Luhmann was famous for his extensive use of the “slip box” or Zettelkasten note-taking method… He used them to systematically organize the results of his excessive and broadly interdisciplinary reading. Luhmann built up a zettelkasten of some 90,000 index cards for his research, and credited it with making his extraordinarily prolific writing possible. - wikipedia

from HN Looks like the author followed a similar approach in Obsidian, a tool to store markdown notes in an interconnected manner.

He wrote: “Roam Research turned bidirectional links into a cult. Obsidian let the cult go off-grid. The lore deepened. You weren’t taking notes. You were building a lattice of meaning. … A quote would spark an insight, I’d clip it, tag it, link it - and move on.”

But it didn’t work out: “the insight was never lived. It was stored. … In trying to remember everything, I outsourced the act of reflection. I didn’t revisit ideas. I didn’t interrogate them. I filed them away and trusted the structure. … The more my system grew, the more I deferred the work of thought to some future self who would sort, tag, distill, and extract the gold. That self never arrived.”

Hence, what he mostly wrote down were thoughts, ideas, quotes, hoping that insights and value will come from this huge collection. Turns out, it wasn’t so easy for him. I believe he’ll need more focus, more curation, a more targeted and heartfelt approach.

Well, it sounds like it did work out back then for Niklas Luhmann. He said that all his famous publications wouldn’t have been possible without his structured note taking approach. His 90,000 cards were digitized and are now available online