Kyle Phillips
Engineer & Creative · Google NYC
Zettelkasten
This site is built like a Zettelkasten: interconnected notes linked through backlinks, so ideas surface relationships rather than sitting in isolation.
What is Zettelkasten?
The Zettelkasten Method is a note-taking system that encourages users to link together related ideas and concepts through atomic notes. This method can be helpful for organizing your thoughts and ideas, and it can also be used to generate new ideas.
It's often conflated with a second brain — both link ideas across notes — but a second brain emphasizes capture (collect everything) while Zettelkasten emphasizes synthesis (process and connect ideas to generate new ones).
History
While it was originally developed by Niklas Luhmann in the 1950s, digital zettelkasten tools such as Roam Research and Obsidian.md have popularized the method in recent years.
2 References
This drive to build extends to my personal philosophy on knowledge and learning. With 20 years as a creative technologist, I'm a firm believer that our tools shape our thinking, and I'm fascinated by systems like Zettelkasten and the design of Tools for Thought.
This is the result of a system I built in early 2024: a nightly AI agent that ingests around 1 million tokens of my personal Obsidian-style Zettelkasten notes — daily journals, technical explorations, creative ideas, project logs — and uses them to generate original research reports while I sleep. Each morning I wake up to 9 new reports, curated not by what's trending, but by what I've been thinking about.