Stop drowning in notes. Start thinking clearly.
Most productivity systems promise to help you capture everything. This book offers something better: the courage to capture almost nothing. The Minimalist's Zettelkasten strips the popular note-taking method down to its essence—three simple moves repeated over time. No complicated software. No thousand-note archives. No digital hoarding disguised as knowledge work.
The Minimalist’s Zettelkasten: Think Better with Less, authored by Edmund Gröpl, is set to be independently published in early 2026. For readers who want to put these principles into practice, I’ve created two open resources on GitHub:
- Obsidian-Templates for Zettelkasten: minimal examples that support the three moves — capture, write, connect.
- Obsidian-Zettelkasten-Starter-Kit: a small, ready-to-use Obsidian vault with the essential note types and workflows described in this book.
Notes & Figures
- The Minimalist’s Zettelkasten - Notes: all notes from the book. Download PDF with links to sources.
- The Minimalist’s Zettelkasten - Figures: all figures from the book to zoom in for details.
Previews
- Podcast from NotebookLM on YouTube: The Minimalist’s Zettelkasten
- Simple rules to start with from: The Minimalist’s Zettelkasten
11.01.2022
- Digital Sketchnotes.
- My first book project.
- Project stopped with v.33 and 184 pages to start new project.
- Why? Focus shifted from visual notetaking to combining sketchnotes with Zettelkasten.
05.03.2022
- Make Useful Notes.
- My second book project.
- Project stopped with v.18 and 233 pages to start new project.
- Why? Increasing complexity evolving from the established outline needs a fresh start.
10.09.2025
- The Minimalist's Zettelkasten. Think Better with Less.
- My third book project.
- Now at v.20 and in the beta-reading stage.
- Self-publishing on KDP is planned for early 2026.
Sketchnotes are a way of taking notes using drawings and illustrations, along with words. The sketchnote concept was coined by Mike Rohde and allows you to add visual element to your notes, making it more engaging, memorable and easy to understand the subject.
More about: https://rohdesign.com/handbook
Obsidian is a note-taking and knowledge management app from Shida Li and Erica Xu. It works on top of a local folder of plain text Markdown files and lets you turn a collection of plain text files into a rich network of linked thought.
More about: https://obsidian.md
Zettelkasten is a personal tool for thinking and writing created by Niklas Luhmann. It has hypertextual features to make a web of thought possible. The difference to other systems is that you create a web of thoughts instead of notes of arbitrary size and form, and emphasize connection, not a collection.
More about: https://www.soenkeahrens.de/en/takesmartnotes
- First published at LinkedIn 25.04.2022.
- Obsidian-Templates
- Obsidian-Zettelkasten-Starter-Kit
Please leave feedback here in the GitHub discussions or file a new issue if you found a bug or have a feature request.