Doing anything without a specific purpose or only for exploratory purposes can be a fruitless endeavor; the same applies to reading. If a reader is to devour loads of books without a focus on a single area or topic, then the resulting Zettelkasten will naturally be chaotic and will hardly be conducive to the formation of connections—the distance between each concept and idea is simply too great. We can then infer that a Zettelkasten works best when new information is being taken in with at least a loose commonality to existing notes, otherwise the difficulty in the early link-making process will increase dramatically.