Can tags ever be useful for your second brain?

Niklas Luhmann's Zettelkasten can certainly vouch for it. Over a 30-year career, his Zettelkasten helped him publish...

• 58 books.

• Hundreds of articles.

• 12 additional books after this passing!

And at the core of his organization are tags, or "keywords" to supplement the sequencing of his notes.

Here's how he did it.

1 Create an index

This will hold all your keywords with reference links to notes.

2 Add references

When adding a new note, also add its reference to an existing keyword in the index. Or, create a new keyword to reference it.

3 Limit the number of references per Keyword

Each keyword has a maximum of 4 references.

There's no need to tag all related notes because of the sequencing of notes. In a Zettlekasten, related notes are next to each other. So, pointing to a beginning note of a topic is effectively pointing to all related notes.

One of the benefits of this approach is that the "cross-pollination" of ideas is built into the process. One keyword may point to vastly different topics.

This helps to inspire comparisons and surprising connections.