How to Take Smart Notes: One Simple Technique to Boost Writing, Learning and Thinking – for Students, Academics and Nonfiction Book Writers

by Sönke Ahrens

It is not so important who you are, but what you do.

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

Even if you don’t aim to develop a grand theory and just want to keep track of what you read, organise your notes and develop your thoughts, you will have to deal with an increasingly complex body of content, especially because it is not just about collecting thoughts, but about making connections and sparking new ideas.

Routines require simple, repeatable tasks that can become automatic and fit together seamlessly

GTD relies on clearly defined objectives, whereas insight cannot be predetermined by definition. We usually start with rather vague ideas that are bound to change until they become clearer in the course of our research

Writing that aims at insight must therefore be organised in a much more open manner.

What 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.

we need a note-taking system that is as comprehensive as GTD, but one that is suitable for the open-ended process of writing, learning and thinking. Enter the slip-box.

He not only stressed that he never forced himself to do something he didn’t feel like, he even said: “I only do what is easy. I only write when I immediately know how to do it. If I falter for a moment, I put the matter aside and do something else.” (Luhmann et al., 1987, 154f.)

The best way to maintain the feeling of being in control is to stay in control. And to stay in control, it's better to keep your options open during the writing process rather than limit yourself to your first idea. It is in the nature of writing, especially insight-oriented writing, that questions change, the material we work with turns out to be very different from the one imagined or that new ideas emerge, which might change our whole perspective on what we do.

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.

Intuitively, most people do not expect much from simple ideas. They rather assume that impressive results must have equally impressively complicated means.

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.

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.

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

Everybody is motivated when the finish line is within reach.

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 really understand something, you have to translate it into your own words.

“no matter how internal processes are implemented, (you) need to understand the extent to which the mind is reliant upon external scaffolding.”

You have to externalise your ideas, you have to write. 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.

Make fleeting notes. Always have something at hand to write with to capture every idea that pops into your mind.

Put them into one place, which you define as your inbox, and process them later.

Make literature notes. Whenever you read something, make notes about the content. Write down what you don’t want to forget or think you might use in your own thinking or writing. Keep it very short, be extremely selective, and use your own words. Be extra selective with quotes – don’t copy them to skip the step of really understanding what they mean. Keep these notes together with the bibliographic details in one place – your reference system.

Make permanent notes.

Go through the notes you made in step one or two (ideally once a day and before you forget what you meant) and think about how they relate to what is relevant for your own research, thinking or interests.

Develop your topics, questions and research projects bottom up from within the system.

Just follow your interest and always take the path that promises the most insight.

Do not brainstorm for a topic.

After a while, you will have developed ideas far enough to decide on a topic to write about.

it is highly unlikely that every text you read will contain exactly the information you looked for and nothing else.

A typical work day will contain many, if not all, of these steps: You read and take notes. You build connections within the slip-box, which in itself will spark new ideas. You write them down and add them to the discussion. You write on your paper, notice a hole in the argument and have another look in the file system for the missing link. You follow up on a footnote, go back to research and might add a fitting quote to one of your papers in the making.

Spending the little extra time to add them to your system will make all the difference, because the accidental encounters make up the majority of what we learn.

the best ideas are usually the ones we haven’t anticipated anyway.

The slip-box provides an external scaffold to think in and helps with those tasks our brains are not very good at, most of all objective storage of information.

More is unnecessary, less is impossible.

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

These notes are not meant to be stored permanently. They will be deleted or chucked soon anyway.

process it soon, ideally within a day.

reference system has two purposes: To collect the references (duh) and the notes you take during your reading.

All you would need are sheets of paper about the size of a postcard (Luhmann used the DIN A6 size, 148 x 105 mm or 5.83 x 4.13 inches) and a box to keep them in.

Everybody knows how to handle a flute (you blow into one end and press your fingers on the holes according to the notes you are playing), but nobody would try it out once and then judge the instrument on what they hear.[11]

This book is based on another assumption: Studying does not prepare students for independent research. It is independent research. Nobody starts from scratch and everybody is already able to think for themselves. 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.

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

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.

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 designed to present you with ideas you have already forgotten, allowing your brain to focus on thinking instead of remembering.

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.

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.