How to Take Smart Notes: One Simple Technique to Boost Writing, Learning and Thinking

by Sönke Ahrens

Can you combine ideas to generate something new? What questions are triggered by them?

Write exactly one note for each idea and write as if you were writing for someone else: Use full sentences, disclose your sources, make references and try to be as precise, clear and brief as possible.

Throw away the fleeting notes from step one and put the literature notes from step two i...

4. Now add your new permanent notes to the slip-box by: a) Filing each one behind one or more related notes

Look to which note the new one directly relates or, if it does not relate directly to any other note yet, just file it behind the last one.

b) Adding links to related notes.

c) Making sure you will be able to find this note later by either linking to it from your index or by making a link to it on a...

5. Develop your topics, questions and research projects bottom up from within the system. See what is there, what is missing and what questions arise.

follow your interest and always take the path that promises the most insight.

Do not brainstorm for a topic. Look into the slip-box instead to see where chains of notes have developed and ideas have been built up to clusters.

The more you become interested in something, the more you will read and think about it, the more notes you will collect and the more likely it is that you will generate questions from it.

6. After a while, you will have developed ideas far enough to decide on a topic to write about. Your topic is now based on what you have, not based on an unfounded idea about what the literature you are about to read might provide.

Look for what is missing and what is redundant.

try ideas out and give yourself enough time to go back to reading and note-taking to improve your ideas, arguments and their structure.

7. Turn your notes into a rough draft. Don’t simply copy your not...

Translate them into something coherent and embed them into the context of your argument while you build your argument out of the notes at the same time. Detect holes in yo...

8. Edit and proofread your ...

In reality, you never work on just one idea, but many ideas in different stages.

Gather what you encounter along your way and don’t let any good idea go to waste.

We constantly encounter interesting ideas along the way and only a fraction of them are useful for the particular paper we started reading it for. Why let them go to waste?

Make a note and add it to your slip-box.

A typical workday will contain many, if not all, of these steps: You read and take notes. You build connections within the slip-box, which in itself will spark new ideas. You write them down and add them to the discussion.

Each added bit of information, filtered only by our interest, is a contribution to our future understanding, thinking and writing. And the best ideas are usually the ones we haven’t anticipated anyway.

3 Everything You Need to Have

NASA developed a fully functional gravity-independent pen, which pushes the ink onto the paper by means of compressed nitrogen. According to this story, the Russians faced the same problem. So they used pencils (De Bono, 1998, 141).

The story itself, unfortunately, is an urban myth, but the lesson of it encapsulates the core idea of the slip-box: Focus on the essentials and don’t complicate things unnecessarily.

the slip-box is

a crucial element in an overarching workflow that is stripped of everything that could distract from what is important.

Good tools do not add features and more options to what we already have, but help to reduce dist...

The slip-box provides an external scaffold to think in and helps with those tasks our brains are not very good at, most of al...

3.1 The Toolbox

We need four tools: • Something to write with and something to write on (pen and paper will do) • A reference management system (Zotero, Citavi or whatever works best for you) • The slip-box (paper or digital). • An editor (Word, LaTeX, Google Docs or whatever works best for you).

More is unnecessary, less is ...

1. You need something to capture ideas whenever and wherever they pop into your head. Whatever you use, it should not require any thoughts, atten...

These notes are not meant to be store...

They only function as a reminder of a thought and are not meant to captu...

I recommend having pen and paper with you...

make sure everything ends up in one place, a central inbox or something like that, where you can process ...

2. The reference system has two purposes: To collect the references (duh) and the notes yo...

I strongly recommend using a free progra...

3. The slip-box. Some prefer the old-fashioned pen and paper version in a wooden box.

computers

can’t speed up the main part of the work, which is thinking, reading and understanding.

All you would need are sheets of paper about the size of a postcard (Luhmann used the DIN A6 size, 148 x 105 mm

and a box to keep...

I recommend using the digital version, if onl...

I strongly recommend using one that allows backlinking like Obsidian

or is especially designed for this system (like Zettlr

4. Finally, the editor: My only recommendation is to choose an editor your reference manager is compatible with (Zotero, for example, works with Microsoft Word, LibreOffice, LaTeX and more). It makes life a lot easier if you don’t have to type in every reference manually.

4 A Few Things to Keep in Mind