How to Take Smart Notes by Sönke Ahrens

Introduction

• Writing is not what follows research, learning or studying, it is the medium
  of all this work.
• If we take notes unsystematically, inefficiently or simply wrong, we
  might not even realize it until we are in the midst of a deadline panic

The main thrust of the entire book is essentially taking notes is a powerful way to learn, remember, and recall the information you’re reading about.

1 Everything You Need to Know

• A good structure is something you can trust. It relieves you from the
  burden of remembering and keeping track of everything. If you can trust the
  system, you can let go of the attempt to hold everything together in your head
  and you can start focusing on what is important: The content, the argument
  and the ideas
• Having a clear structure to work in is completely different from making
  plans about something. If you make a plan, you impose a structure on
  yourself; it makes you inflexible.

The entire system boils down to building a set of very simple rules, and follow them. haveing a solid structure allows you to focus on understanding the content.

1.1 Good Solutions are Simple – and Unexpected

• All that means is that a system is needed to keep track of the ever increasing pool of information, which allows one to combine different ideas in an intelligent way with the aim of generating new ideas.

• The principle of GTD is to collect everything that needs to be taken care of in one place and process it in a standardized way.
  Largely more of the same sentiment. set up a system, make part of the system a natural inclination to collect info and then process it outside the moment of collection.

1.2 The Slip-box

• Writing is not a linear process. We constantly have to jump back and forth
  between different tasks. It wouldn’t make any sense to micromanage
  ourselves on that level. Zooming out to the bigger picture does not really
  help, either, because then we have next steps like “writing a page.” That does
  not really help with navigating the things you have to do to write a page,
  often a whole bunch of other things that can take an hour or a month. One has
  to navigate mostly by sight. These are probably the reasons why GTD never
  really caught on in academia, although it is very successful in business and
  has a good reputation among the self-employed.

• Even hard work can be fun as long as it is aligned with our intrinsic goals and
  we feel in control. The problems arise when we set up our work in such an
  inflexible way that we can’t adjust it when things change and become
  arrested in a process that seems to develop a life of its own.

The next step in a project is usually as far as you can see. Zooming out too far where the only thing you can see are non concrete goals often isn't specific enough to be useful as a framework or to do list to work from. If a system is a poor match for the tasks that are needed, the overhead of managing that can make an otherwise fun and passion filled task be miserable. A simple easy to follow process helps stop that.

2 Everything You Need to Do

• We need a reliable and simple external structure to think in that compensates for the
  limitations of our brains.

• Notes build up while you think, read, understand and generate ideas, because you have to have a pen in your hand if you want to think, read, understand and generate ideas properly anyway. If you want to learn something for the long run, you have to write it down. If you want to really understand something, you have to translate it into your own words. Thinking takes place as much on paper as in your own head.
  When you sit down and read something, theres often an internal dialogue going on at the same time as the written one. Part of taking notes is to allow you to get the internal dialogue written down, in your own words.

3 Everything You Need to Have

• Imagine if we went through life learning only what we planned to learn or being explicitly taught. doubt we would have even learned to speak. Each added bit of information, filtered only by our interest, is a contribution to our future understanding, thinking and writing. And the best ideas are usually the ones we haven’t anticipated anyway.

• Unfortunately, most students collect and embrace over time a variety of learning and note-taking techniques, each promising to make something easier, but combined have the opposite effect.
  Adding information to the things that you know, especially divergent and unrelated information can help shape an interesting lens to see the world through.

3.1 The Tool Box

• Good tools do not add features and more options to what we already have, but help to reduce distractions from the main work, which here is thinking.
  Excellent tools often don't have gadgets and gizmos, they tend to just be excellent at the thing they need to do. A note taking system should be similar.

5 Writing Is the Only Thing That Matters

• Studying, done properly, is research, because it is about gaining insight that cannot be anticipated and will be shared within the scientific community under public scrutiny.

• It is public because in the discussion, it does not matter anymore what the author meant, only what is there in writing. The moment the author can be removed from the scene, the written piece is a public claim on truth. The criteria for a convincing argument are always the same, regardless of who the author is or the status of the publisher: They have to be coherent and based on facts. Truth does not belong to anyone; it is the outcome of the scientific exchange of written ideas. This is why the presentation and the production of knowledge cannot be separated, but are rather two sides of the same coin
  When you write something down, you're divorcing it from your context, and it can be read by anyone at that point.

6 Simplicity Is Paramount

• The ship owners tried to integrate the container into their usual way of working without changing the infrastructure and their routines. They tried to benefit from the obvious simplicity of loading containers onto ships without letting go of what they were used to. In the beginning, the perception was very much shaped by what worked before, and only the most immediate effects were visible.

• If you sort by topic, you are faced with the dilemma of either adding more and more notes to one topic, which makes them increasingly hard to find, or adding more and more topics and subtopics to it, which only shifts the mess to another level.

• To achieve a critical mass, it is crucial to distinguish clearly between three types of notes:

  1. Fleeting notes, which are only reminders of information, can be written in any kind of way and will end up in the trash within a day or two.
  2. Permanent notes, which will never be thrown away and contain the necessary information in themselves in a permanently understandable way. They are always stored in the same way in the same place, either in the reference system or, written as if for print, in the slip-box.
  3. Project notes, which are only relevant to one particular project. They are kept within a project-specific folder and can be discarded or archived after the project is finished.

This is largely the main thrust and idea behind the notetaking system. I will be keeping the same structure because I like it. I can probably do more to stratify my project notes and amplify my notes for the permanent collection.

• It is important to understand, though, that underlining sentences or writing comments in the margins are also just fleeting notes and do nothing to elaborate on a text.

• Permanent notes, on the other hand, are written in a way that can still be understood even when you have forgotten the context they are taken from.

• Nothing in this box would ever get thrown away. Some notes might disappear into the background and never catch his attention again, while others might become connection points to various lines of reasoning and reappear on a regular basis in various contexts.

The main concept here is to write short notes that contain all the relevant information for the atomic idea. a collection of small notes with complete context for each will be more versatile than a large bunch of difficult to access notes.

7 Nobody Ever Starts From Scratch

• The process of writing is vastly misunderstood. If you grab off the shelf a random study guide or self-help book on writing and skim through the first pages, the chances are that you will encounter something like this: “To make your research more efficient, your first step should be to narrow the aspect you choose to focus on and also formulate an explicit question that your research and analysis will address.

• In order to develop a good question to write about or find the best angle for an assignment, one must already have put some thought into a topic.

• By focusing on what is interesting and keeping written track of your own intellectual development, topics, questions and arguments will emerge from the material without force.

• The things you are supposed to find in your head by brainstorming usually don’t have their origins in there.

Picking something that interests the author very important for long term pursuit of a project. Essentially look at information you already know and look at the fringes, the edges often have places that are interesting to explore for long periods of time. as you learn more things, those areas grow and change, keeping things interesting.

8 Let the Work Carry You Forward

• Only if the work itself becomes rewarding can the dynamic of motivation and reward become self-sustainable and propel the whole process forward

• Feedback loops are not only crucial for the dynamics of motivation, but also the key element to any learning process. Nothing motivates us more than the experience of becoming better at what we do.

• As we are the authors of all the notes, we learn in lockstep with the slipbox. This is another big difference from using an encyclopedia like Wikipedia. We use the same mental models, theories and terms to organize our thoughts in our brains as in our slip-box.

Using the slip box should be a pleasant experience and should be a reflection of how you think. Reading Wikipedia wont connect the information to things you already know in the same way because it hasn't been filtered through your personal experience lens.

9.2 Multitasking is not a good idea

• According to a widely cited study, the constant interruption of emails and text messages cuts our productivity by about 40% and makes us at least 10 IQ points dumber.

• Multitasking is not what we think it is. It is not focusing attention on more than one thing at a time. Nobody can do that. When we think we multitask, what we really do is shift our attention quickly between two (or more) things. And every shift is a drain on our ability to shift and delays the moment we manage to get focused again. Trying to multitask fatigues us and decreases our ability to deal with more than one task.

Generally multitasking is terrible

9.3 Give Each Task the Right Kind of Attention

• The good news is that we can train ourselves to stay focused on one thing for longer if we avoid multitasking, remove possible distractions and separate different kinds of tasks as much as possible so they will not interfere with each other.

9.4 Become an Expert Instead of a Planner

• “On one hand, those with wandering, defocused, childlike minds seem to be the most creative; on the other, it seems to be analysis and application that’s important. The answer to this conundrum is that creative people need both … The key to creativity is being able to switch between a wide-open, playful mind and a narrow analytical frame.”

• Experts rely on embodied experience, which enables them to reach the state of virtuosity. An expert in academic writing has a feel for the process, an acquired intuition for which task will bring one closer to the finished manuscript and what is only a distraction.

• Most study guides and academic writing teachers are trying very hard to spare you from that experience by telling you what, when and how to write instead. But they are keeping you from learning the very thing academia and writing is all about: gaining insight and making it public.

• Teachers tend to mistake the ability to follow (their) rules with the ability to make the right choices in real situations. Unlike the expert paramedics, they did not look at the unique circumstances and check if the paramedics in the videos did the best thing possible in each individual situation. Instead, they focused on the question of whether the people in the videos acted according to the rules they taught.

Learning new things and gaining unique insight/contributing to the work of others relies on a persons ability to transition from playing with the general concept, and diving deeply into more stringent and structured ways of engaging with the information. One challenge of traditional teaching, and assessment of knowledge is that its difficult to teach something unstructured like play and verify its success, especially when you have a structure of things you're supposed to be learning for a complete education.

9.5 Get Closure

Therefore, you have to remember much less than seven individual items. You only have to remember two – the rule and the starting year.
This is why it is so much easier to remember things we understand than things we don’t. It is not that we have to choose to focus either on learning or understanding.

Open tasks tend to occupy our short-term memory – until they are done. That is why we get so easily distracted by thoughts of unfinished tasks, regardless of their importance. But thanks to Zeigarnik’s follow-up research, we also know that we don’t actually have to finish tasks to convince our brains to stop thinking about them. All we have to do is to write them down in a way that convinces us that it will be taken care of.

Doing your best to get closure on an idea, whether it is completing the task, or writing it down in a dedicated place. getting the idea out of your head can only occur when youre confident you wont need to remember it later.

9.6 Reduce the Number of Decisions

Today, willpower is compared to muscles: a limited resource that depletes quickly and needs time to recover. Improvement through training is possible to a certain degree, but takes time and effort.

10.1 Read With a Pen in Hand

If you understand what you read and translate it into the different context of your own thinking, materialized in the slip-box, you cannot help but transform the findings and thoughts of others into something that is new and your own.

When we extract ideas from the specific context of a text, we deal with ideas that serve a specific purpose in a particular context, support a specific argument, are part of a theory that isn’t ours or written in a language we wouldn’t use. This is why we have to translate them into our own language to prepare them to be embedded into new contexts of our own thinking, the different context(s) within the slip-box.

Translating an authors ideas into your own automatically helps reframe the context using your own words, which is the first step in both using it later in your own context later, as well as a deeper understanding and relation to the idea. j

10.2 Keep an Open Mind

If insight becomes a threat to your academic or writing success, you are doing it wrong.

If you're dodging insight or different ideas. something has gone horribly wrong.

10.3 Get the Gist

The slip-box forces us to be selective in reading and note-taking, but the only criterion is the question of whether something adds to a discussion in the slip-box. The only thing that matters is that it connects or is open to connections.

Yes, we have to be selective, but not in terms of pros and cons, but in terms of relevant or irrelevant. And as soon we focus on the content of the slip-box, dis-confirming data becomes suddenly very attractive, because it opens up more possible connections and discussions within the slip-box, while mere confirming data does not.

Being selective as to what goes inside the personal database should be a high priority. you want to capture the information that is reusable in other contexts, preserving the gist of the core ideas. the rest can be looked up later if a direct quote or a deeper reference is needed.

** 10.4 Learn to Read**

With practice comes the ability to find the right words to express something in the best possible way, which means in a simple, but not simplified way.

In oral presentations, we easily get away with unfounded claims. We can distract from argumentative gaps with confident gestures or drop a casual “you know what I mean” irrespective of whether we know what we meant. In writing, these maneuvers are a little too obvious. It is easy to check a statement like: “But that is what I said!” The most important advantage of writing is that it helps us to confront ourselves when we do not understand something as well as we would like to believe.

While it is obvious that familiarity is not understanding, we have no chance

of knowing whether we understand something or just believe we understand something until we test ourselves in some form. If we don’t try to verify our understanding during our studies, we will happily enjoy the feeling of getting smarter and more knowledgeable while in reality staying as dumb as we were.

I really like the framing simple, not simplified. writing something down invokes a certain level of clarity and formality. Its much easier to get away with terrible sentence structure and bad logic in a spoken context. Flexing this muscle and writing things down clearly allows us to self test and hopefully catch ourselves when we think we know something but havent quite gotten it yet.

10.5 Learn by Reading

Learning itself requires deliberate practice, and I mean actual learning that helps us to increase our understanding of the world, not just the learning that makes us pass a test. And deliberate practice is demanding; it requires effort. Trying to skip this step would be like going to the gym and trying to work out with the least effort possible. That just doesn’t make sense, just like it wouldn’t make sense to hire a coach to do the heavy lifting.

It is not surprising, therefore, that the best-researched and most successful learning method is elaboration.

Elaborating on an idea forces the writer to make active connections and extrapolations which is a great way to learn and hone in on core concepts.

11 Take Smart Notes

Working with the slip-box, therefore, doesn’t mean storing information in there instead of in your head, i.e. not learning. On the contrary, it facilitates real, long-term learning. It just means not cramming isolated facts into your brain – something you probably wouldn’t want to do anyway. The objection that it takes too much time to take notes and sort them into the slip-box is therefore short-sighted. Writing, taking notes and thinking about how ideas connect is exactly the kind of elaboration that is needed to learn. Not learning from what we read because we don’t take the time to elaborate on it is the
real waste of time.

Taking literature notes is a form of deliberate practice as it gives us feedback on our understanding or lack of it, while the effort to put into our own words the gist of something is at the same time the best approach to understanding what we read.

only if something is written down is it fixed enough to be discussed independently from the author.

What does help for true, useful learning is to connect a piece of information to as many meaningful contexts as possible, which is what we do when we connect our notes in the slip-box with other notes. Making these connections deliberately means building up a self-supporting network of interconnected ideas and facts that work reciprocally as cues for each other.

The practice of writing deliberate notes that connect other notes to it is a strong exercise in understanding the meaning, context, and future use of both notes. long term memory relies on a scaffold of connections and associations, so making notes that explicitly pull some ideas together is a great way to make connections

If you focus your time and energy on understanding, you cannot help but learn. But if you focus your time and energy on learning without trying to understand, you will not only not understand, but also probably not learn. And the effects are cumulative.

The first type of links are those on notes that are giving you the overview of a topic. These are notes directly referred to from the index and usually used as an entry point into a topic that has already developed to such a degree that an overview is needed or at least becomes helpful.

A scientific term or concept only becomes meaningful within the context of a
theory – otherwise it would just be a word.

To be able to play with ideas, we first have to liberate them from their original context by means of abstraction and re-specification.

Creativity cannot be taught like a rule or approached like a plan. But we can make sure that our working environment allows us to be creative with ideas.

We don’t see lines on a paper first, then realize that these are words, then use them to build sentences and finally decipher the meaning. We immediately read on the level of meaningful understanding. To really understand a text is therefore a constant revision of our first interpretation.

In his beautifully titled book “The Antidote: Happiness for People Who Can’t Stand Positive Thinking, Oliver Burkeman describes how much our culture is focused on success and how we neglect the important lessons from failure (Burkeman 2013). Manager biographies are a good example: Even though all of them contain some anecdotes about setbacks, these are always embedded in a bigger story about success (failed managers unfortunately rarely write biographies). If we try to extract a lesson from all these books, we might end up believing that persistence and charisma are paramount for success, even though these are exactly the same ingredients needed to screw a project up big time

simple is not the same as easy, and that the worst thing you can do is to make a simple task unnecessarily complicated.

Language in itself is extremely standardized and limited in many ways. We are restricted to the use of only 26 letters, but what that enables us to do! We can write novels, theories, love letters or court orders – just by rearranging these 26 letters.

The binary code is radically more limited than the alphabet as it contains only two states, one or zero, but it opened up a range of creative possibilities that is unprecedented.

Learning, Reading, and generally the process of becoming educated based on previous persons work is a process of interpretation, understanding, and reframing the contexts your thinking in. Even while reading, we aren't thinking about the arrangement of letters and how they form sounds, which form words, which are combined into sentences, which are in the larger context of a paragraph. Our brain does a lot of filtering and synthesis to essentially understand what people were thinking, automatically.
The restriction of language is part of this process of figuring out how to refine and present the knowledge wed like to transfer in our writing to the other person, through their own lens, to be interpreted.

Testing students for memorized knowledge does not give much indication about their understanding, and the fact that someone came up with a lot of ideas during a brainstorming session does not give much indication about their quality.

Every time we read something, we make a decision on what is worth writing down and what is not. Every time we make a permanent note, we also made a decision about the aspects of a text we regarded as relevant for our longer term thinking and relevant for the development of our ideas.

Being intimately familiar with something enables us to be playful with it, to modify it, to spot new and different ideas without running the risk of merely repeating old ideas believing they are new.

It is not surprising that motivation is shown to be one of the most important indicators for successful students – next to the feeling of being in control of one’s own learning course. When even highly intelligent students fail in their studies, it’s most often because they cease to see the meaning in what they were supposed to learn

The process of reading and writing inevitably produces a lot of unintended by-products. Not all ideas can fit into the same article, and only a fraction of the information we encounter is useful for one particular project.

For every document I write, I have another called “xy-rest.doc,” and every single time I cut something, I copy it into the other document, convincing myself that I will later look through it and add it back where it might fit. Of course, it never happens – but it still works.

Learning, thinking and writing should not be about accumulating knowledge, but about becoming a different person with a different way of thinking. This is done by questioning one’s own thinking routines in the light of new experiences and facts.