Doing it right, you can move way beyond input/output-based note-taking. You can interact with and communicate with your system of notes. As holds true for every communication, you’ll learn something new when you interact with your Zettelkasten.

Whenever you want to think to some purpose, you should consider writing it down.

Writing improves your ability to think coherently: “what’s my point?” Whatever the answer, you’ll be able to stick to it.
Writing prevents you from jumping around in your mind, forgetting details, but rather to think consistently: “how is my point being developed?”
Writing things down improves memorization.
Thoughts written down can be retrieved as-is. This conquers hindsight bias which makes you change your mind after the fact, pretending you knew it all along.

Thoughts and feelings are nebulous happenings in our mind holes, but writing forces us to crystalize those thoughts and put them in a logical order.

Irritation: basically, without surprise or disappointment there’s no information. Both partners have to be surprised in some way to say communication takes place.

In a nutshell, you’ll have to store lots of interconnected notes and forget what you put in to be surprised by the results of your search queries.

Do not sort your stuff. Don’t waste time making up categories; this hampers organic growth.

Things aren’t important simply because of their topic but because you write a lot about them.

nodes won’t work properly in isolation but need to be heavily connected. The more connections there are between our neurons, the easier information can be retrieved and the better we perform a task.