Zettelkasten

The 20th-century German sociologist Niklas Luhmann was a highly productive social scientist. He published 50 books and over 600 articles.

He credited much of his producitivity and success to his Zettelkasten (translate: “Slip Box”). It’s a system for developing ideas over long periods of time by slowly iterating a collection of many atomic slips of paper, all densly linked to each other.

References

https://zettelkasten.de/introduction/

Luhmann, N. (1992). Communicating with Slip Boxes. In A. Kieserling (Ed.), & M. Kuehn (Trans.), Universität als Milieu: Kleine Schriften (pp. 53–61). Retrieved from http://luhmann.surge.sh/communicating-with-slip-boxes