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The third typical mistake is, of course, to treat all notes as fleeting ones.
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.
The things you are supposed to find in your head by brainstorming usually don’t have their origins in there. Rather, they come from the outside: through reading, having discussions and listening to others, through all the things that could have been accompanied and often even would have been improved by writing.
Having trouble finding the right topic is a symptom of the wrong attempt to rely heavily on the limitations of the brain, not the inevitable problematic starting point, as most study guides insinuate.
develop your thinking in writing, open questions will become clearly visible and give you an abundance of possible topics to elaborate further in writing.
Sometimes we feel like our work is draining our energy and we can only move forward if we put more and more energy into it. But sometimes it is the opposite. Once we get into the workflow, it is as if the work itself gains momentum, pulling us along and sometimes even energizing us. This is the kind of dynamic we are looking for.
Spending more time does not increase productivity. Getting into a routine and the right headspace makes for more productive work. Implement methods that will get you into the zone.
Feedback loops are not only crucial for the dynamics of motivation, but also the key element to any learning process. 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,
A feedback loop helps us to improve ourselves, refine our ideas, and share our ideas concisely.
Expressing our own thoughts in writing makes us realise if we really thought them through.
Our permanent notes become our feedback loop. These provide feedback and help us view the content as if it were an original idea we discovered.
Give Each Task Your Undivided Attention
Multitasking is not a good idea
Writing a paper involves much more than just typing on the keyboard. It also means reading, understanding, reflecting, getting ideas, making connections, distinguishing terms, finding the right words, structuring, organizing, editing, correcting and rewriting. All these are not just different tasks, but tasks requiring a different kind of attention. It is not only impossible to focus on more than one thing at a time, but also to have a different kind of attention on more than one thing at a time.
The good news is that we can train ourselves to stay focused on one thing for longer if we avoid multitasking, remove possible distractions and separate different kinds of tasks as much as possible so they will not interfere with each other.
Separating tasks and single-tasking helps us to be more productive. Practicing this habit will increase our focus and attention span.
Give Each Task the Right Kind of Attention
Proofreading, for example, is obviously part of the writing process, but requires a very different state of mind than the attempt to find the right words.
Select which tasks to do at which times. Write when in the most creative state, and proofread in a different state.
It is also easier to focus on finding the right words if we don’t have to think about the structure of the text at the same time, which is why a printed outline of the manuscript should be always in front of our eyes.
Use an outline to guide the big picture of a polished writing work.
Outlining or changing the outline is also a very different task that requires a very different focus on something else: not on one thought, but on the whole argument.
Reading, of course, is also different. Reading in itself can require very different kinds of attention, depending on the text. Some texts need to be read slowly and carefully, while others are only worth skimming.
Become an Expert Instead of a Planner
Get Closure
Attention is not our only limited resource. Our short-term memory is also limited. We need strategies not to waste its capacity with thoughts we can better delegate to an external system.
Closure on ideas comes by taking notes and refining these ideas into more published work.
While we want to remember some things as long as possible, we don’t want to clog our brains with irrelevant information. And the way we organise everyday information makes a big difference not only for long-term memories, but short-term as well.
It is freeing to move ideas and topics out of our brains into secure sources to revisit later.
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.
Finish the current idea by writing it down. Process that before moving on.
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.
Writing the ideas down is step one.
The second step is to make sure we always write down the outcome of our thinking, including possible connections to further inquiries.
Write the outcome of your ideas. Follow up with yourself. Your future self will then have the data to refer back.
Reduce the Number of Decisions
Decision fatigue is real. Slim down the quantity of decisions you have to make.
In the way we organise our research and writing, we too can significantly reduce the amount of decisions we have to make. While content-related decisions have to be made (on what is more and what is less important in an article, on the connections between notes, the structure of a text, etc.), most organisational decisions can be made up front, once and for all, by deciding on one system.
Templates of posts can help reduce our decisions, as can standardizing where we take notes and our process for reviewing the notes.
Read With a Pen in Hand
the mere copying of quotes almost always changes their meaning by stripping them out of context, even though the words aren’t changed. This is a common beginner mistake, which can only lead to a patchwork of ideas, but never a coherent thought.
Taking notes into our own words preserves the context of the quote while avoiding plagiarism.
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.”
Allow time after books for reviewing our notes and looking for connections to other notes.
Sometimes it is necessary to slowly work our way through a difficult text and sometimes it is enough to reduce a whole book to a single sentence.
Does the act of outlining a book and practicing how to read the book make an impact on retention?
The only thing that matters is that these notes provide the best possible support for the next step, the writing of the actual slip-box notes.
In a small but fascinating study, two psychologists tried to find out if it made a difference if students in a lecture took notes by hand or by typing them into their laptops (Mueller and Oppenheimer 2014). They were not able to find any difference in terms of the number of facts the students were able to remember. But in terms of understanding the content of the lecture, the students who took their notes by hand came out much, much better. After a week, this difference in understanding was still clearly measurable.
Handwriting makes pure copying impossible, but instead facilitates the translation of what is said (or written) into one’s own words.
Keep an Open Mind
While we should seek out dis-confirming arguments and facts that challenge our way of thinking, we are naturally drawn to everything that makes us feel good, which is everything that confirms what we already believe we know.
Developing arguments and ideas bottom-up instead of top-down is the first and most important step to opening ourselves up for insight.
How do you approach your argument or purpose of a written passage?
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.
Everything can contribute to the development of thoughts within the slip-box: an addition as well as a contradiction, the questioning of a seemingly obvious idea as well as the differentiation of an argument. What we are looking for are facts and information that can add something and therefore enrich the slip-box.
Our notes enrich our PKM, and are not perfunctory.
Get the Gist
The ability to distinguish relevant from less relevant information is another skill that can only be learned by doing.
Ongoing practice helps us determine if the content is important or worthwhile to take notes upon.
As we are forced to make this distinction when we read with a pen in our hand and write permanent note after permanent note, it is more than mere practice: it is deliberate practice repeated multiple times a day.
Taking smart notes is the deliberate practice of these skills. Mere reading, underlining sentences and hoping to remember the content is not.
To put our knowledge to work for us, we take notes. Reading alone does not help us retain the information.
Learn to Read
The most important advantage of writing is that it helps us to confront ourselves when we do not understand something as well as we would like to believe.
Now we are faced with a clear choice: 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.
The mere-exposure effect would fool us here, too: Seeing something we have seen before causes the same emotional reaction as if we had been able to retrieve the information from our memory.
Rereading our notes brings the content to mind as if it were the first time.
Learn by Reading
Learning itself requires deliberate practice, and I mean actual learning that helps us to increase our understanding of the world, not just the learning that makes us pass a test. And deliberate practice is demanding; it requires effort.
Learning requires intentionality. Start each day by considering what we will learn today.
that the best-researched and most successful learning method is elaboration.
Reviewing notes is one method, but improved retention happens when we do something with our notes.
