How to Take Smart Notes

by Sönke Ahrens

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.

Expound upon your notes. Use notes as a jumping off point to form your own presentation of the information.

The slip-box takes care of details and references and is a long-term memory resource that keeps information objectively unaltered. That allows the brain to focus on the gist, the deeper understanding and the bigger picture, and frees it up to be creative. Both the brain and the slip-box can focus on what they are best at.

Having a second brain can clear up the working memory. Trust your notes to recall details needed.

Writing brief accounts on the main ideas of a text instead of collecting quotes. And she also stresses that it is no less important to do something with these ideas – to 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.

Taking literature notes is a form of deliberate practice as it gives us feedback on our understanding or lack of it, while the effort to put into our own words the gist of something is at the same time the best approach to understanding what we read.

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.

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.

Learning would be not so much about saving information, like on a hard disk, but about building connections and bridges between pieces of information to circumvent the inhibition mechanism in the right moment. It is about making sure that the right “cues” trigger the right memory, about how we can think strategically to remember the most useful information when we need it.

If we instead focus on “retrieval strength,” we instantly start to think strategically about what kind of cues should trigger the retrieval of a memory.

What does help for true, useful learning is to connect a piece of information to as many meaningful contexts as possible, which is what we do when we connect our notes in the slip-box with other notes.

The first step of elaboration is to think enough about a piece of information so we are able to write about it. The second step is to think about what it means for other contexts as well.

Adding Permanent Notes to the Slip-Box

Add a note to the slip-box either behind the note you directly refer to

Add links to other notes or links on other notes to your new note.

Make sure it can be found from the index; add an entry in the index if necessary or refer to it from a note that is connected to the index.

Build a Latticework of Mental Models

After adding a note to the slip-box, we need to make sure it can be found again. This is what the index is for.

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.

12.2 Make Smart Connections

The first type of links are those on notes that are giving you the overview of a topic.

A similar though less crucial kind of link collection is on those notes that give an overview of a local, physical cluster of the slip-box.

Equally less relevant for the digital version are those links that indicate the note to which the current note is a follow-up and those links that indicate the note that follows on the current note.

note-to-note links. They have no function other than indicating a relevant connection between two individual notes.

By dealing with actual notes, we are also less prone to imagine connections where there aren’t any, as we can see in black and white if something makes sense or not.

Our ideas will be rooted in a network of facts, thought-through ideas and verifiable references.

The brain is very good at making associations and spotting patterns and similarities between seemingly different things and also very good in spotting differences between seemingly similar things, but it needs to have them presented objectively and externally. It is much easier to see differences and similarities than to detect them by mere thinking.

Without external help, we would not only take exclusively into account what we know, but what is on top of our heads.[35]

looking out for the most powerful concepts in every discipline and to try to understand them so thoroughly that they become part of our thinking.

A truly wise person is not someone who knows everything, but someone who is able to make sense of things by drawing from an extended resource of interpretation schemes.

1. Pay attention to what you want to remember. 2. Properly encode the information you want to keep. (This includes thinking about suitable cues.) 3. Practice recall. (Ibid., 31)

We learn something not only when we connect it to prior knowledge and try to understand its broader implications (elaboration), but also when we try to retrieve it at different times (spacing) in different contexts (variation), ideally with the help of chance (contextual interference) and with a deliberate effort (retrieval).

It is the intuition that comes from the intimate knowledge of a practice that can lead us to new insights.

Even groundbreaking paradigm shifts are most often the consequence of many small moves in the right direction instead of one big idea.

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“ (Andreasen 2014).

Comparing, differentiating and connecting notes are the basis of good academic writing, but playing and tinkering with ideas is what leads to insight and exceptional texts.

Creativity cannot be taught like a rule or approached like a plan. But we can make sure that our working environment allows us to be creative with ideas.

What kind of answer can you expect from asking a question in this particular way? What is missing?

Taking simple ideas seriously.

treating a digital note as if the space were limited.

Not having to make choices can unleash a lot of potential, which would otherwise be wasted on making these choices.

The biggest threat to creativity and scientific progress is therefore the opposite: a lack of structure and restrictions.

Instead of widening the perspective to find as many possible lines of thought to which an idea might contribute, it is now about narrowing the perspective, making a decision on one topic only and cutting out everything that does not directly contribute to the development of the text and support the main argument.

The brain more easily remembers information that it encountered recently, which has emotions attached to it and is lively, concrete or specific.

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.

Being intimately familiar with something enables us to be playful with it, to modify it, to spot new and different ideas without running the risk of merely repeating old ideas believing they are new.

Nothing motivates us more than seeing a project we can identify with moving forward, and nothing is more demotivating than being stuck with a project that doesn’t seem to be worth doing.

The ability to keep control over our work and change course if necessary is made possible by the fact that the big task of “writing a text” is broken down into small, concrete tasks, which allows us practically to do exactly what is needed at a certain time and take the next step from there. It is not just about feeling in control, it is about setting up the work in a way that we really are in control.

The key is to structure the draft visibly.

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

If we read something that is interesting, but not directly relevant to our current project, we can still use it for another project we are working on or might work on.

Take notes in such a way as to have research done for additional projects beyond the current work.

The projects we work on can be in completely different stages of completion. Some of them might not even have come to our attention.