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Writing these notes is also not the main work. Thinking is. Reading is. Understanding and coming up with ideas is. And this is how it is supposed to be. The notes are just the tangible outcome of it.
Writing notes accompanies the main work and, done right, it helps with it. Writing is, without dispute, the best facilitator for thinking, reading, learning, understanding and generating ideas we have.
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.
“Notes on paper, or on a computer screen [...] do not make contemporary physics or other kinds of intellectual endeavour easier, they make it possible,” neuroscientist Neil Levy concludes in the introduction to the Oxford Handbook of Neuroethics,
Richard Feynman stresses it as much as Benjamin Franklin. If we write, it is more likely that we understand what we read, remember what we learn and that our thoughts make sense.
1. Make fleeting notes.
These are fleeting notes, mere reminders of what is in your head. They should not cause any distraction. Put them into one place, which you define as your inbox, and process them later.
2. Make literature notes.
Write down what you don’t want to forget or think you might use in your own thinking or writing.
Keep these notes together with the bibliographic details in one place – your reference system.
3. Make permanent notes.
The idea is not to collect, but to develop ideas, arguments and discussions.
Write exactly one note for each idea and write as if you were writing for someone else: Use full sentences, disclose your sources, make references and try to be as precise, clear and brief as possible.
4. Now add your new permanent notes to the slip-box
a) Filing each one behind one or more related notes
b) Adding links to related notes.
c) Making sure you will be able to find this note later by either linking to it from your index or by making a link to it on a note that you use as an entry point to a discussion
5. Develop your topics, questions and research projects bottom up from within the system.
Look into the slip-box instead to see where chains of notes have developed and ideas have been built up to clusters.
6. After a while, you will have developed ideas far enough to decide on a topic to write about. Your topic is now based on what you have,
Look through the connections and collect all the relevant notes on this topic (most of the relevant notes will already be in partial order), copy them onto your “desktop”[6] and bring them in order.
7. Turn your notes into a rough draft.
Don’t simply copy your notes into a manuscript. Translate them into something coherent and embed them into the context of your argument
8. Edit and proofread your manuscript.
Each added bit of information, filtered only by our interest, is a contribution to our future understanding, thinking and writing.
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.
To have an undistracted brain to think with and a reliable collection of notes to think in is pretty much all we need.
We need four tools: · Something to write with and something to write on (pen and paper will do) · A reference management system (the best programs are free) · The slip-box (the best program is free) · An editor (whatever works best for you: very good ones are free)
1. You need something to capture ideas whenever and wherever they pop into your head.
make sure everything ends up in one place, a central inbox or something like that, where you can process it soon, ideally within a day.
2. The reference system
Zotero, which allows you to make new entries via browser plugins or just by entering the ISBN or digital object identifier (DOI) number.
takesmartnotes.com.
3. The slip-box.
any program that allows setting links and tagging (like Evernote or a Wiki), I strongly recommend using Daniel Lüdecke’s Zettelkasten.
zettelkasten.danielluedecke.de
4. Finally, the editor:
Studying, done properly, is research, because it is about gaining insight that cannot be anticipated
An idea kept private is as good as one you never had. And a fact no one can reproduce is no fact at all. Making something public always means to write it down so it can be read.
as Wilhelm von Humboldt, founder of the Humboldt University of Berlin and brother to the great explorer Alexander von Humboldt, put it, the professor is not there for the student and the student not for the professor. Both are only there for the truth. And truth is always a public matter. Everything within the university aims at some kind of publication.
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 (Peters and Schäfer 2006, 9).
Having a clear, tangible purpose when you attend a lecture, discussion or seminar will make you more engaged and sharpen your focus.
You will read in a more engaged way, because you cannot rephrase anything in your own words if you don’t understand what it is about. By doing this, you will elaborate on the meaning, which will make it much more likely that you will remember it.
Deliberate practice is the only serious way of becoming better at what we are doing (cf. Anders Ericsson, 2008).
you will improve your reading, thinking and other intellectual skills just by doing everything as if nothing counts other than writing.
McLean converted the tanker Ideal X to be able to carry 58 containers and set it to sail on 26 April 1956,
The idea was simple, but it wasn’t easy to put it efficiently into practice.
When the advantages became obvious, second-order effects came into play and went into a self-reinforcing positive feedback loop. The more harbours were able to handle containers, the more container ships were needed to be built, which made shipping cheaper, which increased the range of goods worth shipping, which created more traffic, which made bigger container ships economical, which created more demand for infrastructure and so on. It wasn’t just another way of shipping goods. It was a whole new way of doing business.
In the old system, the question is: Under which topic do I store this note? In the new system, the question is: In which context will I want to stumble upon it again?
The first system is designed to find things you deliberately search for, putting all the responsibility on your brain. The slip-box is designed to present you with ideas you have already forgotten, allowing your brain to focus on thinking instead of remembering.
