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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Sönke Ahrens
Books on note-taking have a different life cycle and should focus on the more timeless aspects of the topic – that’s their advantage.
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.
Many books on tjos topoc address the sytoms as opppsed to the illness itself
The right question is: What can we do differently in the weeks, months or even years before we face the blank page that will get us into the best possible position to write a great paper easily?
good, productive writing is based on good note-taking.
the single most important indicator of academic success is not to be found in people’s heads, but in the way they do their everyday work.
What does make a significant difference along the whole intelligence spectrum is something else: how much self-discipline or self-control one uses to approach the tasks at hand
It is not so important who you are, but what you do.
A good structure allows you to do that, to move seamlessly from one task to another – without threatening the whole arrangement or losing sight of the bigger picture.
If you can trust the system, you can let go of the attempt to hold everything together in your head and you can start focusing on what is important:
A good structure enables flow, the state in which you get so completely immersed in your work that you lose track of time and can just keep on going as the work becomes effortless
A good, structured workflow puts us back in charge and increases our freedom to do the right thing at the right time.
Even though planning is often at odds with the very idea of research and learning, it is the mantra of most study guides and self-help books on academic writing. How do you plan for insight, which, by definition, cannot be anticipated? It is a huge misunderstanding that the only alternative to planning is aimless messing around. The challenge is to structure one’s workflow in a way that insight and new ideas can become the driving forces that push us forward. We do not want to make ourselves dependent on a plan that is threatened by the unexpected, like a new idea, discovery – or insight.
Having read more does not automatically mean having more ideas.
In fact, poor students often feel more successful (until they are tested), because they don’t experience much self-doubt. In psychology, this is known as the Dunning-Kruger effect
This is why high achievers who have had a taste of the vast amount of knowledge out there are likely to suffer from what psychologists call imposter syndrome, the feeling that you are not really up to the job, even though, of all people, they are
The best way to deal with complexity is to keep things as simple as possible and to follow a few basic principles.
There is really no need to reorganise anything you already have. Just deal with things differently the moment you have to deal with them anyway.
Like every change in behaviour, a change in working habits means going through a phase where you are drawn back to your old ways. The new way of working might feel artificial at first and not necessarily like what you intuitively would do.
The principle of GTD is to collect everything that needs to be taken care of in one place and process it in a standardised way.
It wouldn’t make any sense to micromanage ourselves on that level.
What we can take from Allen as an important insight is that the secret to a successful organization lies in the holistic perspective.
Only if you can trust your system, only if you really know that everything will be taken care of, will your brain let go and let you focus on the task at hand.
