To My Messy Artist, How I Designed My One-Tap System for Never Losing an Idea Again (with Zettelkasten method)
- Ming
- Mar 16
- 6 min read
David Lynch once said that if he forgets the idea that he didn't write down, he would kill himself, literally - bit dramatic. But as an artist — especially one whose mind often wanders all over the place — you know exactly the kind of violence he means. It's not the forgetting that hurts. It's knowing you had something, and it slipped through.
In my last post I wrote about journaling and the self — about how the diary gives shelter to the shadow self, the part of you that has never been performed for anyone. I mentioned Laura Palmer's diary with its torn-off pages, Herculine Barbin writing herself into existence, and the question that haunts me: if a performance is not recorded, not archived — does it still exist?
I meant all of that. But I also have to confess: as an ENFP, I am a very messy, unorganised, absolutely-hate-Mr.Banks-way-of-living kind of artist. Life falls faster than I can find the time to write it down. Ideas arrive on the bus, in the rehearsal room, at 2 a.m. staring at the ceiling, between two paintings in a gallery — and if I don't catch them in that exact moment, they dissolve. Like Lynch's fish, swimming back into deep water before you've even reached for the rod.
So instead of trying to become a well-managed self-disciplined person (which I have tried and failed at, repeatedly), I designed a system around the way I actually think — scattered, cross-disciplinary, in fragments, on the move. The goal wasn't to make you to be someone else but to build a system that for people who struggling exactly like myself.
I set myself four conditions before choosing any methodology, which I think that is vital in this case:
PRACTICAL AND EASY
If a system takes more than sixty seconds of my attention in the moment of capture, I won't use it. Love handwriting but imagine try to find a pen, paper, or need to grab your laptop you left in the sitting room, the quick voice memo you never go back to listen (not everyone has Diane as assistant) That's why my phone became the principal input tool as a choice. Unlock, one tap, note them done, done. Lynch had his little notebook and pencil. I have a home screen shortcut that goes directly to a capture prompt. Same principle, different century.
REVIEW AND CONNECT
Capturing is only half the problem. The other half is: what do you do with a hundred disconnected fragments? Combining my personal academic experience and research, the Zettelkasten — German for 'slip-box' — comes in. Invented by the sociologist Niklas Luhmann, who used this personal knowledge management methodology to write 70 books, the method organises notes not by category but by connection. Each note contains ONLY one idea. Each idea links to others. Over time the network of links becomes more valuable than any individual note. Your slip-box starts thinking with you, surfacing patterns you didn't plan, making connections across disciplines that a filing system would keep separate. Like Lynch describes, one fragment of an idea attracts another, and then another, and the whole picture begin to emerge.
FOR TRANS-DISCIPINARY THINKER
My own practice moves between live performance, video installation, Super 8 film, writing, and community engagement. A system that forces me to file notes under a single category would kill the most interesting part of my thinking: the moment when an idea from anthropology (van Gennep's liminality) connects to an observation from rehearsal (the body on the toilet) connects to a visual reference (Derek Jarman's Blue). The Zettelkasten's linking structure is inherently transdisciplinary. A note doesn't belong to one subject — it belongs to every note it connects to. This has been demonstrated by Luhmann himself, by scholars in personal knowledge management, and by artists who work across media. The connections between disciplines are where new ideas live.
FREE, SAFE AND SUSTAINABLE
I always believe everyone can be an artist, and it is a lifetime job. Therefore, the idea of monthly subscription to store your own thoughts feels fundamentally wrong. The tool I chose is Obsidian: free, open-source, stores everything as plain text files on your own device. Even if the app disappeared tomorrow, all your thoughts and notes survive as simple text still. Fully belong to you, as they should - Martin Margiela has the same principle, 'it should not intrude, should not hide or disguise, but demand the participation and creativity of the person using it.'
Borrowing Zettelkasten method, the system uses three types of notes: Fleeting Notes and Literature Notes are the thoughts or words we captured temporarily, by reviewing them and finding the connection in between, we can link and generate our own idea - Permanent Notes. I will use my MA dissertation as an example:
Fleeting Notes
Raw captures. A thought during rehearsal, a sentence from a conversation, an image that won't leave your head. Written in seconds, unpolished, meant to be processed later — not preserved forever.
⚡ [F06] ‘Speak with more Chinese accent’ Type: Fleeting Note |
A director asked me to sound ‘more Chinese’ on set. Another director said ‘just be you.’ The first wanted a cultural signifier. The second wanted a person. This is the whole problem of representation in one anecdote. |
Tags: #identity #representation #self Links → [L07], [P06] |
Literature Notes
Responses to specific sources — books, films, exhibitions, lectures. Not summaries. The question isn't "what does this source say?" but "what does this source trigger in my thinking?" Always written in your own words.
📖 [L04] Cynthia Cruz — The Melancholia of Class Type: Literature Note |
Cruz coins ‘class melancholia’: a collective grief attached to working-class identity when individuals move between class positions. The grief is for what’s lost in the crossing — community, language, belonging. This connects to Harry and Jimmy in Liminal Stranding. Jimmy reads Harry through his own class lens and misses Harry’s own displacement. They’re both in class limbo, but from opposite directions. Their mutual incomprehension is the tragedy. Also connects to Yu Hua’s motorcycle metaphor — China’s class transformation was so fast that people were lost in the transition. Same mechanism, different geography. |
Permanent Notes
Your refined ideas. Each one expresses a single clear thought, developed from fleeting and literature notes. These are the building blocks of your future writing, proposals, artist statements, and public thinking.
🔒 [P04] Cross-Cultural Class Illegibility Type: Permanent Note |
Class identity becomes illegible when it crosses cultural borders. In China, post-1980s economic reform created rapid class mobility that Yu Hua captures with his motorcycle metaphor — people accustomed to bicycle pace forced onto motorcycle speed. In the UK, class is encoded in accent, postcode, education, and cultural consumption patterns that are invisible to outsiders. Harry and Jimmy in Liminal Stranding embody this mutual illegibility. Jimmy reads Harry through British class markers and sees a Chinese student in a small flat — not the middle-class family that funded his education. Harry reads Jimmy through his own class assumptions and sees only a threatening body. Neither can decode the other’s class position because their encoding systems are incompatible. Cynthia Cruz’s ‘class melancholia’ describes the grief of crossing class boundaries. But when the crossing is also transnational, the melancholia doubles: you grieve both the class position you’ve left and the cultural context that made it legible. |
The magic is in the flow between them. A fleeting note captured on the train becomes a literature note when you sit down and connect it to something you've read. The literature note becomes a permanent note when you develop your own argument. And permanent notes link to each other, forming a web of interconnected thinking that grows richer over time.
Why This Matters for Creative Practice
This isn't about productivity. It's about building a relationship with your own thinking system. The connections between Nina Simone's refusal to perform on the audience's terms, van Gennep's theory of rites of passage, the toilet as a liminal object on stage, Maggie Cheung's transnational identity in Irma Vep — these links existed in my mind but I had to reconstruct them every time I sat down to write. A Zettelkasten would have held them for me, ready to assemble.
Now, when I capture a fleeting thought about a rehearsal or an exhibition, I know it will eventually find its place in the network. It might connect to something I noted six months ago. It might become the seed of a new project. The system remembers what I forget.
And it starts with one tap on a phone screen.
Comments