

Scope your long-form article, thesis or book, summarizing each section or chapter.Organize your thoughts and findings around a particular topic you’re researching.There are other ways you can use this method in a notebook, to help order and structure your projects and ideas: See how the page numbers at the bottom correspond to those listed on the original overview pages? Similarly, I’ve added ‘(36)’ to the top of these pages, to link them back to the overview page. I can take this project a step further using an index card method to document the process and tasks related to these integrations, and then share the cards in the THINKERS App with my website developer.

There are several plugins I need to add to the website to help it work. In the last article about mind maps, I shared an example of how I fleshed out the page requirements of my new podcast website using a mind map in my THINKERS notebook. Instead, you can use separate pages in your notebook to represent each one. This means that you don’t actually need physical index cards to use the method. The lovely thing about this method is that you can adapt it to suit your writing and research style, incorporating it into your existing note taking process. Each card is linked back to a main thread or theme of information via a number, a tag, or a title (or a mix of all three).The information on the card is summarized or simplified.The key components of an effective index card method are: Greene and Holiday each have several successful books under their belts, written with the aid of index cards as their primary research and info storage tool. Index cards have been popularized for a modern-day audience by the author Ryan Holiday, who originally learned this method from his mentor Robert Greene, another respected author. But you don’t need to follow such a detailed path to benefit from using an index card method.Īn Evolving Method “Nearly every dollar I’ve made in my adult life was earned first on the back or front (or both) of an index card.” Luhmann defined his collection as a “combination of disorder and order, of clustering and unpredictable combinations emerging from ad hoc selection”. In the 20th Century, Niklas Luhmann, a prominent sociologist and systems thinker, developed an index card system that he dubbed the Zettelkasten (aka “slip box”) containing 90,000 cards! And then Melvil Dewey took the library system to the next level. In the same century, French libraries started using playing cards for their catalogues, before index cards were adopted by libraries more widely in the 19th Century.
