How to Take Smart Notes

by Sönke Ahrens

Writing is, without dispute, the best facilitator for thinking, reading, learning, understanding and generating ideas we have. 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.

You need something to capture ideas whenever and wherever they pop into your head.

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 slip-box is the shipping container of the academic world. Instead of having different storage for different ideas, everything goes into the same slip-box and is standardised into the same format.

everything is streamlined towards one thing only: insight that can be published.

Fleeting notes are only useful if you review them within a day or so and turn them into proper notes you can use later.

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 motivates us more than the experience of becoming better at what we do. And the only chance to improve in something is getting timely and concrete feedback. Seeking feedback, not avoiding it, is the first virtue of anyone who wants to learn,

The slip-box is not a collection of notes. Working with it is less about retrieving specific notes and more about being pointed to relevant facts and generating insight by letting ideas mingle.

Its usability grows with its size, not just linearly but exponentially. When we turn to the slip-box, its inner connectedness will not just provide us with isolated facts, but with lines of developed thoughts. Moreover, because of its inner complexity, a search thought the slip-box will confront us with related notes we did not look for. This is a very significant difference that becomes more and more relevant over time. The more content it contains, the more connections it can provide, and the easier it becomes to add new entries in a smart way and receive useful suggestions.

Things we understand are connected, either through rules, theories, narratives, pure logic, mental models or explanations. And deliberately building these kinds of meaningful connections is what the slip-box is all about. Every step is accompanied by questions like: How does this fact fit into my idea of …? How can this phenomenon be explained by that theory? Are these two ideas contradictory or do they complement each other? Isn’t this argument similar to that one? Haven’t I heard this before? And above all: What does x mean for y? These questions not only increase our understanding, but facilitate learning as well.

The secret to have a “mind like water” is to get all the little stuff out of our short-term memory. And as we can’t take care of everything once and for all right now, the only way to do that is to have a reliable external system in place where we can keep all our nagging thoughts about the many things that need to be done and trust that they will not be lost. And the same is true for the work with the slip-box. To be able to focus on the task at hand, we have to make sure other, unfinished tasks are not lingering in our head and wasting precious mental resources. The first step is to break down the amorphous task of “writing” into smaller pieces of different tasks that can be finished in one go. The second step is to make sure we always write down the outcome of our thinking, including possible connections to further inquiries. As the outcome of each task is written down and possible connections become visible, it is easy to pick up the work any time where we left it without having to keep it in mind all the time.

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. That leaves us with much more mental energy that we can direct towards more useful tasks, like trying to solve the problems in question.

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.

Literature notes are short and meant to help with writing slip-box notes.

Developing arguments and ideas bottom-up instead of top-down is the first and most important step to opening ourselves up for insight.

We postpone the decision on what to write about specifically and focus on building a critical mass within the slip-box.

Confirm that we have separated tasks and focus on understanding the text we read, · Make sure we have given a true account of its content · Find the relevance of it and make connections.

The slip-box is pretty agnostic about the content it is fed. It just prefers relevant notes.

‘Have the courage to use your own understanding,’ is therefore the motto of the Enlightenment.”

The ability to spot patterns, to question the frames used and detect the distinctions made by others, is the precondition to thinking critically and looking behind the assertions of a text or a talk. 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.

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, which is the opposite of mere re-viewing (Stein et al. 1984) 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. In fact, “Writing for Learning” is the name of an “elaboration method”

Writing brief accounts on the main ideas of a text instead of collecting quotes.

The technique of writing a certain amount every day was perfected by Anthony Trollope, one of the most popular and productive authors of the 19th century: He would start every morning at 5:30 a.m. with a cup of coffee and a clock in front of him. Then he would write at least 250 words every 15 minutes. This, he writes in his autobiography: “allowed me to produce over ten pages of an ordinary novel volume a day, and if kept up through ten months, would have given as its results three novels of three volumes each in the year” (Trollope, 2008, 272). And that, mind you, was before breakfast.

You could therefore measure your daily productivity by the number of notes written.

By explicitly writing down how something connects or leads to something else, we force ourselves to clarify and distinguish ideas from each other.

We have seen in the first step that 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. Now we elaborate these ideas within different contexts and connect them with other ideas in a durable fashion. The literature notes are going to be archived, which means the ideas would be lost in the reference system if we didn’t do something with them. That is why we transfer them into our external memory, the slip-box, with which we have an ongoing dialogue and where they can become part of our active set of ideas. Transferring ideas into the external memory also allows us to forget them. And even though it sounds paradoxical, forgetting actually facilitates long-term learning. It is important to understand why, because there are still many students who shy away from using an external memory. They fear that they would have to choose between remembering things in their heads (which wouldn’t require an external memory) or in the external memory (which then would be forgotten in the internal memory). That this is a false choice becomes obvious as soon as we understand how our memory truly works.

The slip-box is forcing us to do the exact opposite: To elaborate, to understand, to connect and therefore to learn seriously.

Keywords should always be assigned with an eye towards the topics you are working on or interested in, never by looking at the note in isolation.

Good keywords are usually not already mentioned as words in the note.

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. On a note like this, you can collect links to other relevant notes to this topic or question, preferably with a short indication of what to find on these notes (one or two words or a short sentence is sufficient). This kind of note helps to structure thoughts and can be seen as an in-between step towards the development of a manuscript.

The most common form of reference is plain note-to-note links. They have no function other than indicating a relevant connection between two individual notes. By linking two related notes regardless of where they are within the slip-box or within different contexts, surprising new lines of thought can be established.

It is important to always keep in mind that making these links is not a chore, a kind of file-box maintenance. The search for meaningful connections is a crucial part of the thinking process towards the finished manuscript.

The slip-box is like a well-informed but down-to-earth communication partner who keeps us grounded. If we try to feed it some lofty ideas, it will force us to check first: What is the reference? How does that connect to the facts and the ideas you already have?

If you use the slip-box for a while, you will inevitably make a sobering discovery: The great new idea you are about to add to the slip-box turns out to be already in there. Even worse, chances are this idea wasn’t even yours, but someone else’s. Having the same thought twice or mistaking another person’s idea with our own is far from unusual. Unfortunately, most people never notice this humbling fact because they have no system that confronts them with already thought thoughts.

the construction of oppositions is the most reliable way of generating new ideas

The slip-box constantly reminds us of information we have long forgotten and wouldn’t remember otherwise – so much so, we wouldn’t even look for it.

“[C]reative people are better at recognizing relationships, making associations and connections and seeing things in an original way—seeing things that others cannot see“

Make sure that you really see what you think you see and describe it as plainly and factually as possible.

I highly recommend treating a digital note as if the space were limited. By restricting ourselves to one format, we also restrict ourselves to just one idea per note and force ourselves to be as precise and brief as possible. The restriction to one idea per note is also the precondition to recombine them freely later.

Each note should fit onto the screen and there should be no need of scrolling.

we who have already accompanied our studies by writing and collecting notes in a smart way simply don’t have the need for brainstorming anymore. We can just look into our slip-box instead.

We don’t need to worry about the question of what to write about because we have answered the question already – many times on a daily basis. 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. We constantly make explicit how ideas and information connect with each other and turn them into literal connections between our notes. By doing this, we develop visible clusters of ideas that are now ready to be turned into manuscripts.

It is the one decision in the beginning, to make writing the mean and the end of the whole intellectual endeavour, that changed the role of topic-finding completely. It is now less about finding a topic to write about and more about working on the questions we generated by writing.

A key point: Structure the text and keep it flexible.

Another key point: Try working on different manuscripts at the same time.

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.

“It is a profoundly erroneous truism, repeated by all copybooks and by eminent people when they are making speeches, that we should cultivate the habit of thinking of what we are doing. The precise opposite is the case. Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them.” (Whitehead)

The slip-box is as simple as it gets. Read with a pen in your hand, take smart notes and make connections between them. Ideas will come by themselves and your writing will develop from there. There is no need to start from scratch. Keep doing what you would do anyway: Read, think, write.