How to Take Smart Notes

by Sönke Ahrens

Everybody writes.

these “written pieces” are also what most self-help books for academics or study guides focus on, but very few give guidance for the everyday note-taking that takes up the biggest chunk of our writing.

they ignore the main part, namely note-taking, failing to understand that improving the organisation of all writing makes a difference.

This book aims to fill this gap by showing you how to efficiently turn your thoughts and discoveries into convincing written pieces and build up a treasure of smart and interconnected notes along the way.

notes not only to make writing easier and more fun for yourself, but also to learn for the long run and generate new ideas.

those who take smart notes will never have the problem of a blank screen again.

Just having it all in your head is not enough, as getting it down on paper is the hard bit.

productive writing is based on good note-taking.

Getting something that is already written into another written piece is incomparably easier than assembling everything in your mind and ...

The quality of a paper and the ease with which it is written depends more than anything on what you have done in writing before you even made a decision on the topic.

most important indicator of academic success is not to be found in people’s heads, but in the way they do their everyday work.

What does make a significant difference along the whole intelligence spectrum is something else: how much self-discipline or self-control one uses to approach the tasks at hand

self-control and self-discipline have much more to do with our environment than with ourselves (cf. Thaler, 2015, ch. 2) – and the environment can be changed.

Having a meaningful and well-defined task beats willpower every time.

not having to use willpower indicates that you set yourself up for success.

A good structure allows you to do that, to move seamlessly from one task to another – without threatening the whole arrangement or losing sight of the bigger picture.

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.

How do you plan for insight, which, by definition, cannot be anticipated?

The challenge is to structure one’s workflow in a way that insight and new ideas can become the driving forces that push us forward.

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.

it is not just about collecting thoughts, but about making connections and sparking new ideas.

The best way to deal with complexity is to keep things as simple as possible and to follow a few basic principles. The simplicity of the structure allows complexity to build up where we want it: on the content level.

importance of an overarching workflow

David Allen’s “Getting Things Done”

The principle of GTD is to collect everything that needs to be taken care of in one place and process it in a standardised way.

Only if we know that everything is taken care of, from the important to the trivial, can we let go and focus on what is right in front of us.

Only if nothing else is lingering in our working memory and taking up valuable mental resources can we experience what Allen calls a “mind like water” - the state where we can focus on the work right in front of us without getting distracted by competing thoughts.

structure for our everyday work that deals with the fact that most distractions do not come so much from our environment, but our own minds.

we can take from Allen as an important insight is that the secret to a successful organization lies in the holistic perspective. Everything needs to be taken care of, otherwise the neglected bits will nag us until the unimportant tasks become urgent.

other insight of David Allen: Only if you can trust your system, only if you really know that everything will be taken care of, will your brain let go and let you focus on the task at hand.

Niklas Luhmann.

Instead of adding notes to existing categories or the respective texts, he wrote them all on small pieces of paper, put a number in the corner and collected them in one place: the slip-box.

His slip-box became his dialogue partner, main idea generator and productivity engine. It helped him to structure and develop his thoughts.

He turned to his slip-box and with its help he put together a doctoral thesis and the habilitation thesis in less than a year – while taking classes in sociology. Shortly after, in 1968, he was chosen to become professor of sociology at the University of Bielefeld

But doesn’t it make much more sense that the impressive body of work was produced not in spite of the fact he never made himself do anything he didn’t feel like, but because of it?

Only if the work is set up in a way that is flexible enough to allow these small and constant adjustments can we keep our interest, motivation and work aligned – which is the precondition to effortless or almost effortless work.

If we work in an environment that is flexible enough to accommodate our work rhythm, we don’t need to struggle with resistance.

Studies on highly successful people have proven again and again that success is not the result of strong willpower and the ability to overcome resistance, but rather the result of smart working environments that avoid resistance in the first place

Sure, you need to be smart to be successful in academia and writing, but if you don’t have an external system to think in and organise your thoughts, ideas and collected facts, or have no idea how to embed it in your overarching daily routines, the disadvantage is so enormous that it just can’t be compensated by a high IQ.

Whenever he read something, he would write the bibliographic information on one side of a card and make brief notes about the content on the other side (Schmidt 2013, 170). These notes would end up in the bibliographic slip-box.

shortly after, he would look at his brief notes and think about their relevance for his own thinking and writing. He then would turn to the main slip-box and write his ideas, comments and thoughts on new pieces of paper,

He did not just copy ideas or quotes from the texts he read, but made a transition from one context to another. It was very much like a translation where you use different words that fit a different context, but strive to keep the original meaning as truthfully as possible.

The trick is that he did not organise his notes by topic, but in the rather abstract way of giving them fixed numbers. The numbers bore no meaning and were only there to identify each note permanently.

Whenever he added a note, he checked his slip-box for other relevant notes to make possible connections between them.

By adding these links between notes, Luhmann was able to add the same note to different contexts.

Luhmann developed topics bottom up, then added another note to his slip-box, on which he would sort a topic by sorting the links of the relevant other notes.

last element in his file system was an index, from which he would refer to one or two notes that would serve as a kind of entry point into a line of thought or topic.

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

Assemble notes and bring them into order, turn these notes into a draft, review it and you are done.

writing these notes is the main work.