How to Take Smart Notes: One Simple Technique to Boost Writing, Learning and Thinking – for Students, Academics and Nonfiction Book Writers - By Sonke Ahrens

30 Aug 2021

Date Finished: 29th August 2021 How strongly I recommend it: 9/10

This book is based on Niklas Luhmann’s note taking system - Zettelkasten (slip-box), a unique and effective note-taking system ideal for students and researchers. Author Sonke Ahrens has done a great job of connecting topics like manuscript writing, how we understand things, and the psychology behind producing great work. I would definitly recommend this book if you are a researcher or wish to pursue any kind of writing in th future.

Details and review: Amazon Page

My Notes:

Note-taking is an important part of any process be it academic (writing papers, studying, etc) or professional. But the fear of facing a blank screen drains most of our energy and we produce poor results. Thus, we need to change that. For this, it is important to realize that the process of writing doesn’t start with a blank paper, but an efficient note-taking system to keep our ideas in an organized collection.

Developing and coming up with new ideas can be challenging, especially when we’re raising the bar for ourselves. We will come across a number of ideas and topics. To succeed at it, it is important to keep track of the ideas we read about so that they can be used later. For this, a good note taking system needs to be established.

Establishing such systems can seem complex, but is done properly can be very efficient. For this, we’ll try to keep the system as simple and let the concepts and ideas become complex. We also don’t need to get anything prepared for it. We don’t need to create a new system but the “slip-box” does that for us. Though, it is important to develop routines that help us stick with the system.

If we implement this slip-box well, the task of writing a paper doesn’t seem to be that hard:

1. Assemble notes and bring them in order
2. Turn the notes into draft
3. Review it and you have a manuscript ready

Writing a paper step-by-step

1. Take short and quick notes of any new ideas in your mind (we will process them better later and add it to the slip-box).
2. Make literature notes about what you read (which you might need later for your own research). Make these in your own words with references.
3. Make permanent notes based on notes from steps 1 and 2. Write properly (like for a manuscript for someone else to read).
4. Add to the slip-box such that related notes are together and you can easily find it using a reference.
5. Fill gaps in the slip-box notes and add what interests you. This system will help you find gap to fill and new ideas to pursue.
6. After some time, you will have complete sections on an idea or topic. Check for missing pieces and redundancies and remedy them.
7. Transform these notes into a manuscript in a way it’s relevant to the discussion there.
8. Make final changes to manuscript can you move onto the next manuscript.

Toolbox for this System

1. Pen and Paper/Small Notepad: This is to note down any new ideas/insights that we encounter or pops in our mind (so we don’t forget it).
2. Reference management system: To keep a reference of what we read (software like Zotero do a great job).
3. Slip-box: This is the main component. We can go for a physical paper and box-based system, but modern softwares are more convenient in this digital age (like Zettlr, RoamResearch)
4. Editor: Any editor works fine. If you want it to be compatible with Zotero, Microsoft Word is a good choice.

Why writing is important

Writing helps us improve our knowledge base much better than just reading as it promotes articulation. It has obvious benefits of getting more quantified ideas and information, introduces structure in our findings, and right better works. The biggest advantage of writing is that it improves and reading, thinking and other intellectual skills (which is beneficial even if we don’t plan on writing a book/articles/manuscripts).

Do everything as if nothing counts other than writing.

The problem with traditional note-taking systems is that all important points are scattered (highlights, notes in margin, excerpts of articles). The slip-box streamlines everything – all information in one format, in one place.

Sorting ideas and concepts by topics or time (chronology) is a bad idea. It might grow too large making it difficult to find relevant pieces and creates a mess. So, add notes to the slip-box based on critical mass. Critical mass is achieved when we have information in our slip-box in decent quantity and good quality.

To obtain critical mass, we need to differentiate between:

1. Fleeting notes
   • Reminders of information
   • Do not take fleeting notes as permanent notes as it will not help build the critical mass and chronology will make them useless.
   • Also do not take all notes as fleeting notes.
2. Permanent notes
   • Never thrown away and are standalone.
   • Increasing more of these will lead to a repository of irrelevant information.
3. Project notes
   • Relevant for a particular project. Can be discarded after the project is over.
   • Don’t collect notes that are only specific to one/current project. You’ll need to start everything from scratch for the next one.
   • Moreover, creating new folders for every potential project is also not the solution. Establish a trade off.

How to motivate yourself to keep taking notes

When we read something and try to express our understanding by taking notes, it pushes us to understand the concept and relate with our own mental models and understanding. The fact is that this makes us better at the concept and the better we become, we learn to take better and quicker notes easily. The same is also true for reading and capturing the relevant bits of entire article/resource.

The reason this is a good practice is that it pushes us into a virtuous cycle where moving forward doesn’t need will power or motivation. The work automatically produce a positive affect and we enjoy doing it. This serves as the motivation. On the contrary, if we look for external motivation (say “If I exercise for one hour today, I’ll treat myself by watching Netflix in the evening”), it will lead us to abandon the task (exercising) and directly jump to the reward (Netflix) sooner or later.

Six steps to successful writing

1. Separate and Interlocking Task

Multitasking and distractions severely hampered our attention. In academic writing, there are multiple tasks (reading, thinking, writing, proofreading). Thus, keep these tasks different and try not to multitask (it might seem obvious, but unknowingly we tend to do it, like writing and proofreading at the same time).

Be flexible in your approaches. Know where to be extraordinarily focused and when in a playful exploration of ideas phase.

Become an expert instead of a planner. Experts don’t use proper structure and methodical approaches rigidly. With experience, they derive connections among various pieces and parts, and act accordingly (this is what gut feeling actually is!) We can get to this stage by setting up feedback mechanisms and incorporating them to improve our understanding.

Unfinished tasks tend to bug us until they are finished. What we can do is make a note of unfinished tasks – which will give us a sense of completion. We can later continue the task when we left it (as we’ve noted it) and not get the feeling of being constantly reminded of it.

Finally, we must make an attempt to reduce the number of decisions we make. We can do this for small things like keeping the same notebook, pen, times, spot where we’ll work, etc. to make less decisions. Studies show that as we make more decisions through the day, we deplete our focus. By making less decisions, we will be able to focus better on the main task.

2. Read for understanding

Taking handwritten notes has more advantages than typing it out or just remembering it. Various studies indicate that writing facilitate better understanding. This is because writing takes time and to take notes by hand, we understand what we read/listen and jot down the essence in our own words. This puts the information out of the author’s/lecturer’s context and puts in our context (which is relevant for our mental models). Thus, we must always keep a pen in our hand while we read and make notes whenever we encounter a new idea.

For this, we can maintain a book, take notes chronologically, set up book number and page number system, and use the location of information as a reference for a note in the slip box.

To develop good quality work, it is important to focus on not only the ideas and facts that confirm our thoughts/project hypothesis but also those that contradict it. The human mind is naturally drawn to ideas that confirm what we already know. This is called “confirmation bias”. This pushes us away from the territory of the unknown, which is not suitable for researchers. Thus, we need to tackle this.

For this, the first step is to focus on insight and not if it confirms or dispute our hypothesis. The idea is to generate critical mass. And the next step is to add notes to the slip-box if it’s relevant. This is a shift of mindset from “approve vs disprove” to “relevant vs irrelevant”. Once, we have achieved with this, we can go on to seek out dis-confirming facts. This makes our work much better and worthwhile.

To make effective and useful notes, it’s important to be able to get the gist of what we read or learnt. We can build this skill if we practise it. It improves our understanding, articulation, and ability to observe patterns to add to our mental models.

There is an important difference between familiarity and understanding. We might seem to understand it in the bird’s eye view but fall prey to misunderstanding familiarity with understanding. Example, when we resort to re-reading. Rephrasing information in our own words pushes us to truly understand and fill gaps in our understanding.

We might be getting the idea that the slip-box is a second mind. It is not. The slip box takes care of the details, ideas, concepts, and their references. Mind focuses on the big picture (mental associations and connections), and creative thinking. So basically we are transferring the load of a long-term memory from our mind to slip-box. In fact, each one of them will do best when working this way.

3. Take smart notes

To become a good researcher, an important skill is to be able to think about something beyond the given context. This is logical to follow as it’s the nature of this work to be able to apply concepts in different lines of thoughts. A slip box build connections and facilitates just that.

A generally tried approach to writing is doing a set number of pages every day (like writing 5 pages everyday or something similar). While this could be a good idea for novels, it is not a good idea for research as research also includes other steps like thinking, literature reading and survey, etc. Maintaining a slip box can ultimately lead to a much higher productivity for researchers than doing something like 5 pages every day. The benefits that slip box of us as it grows with time grows exponentially due to the connections it helps us establish among different pieces. Think of it this way, slip box approach is like compounding on your investment and writing a few pages every day is like saving money in the piggy-bank. If we want to measure our daily productivity, we can measure it based on number of slip-box notes written.

Our brain does not always do a good job of evaluating our thinking and arguments. So taking notes (writing it down) helps us scrutinize it better and solve any inconsistencies that might be in our thought in mind. Moreover, people think thinking is just an internal process in our brain and writing is for the finished ideas. Luhmann clearly states that it is not possible to think systematically without writing. Thus, by writing down ideas and adding to slip box, we force ourselves to find answers to questions that arise in our mind about it and also distinguish among different ideas.

One of the greatest functionalities of a brain is the ability to forget almost everything. Some of this information can be retrieved my triggers in our brains which indicates the importance of associations in our mind. In fact, this is how we actually learn and understand (and not cramming). If we were able to remember everything, we will not be able to get a gist not understanding any underlying meaning. The slip-box and to achieve this in an external system. Writing notes and sorting them is nothing other than an attempt to understand wider meaning of something. And to enhance our learning, we must not attempt to make learning easier (by sorting them into topics, or what teachers generally do), but instead elaborate on differences and similarities of notes.

4. Develop ideas

The slip-box is not an encyclopedia/wikipedia. It is actually just like information in our mind. We might get an impression that we need to have an overview of it but this idea is just as absurd as having an overview of our thinking.

We must understand the difference between being an archivist and a writer. An archivist will add the notes with keywords relevant to the topic. A writer will add the keywords to the notes in a way in which he/she wants it to be called forth (pull this string). Hence, keywords should be chosen in context of what we are working on or interested in and not by looking at that note in isolation.

Building connections among notes:

For a digital slip-box, there are 2 important types of links/connections:

• Notes that serve as an entry point to a topic. It can include links to other related notes. These will/can change over time.
• Note-to-note links. These are general links expanding the topic.

We must keep adding our ideas and new information to slip-box as it happens many times that the information we newly learn/rediscover are already present in the slip-box. So, maintaining a slip-box quickly solve this. There is also opportunity to improve/correct the information in the slip-box. Moreover, it also helps differentiate between pieces of information with subtle nuances, that facilitate deeper understanding.

“A truly wise person is not someone who knows everything, but someone who is able to make sense of things by drawing from an extended resource of interpretation of schemes.”

This highlights the importance of having mental models to interpret information and use it in right context (Charlie Munger is a strong believer of this idea).

What is innovation?

Contrary to the popular belief, innovation is small steps taken in the right direction by deliberate effort and for a long time rather than just a moment of realization.

Abstraction:

To achieve good insights and exceptional works, it is important to play around with the existing ideas and information. This requires ability to think abstractly. This pushes us to think of a piece of information in another contexts. This is what creativity is.

Effective thinkers:

• They have great ability to focus on main idea beyond the details.
• They make sure they really see what they think they see and describe it as plainly and factually as possible (seems banal but we fall prey to it). This promotes them to learn from others’ mistakes and eliminating the biases in the data (eg. survivorship bias).
• They take simple ideas seriously.

Facilitate creativity through restrictions:

It is generally thought that we can be creative when we break from structure. But evidence shows otherwise. Studies as well as examples show that imposing restrictions and structure can promote creativity. Tips to store in notes in slip-box with this idea:

• keep same format
• keep notes precise
• for digital notes, make notes of size such that there’s no need to scroll

5. Share your insight

This step mainly concerns more with writing the manuscript than taking notes for the slip-box. So the thought process here changes from developing a mental model to arranging the notes linearly and collating it into a manuscript.

Brainstorming can be a terrible technique for coming up with ideas as our brain prioritizes fetching easily available information, which is not the same as relevant information. Turning over to the slip-box, the topics which have formed a cluster are where our new ideas lie.

Doing research is not easy as we might lose interest in it. To avoid that, it is important to carefully estimate the time and resources needed to complete it (most of the time we underestimate this). After that, we must break down the entire task into small sub tasks which can be measured quantifiably, and adjust future plans accordingly. Thus, having the flexibility to make necessary changes in the direction of the project helps us stay at it and produce better results. As an extension, when we feel we are in charge, we will stay longer at the task, as it requires no willpower to keep at it.

While writing, we will obviously make changes. TIP: if there’s any part we feel might help us but seems incorrectly/overwritten, copy it to another file named “xyz-rest.doc”. It gives us a sense that we haven’t lost anything, but in reality, we’ll mostly end up not using the doc.

6. Make it a habit

Doing research and even maintaining a slip-box requires constant efforts and habit building.

The key to building a habit successfully is not to break the old habit but to build new ones such that someday they might replace the old ones.

---

Want to get hands on my other book notes? Head over to My Book Notes.