How to Take Smart Notes

by Sönke Ahrens

Let the Work Carry You Forward

Feedback loops are not only crucial for the dynamics of motivation, but also the key element to any learning process.

Seeking feedback, not avoiding it, is the first virtue of anyone who wants to learn, or in the more general terms of psychologist Carol Dweck, to grow.

We tend to think we understand what we read – until we try to rewrite it in our own words. By doing this, we not only get a better sense of our ability to understand, but also increase our ability to clearly and concisely express our understanding – which in return helps to grasp ideas more quickly.

mere-exposure effect: doing something many times makes us believe we have become good at it – completely independent of our actual performance

Teachers tend to mistake the ability to follow (their) rules with the ability to make the right choices in real situations. Unlike the expert paramedics, they did not look at the unique circumstances and check if the paramedics in the videos did the best thing possible in each individual situation. Instead, they focused on the question of whether the people in the videos acted according to the rules they taught.

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. Once we make a meaningful connection to an idea or fact, it is difficult not to remember it when we think about what it is connected with.

Zeigarnik effect: Open tasks tend to occupy our short-term memory – until they are done. That is why we get so easily distracted by thoughts of unfinished tasks, regardless of their importance.

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.

Conversely, we can use the Zeigarnik effect to our advantage by deliberately keeping unanswered questions in our mind. We can ruminate about them, even when we do something that has nothing to do with work and ideally does not require our full attention. Letting thoughts linger without focusing on them gives our brains the opportunity to deal with problems in a different, often surprisingly productive way.

Reduce the Number of Decisions

Next to the attention that can only be directed at one thing at a time and the short-term memory that can only hold up to seven things at once, the third limited resource is motivation or willpower.

ego depletion to refer to a temporary reduction in the self’s capacity or willingness to engage in volitional action (including controlling the environment, controlling the self, making choices, and initiating action) caused by prior exercise of volition.”

Acts of self-control, responsible decision making, and active choice seem to interfere with other such acts that follow soon after. The implication is that some vital resource of the self becomes depleted by such acts of volition.

10 Read for Understanding “I would advise you to read with a pen in your hand and enter in a little book short hints of what you feel that is common or that may be useful; for this will be the best method of imprinting such portcullis in your memory.” – Benjamin Franklin[26]

the idea is not to copy, but to have a meaningful dialogue with the texts we read.

When we extract ideas from the specific context of a text, we deal with ideas that serve a specific purpose in a particular context, support a specific argument, are part of a theory that isn’t ours or written in a language we wouldn’t use. This is why we have to translate them into our own language to prepare them to be embedded into new contexts of our own thinking,

Whenever we explore a new, unfamiliar subject, our notes will tend to be more extensive, but we shouldn’t get nervous about it, as this is the deliberate practice of understanding we cannot skip.

By employing often-recommended reading techniques like SQ3R or SQ4R, they treat every text the same, regardless of the content. They do not clearly decide on the format and the organisation of their notes and do not have a plan for what to do with them afterwards.

The case against speed reading

Handwriting is slower and can’t be corrected as quickly as electronic notes. Because students can’t write fast enough to keep up with everything that is said in a lecture, they are forced to focus on the gist of what is being said, not the details. But to be able to note down the gist of a lecture, you have to understand it in the first place. So if you are writing by hand, you are forced to think about what you hear (or read) – otherwise you wouldn’t be able to grasp the underlying principle, the idea, the structure of an argument. Handwriting makes pure copying impossible, but instead facilitates the translation of what is said (or written) into one’s own words.

If insight becomes a threat to your academic or writing success, you are doing it wrong.

Developing arguments and ideas bottom-up instead of top-down is the first and most important step to opening ourselves up for insight. We should be able to focus on the most insightful ideas we encounter and welcome the most surprising turns of events without jeopardizing our progress or, even better, because it brings our project forward.

Without these tools and reference points, no professional reading or understanding would be possible. We would read every text in the same way: like a novel. But with the learned ability of spotting patterns, we can enter the circle of virtuosity: Reading becomes easier, we grasp the gist quicker, can read more in less time, and can more easily spot patterns and improve our understanding of them.

Immanuel Kant described in his famous text about the Enlightenment: “Nonage [immaturity] is the inability to use one’s own understanding without another’s guidance. This nonage is self-imposed if its cause lies not in lack of understanding but in indecision and lack of courage to use one’s own mind without another’s guidance. Dare to know! (Sapere aude.) ‘Have the courage to use your own understanding,’ is therefore the motto of the Enlightenment.”

One has to read extremely selectively and extract widespread and connected references. One has to be able to follow recurrences.

It is proven that readers regard an author and an audience a speaker as more intelligent the more clear and to the point their expressions are (Oppenheimer 2006).

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.

we understand something until we test ourselves in some form. If we don’t try to verify our understanding during our studies, we will happily enjoy the feeling of getting smarter and more knowledgeable while in reality staying as dumb as we were. This warm feeling disappears quickly when we try to explain what we read in our own words in writing. Suddenly, we see the problem.

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.

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.

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, taking notes and thinking about how ideas connect is exactly the kind of elaboration that is needed to learn. Not learning from what we read because we don’t take the time to elaborate on it is the real waste of time.

11 Take Smart Notes

Even more problematic than staying within the given frame of a text or an argument is the inability to interpret particular information in the text within the bigger frame or argument of the text. Even doctoral students sometimes just collect de-contextualised quotes from a text – probably the worst possible approach to research imaginable. This makes it almost impossible to understand the actual meaning of information. Without understanding information within its context,

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.

11.1 Make a Career One Note at a Time

you could settle for three notes a day and still build up a significant critical mass of ideas in a very reasonable time.

The brain, as Kahneman writes, is “a machine for jumping to conclusions” (Kahneman, 2013, 79). And a machine that is designed for jumping to conclusions is not the kind of machine you want to rely on when it comes to facts and rationality – at least, you would want to counterbalance

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. And even though it sounds paradoxical, forgetting actually facilitates long-term learning.

Robert and Elizabeth Ligon Bjork from the University of California suggest distinguishing between two different measurements when it comes to memory: Storage strength and retrieval strength (Bjork 2011). They speculate that storage strength, the ability to store memories, only becomes greater over one’s lifetime.

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.

meaning of something is not always obvious and needs to be explored. That is why we need to elaborate on it.

elaboration is nothing more than connecting information to other information in a meaningful way. 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.

most information is given to us in our learning institutions. Most often, it comes in modular form, sorted by topic, separated by disciplines and generally isolated from other information. The slip-box is forcing us to do the exact opposite: To elaborate, to understand, to connect and therefore to learn seriously.

How the education system is broken

11.4 Adding Permanent Notes to the Slip-Box The next step after writing the permanent notes is to add them to the slip-box. 1. Add a note to the slip-box either behind the note you directly refer to or, if you do not follow up on a specific note, just behind the last note in the slip-box. Number it consecutively. The Zettelkasten numbers the notes automatically. “New note” will just add a note with a new number. If you click “New note sequence,” the new note will be registered at the same time as the note that follows the note currently active on the screen. But you can always add notes “behind” other notes anytime later. Each note can follow multiple other notes and therefore be part of different note sequences. 2. Add links to other notes or links on other notes to your new note. 3. 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. 4. Build a Latticework of Mental Models

12.1 Develop Topics 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.

Because it should not be used as an archive, where we just take out what we put in, but as a system to think with, the references between the notes are much more important than the references from the index to a single note.

liberating our brains from the task of organizing the notes is the main reason we use the slip-box in the first place.