How to Take Smart Notes

by Sönke Ahrens

Every intellectual endeavour starts with a note.

There is another reason that note-taking flies mostly under the radar: We don’t experience any immediate negative feedback if we do it badly.

We know today that self-control and self-discipline have much more to do with our environment than with ourselves

“I never force myself to do anything I don’t feel like. Whenever I am stuck, I do something else.”

Having a clear structure to work in is completely different from making plans about something. If you make a plan, you impose a structure on yourself; it makes you inflexible. To keep going according to plan, you have to push yourself and employ willpower. This is not only demotivating, but also unsuitable for an open-ended process like research, thinking or studying in general, where we have to adjust our next steps with every new insight, understanding or achievement – which we ideally have on a regular basis and not just as an exception.