# 1 - The very first step in creating an analog, old-school Zettelkasten

Building an analog Zettelkasten starts with a single, practical decision: choose the main subject areas (and a few subcategories) that will anchor where new cards belong. The method’s early structure matters because it gives a “map” for deciding whether incoming notes should become cards—and where they should branch—before the system has enough existing cards to naturally connect everything.

For a course-focused Zettelkasten, the structure can be simple: one main category for the course itself. But for an old-school, personal Zettelkasten, the first step is to decide what topics we want to explore. The transcript points to Niklas Luhmann as a reference case. Luhmann ran two Zettelkastens during his lifetime: one devoted to 108 top-level subjects (as reported by Johannes Schmidt) and another with just 11 top-level subject areas. The speaker’s own analog setup currently uses 10 subject areas, including political economy, race and racism, buddhism, philosophy, sociology, education, environment, history, note taking in writing, and productivity.

To generate a starting list, the transcript recommends using an “outline of academic disciplines” (via Wikipedia) to browse major fields and drill down into subcategories. If a user is especially interested in religion, for example, they could take “religious studies” and select relevant subcategories as main categories or branches. Another suggested resource is a video by Scott Shepard that walks through setting up a Zettelkasten from scratch, including how to use the academic-discipline outline to choose subject areas. The transcript also notes that numbering conventions for cards may differ across practitioners, and the speaker’s own numbering approach will be covered later.

Once the main categories are chosen, the transcript advises building subcategories only a limited amount—typically two or three levels deep—especially for areas the user isn’t already deeply knowledgeable about. The reason is that most of the Zettelkasten’s organization should emerge as new cards are created, not from over-engineering a perfect taxonomy upfront. This aligns with the principle attributed to Schmidt: Luhmann organized entries so each new card had some relation to a previous one, without requiring an overarching system to be “kept in mind” at every step.

Still, beginners may need an overarching scaffold early on. That scaffold—main subject areas plus shallow subcategories—helps decide where a new card should go when there aren’t yet enough existing cards to connect it naturally. It also acts as a filter against the “collector’s fallacy,” the impulse to accumulate interesting information without developing lines of thinking. The transcript emphasizes that the goal isn’t an immaculate filing system where every idea has a perfect home; the goal is idea development, with cards primarily elaborating on existing ideas or continuing existing lines of thought.

The practical takeaway is to spend about 20–30 minutes creating a first draft of 4–10 main subject areas, optionally expanding a few into shallow subcategories. If a topic feels missing, the academic-discipline outline can help catch gaps. Finally, overlap between subject areas is expected and not a failure—race and racism can intersect with political philosophy, and inequality can appear across multiple branches—because the method is about thinking, not forcing every idea into a single, exclusive slot.