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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. The phenomenon is usually discussed under the term “ego depletion”:
a reliable and standardised working environment is less taxing on our attention, concentration and willpower, or, if you like, ego. It is well known that decision-making is one of the most tiring and wearying tasks,
most organisational decisions can be made up front, once and for all, by deciding on one system.
By always using the same notebook for making quick notes, always extracting the main ideas from a text in the same way and always turning them into the same kind of permanent notes, which are always dealt with in the same manner, the number of decisions during a work session can be greatly reduced.
To get a good paper written, you only have to rewrite a good draft;
to get a good draft written, you only have to turn a series of notes into a continuous text.
as a series of notes is just the rearrangement of notes you already have in your slip-box, all you really have to do is hav...
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If you understand what you read and translate it into the different context of your own thinking, materialised in the slip-box, you cannot help but transform the findings and thoughts of others into something that is new and your own.
The slip-box is an idea generator that develops in lockstep with your own intellectual development.
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 means to give the truest possible account of the original work, using different words
After finishing the book I go through my notes and think how these notes might be relevant for already written notes in the slip-box. It means that I always read with an eye towards possible connections in the slip-box.” (Luhmann et al., 1987, 150)
the purpose of taking literature notes is as clear as the procedure, you are free to use whatever technique helps the most with understanding what you are reading and getting to useful notes
all of this would be just an extra step before you do the only step that really counts, which is to take the permanent note that will add value to the actual slip-box.
Confirmation bias is a subtle but major force. As the psychologist Raymond Nickerson puts it: “If one were to attempt to identify a single problematic aspect of human reasoning that deserves attention above all others, the confirmation bias would have to be among the candidates for consideration” (Nickerson 1998, 175).
Charles Darwin. He forced himself to write down (and therefore elaborate on) the arguments that were the most critical of his theories.
Developing arguments and ideas bottom-up instead of top-down is the first and most important step to opening ourselves up for insight.
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.
It is after reading and collecting relevant data, connecting thoughts and discussing how they fit together that it is time to draw conclusions and develop a linear structure for the argument.
Extracting the gist of a text or an idea and giving an account in writing is for academics what daily practice on the piano is for pianists: The more often we do it and the more focused we are, the more virtuous we become.
‘Have the courage to use your own understanding,’ is therefore the motto of the Enlightenment.” (Kant 1784)
Being able to re-frame questions, assertions and information is even more important than having an extensive knowledge, because without this ability, we wouldn’t be able to put our knowledge to use.
Permanent notes, too, are directed towards an audience ignorant of the thoughts behind the text and unaware of the original context, only equipped with a general knowledge of the field. The only difference is that the audience here consists of our future selves, which will very soon have reached the same state of ignorance as someone who never had access to what we have written about.
We have to choose between feeling smarter or becoming smarter. And while writing down an idea feels like a detour, extra time spent, not writing it down is the real waste of time, as it renders most of what we read as ineffectual.
choosing an external system that forces us to deliberate practice and confronts us as much as possible with our lack of understanding or not-yet-learned information is such a smart move. We only have to make the conscious choice once.
“The one who does the work does the learning,” writes Doyle (2008, 63). It is hard to believe, but in education that is still a revolutionary idea.
Learning requires effort, because we have to think to understand and we need to actively retrieve old knowledge to convince our brains to connect it with new ideas as cues.
the best-researched and most successful learning method is elaboration. It is very similar to what we do when we take smart notes and combine them with others,
Elaboration means nothing other than really thinking about the meaning of what we read, how it could inform different questions and topics and how it could be combined with other knowledge.
Writing, taking notes and thinking about how ideas connect is exactly the kind of elaboration that is needed to learn.
The ability to think beyond the given frames of a text (Lonka 2003, 155f).
Experienced academic readers usually read a text with questions in mind and try to relate it to other possible approaches, while inexperienced readers tend to adopt the question of a text and the frames of the argument and take it as a given.
Without understanding information within its context, it is also impossible to go beyond it, to reframe it and to think about what it could mean for another question.
Writing brief accounts on the main ideas of a text instead of collecting quotes.
think hard about how they connect with other ideas from different contexts and could inform questions that are not already the questions of the author of the respective text.
We think about what they mean for other lines of thoughts, then we write this explicitly on paper and connect them literally with the other notes.
a certain number of notes a day is a reasonable goal for academic writing.
Any thought of a certain complexity requires writing. Coherent arguments require the language to be fixed, and only if something is written down is it fixed enough to be discussed independently from the author.
Only in the written form can an argument be looked at with a certain distance – literally. We need this distance to think about an argument – otherwise the argument itself would occupy the very mental resources we need for scrutinizing it.
The brain, as Kahneman writes, is “a machine for jumping to conclusions” (Kahneman, 2013, 79).
Luhmann states as clearly as possible: it is not possible to think systematically without writing (Luhmann 1992, 53).
“Notes on paper, or on a computer screen [...] do not make contemporary physics or other kinds of intellectual endeavour easier, they make it possible” is one of the key takeaways in a contemporary handbook of neuroscientists (Levy 2011, 290)
only if the connections are somehow fixed externally can they function as models or theories to give meaning and continuity for further thinking (Luhmann, 1992, 53).
A common way to embed an idea into the context of the slip-box is by writing out the reasons of its importance for your own lines of thought.
Why did the aspects I wrote down catch my interest?
By explicitly writing down how something connects or leads to something else, we force ourselves to clarify and distinguish ideas from each other.
elaboration through taking smart literature notes increases the likelihood that we will remember what we read in the long term. But this was only the first step.
Transferring these ideas into the network of our own thoughts, our latticework of theories, concepts and mental models in the slip-box brings our thinking to the next level.
Transferring ideas into the external memory also allows us to forget them.
Forgetting, then, would not be the loss of a memory, but the erection of a mental barrier between the conscious mind and our long-term memory. Psychologists call this mechanism active inhibition (cf. MacLeod, 2007).
we cannot just consciously pluck from our memory what we need like from a folder in an archive. That would require the memory we can choose from to be already in our conscious mind, which would render the mechanism of remembering redundant.
