn’t find anything. I knew I had read something on a subject, I knew almost which book it was in, and I’d spend half an hour leafing through. Or I’d quote it from memory, which is the worst habit there is.
Forty years of reading and no system. What I called studying was reading a lot.
What changed it was a book a friend passed me, by a German called Sönke Ahrens, about the Zettelkasten method. Cardboard cards and a box.
It works like this: each idea goes on one card, in your own words, one idea per card, with the exact reference. And to file it, you have to decide which card it goes next to. That is where the studying happens: at the moment of placing it, not of reading it.
After a year you stop having notes and you have someone to talk to. You ask it something and it answers with things you wrote yourself and no longer remembered.
I work there from half past seven to half past eight, every day. What you get each morning comes out of that box.
One warning that saves you a year: don’t start by putting in the backlog. Start with what you read tomorrow. The file grows forwards.