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

by Sönke Ahrens

Tools are only as good as your ability to work with them.

The slip-box, for example, would most likely be used as an archive for notes – or worse: a graveyard for thoughts (cf. Hollier 2005, 40 on Mallarmé’s index cards).

THE FOUR UNDERLYING PRINCIPLES

5 Writing Is the Only Thing That Matters

Students should not only learn to write papers, but also learn facts, be able to discuss their ideas in seminars and listen carefully to lectures. Writing papers is seen as a task in itself with a beginning and an end.

Studying does not prepare students for independent research. It is independent research.

You will not waste your time with the attempt to figure out what you “should” learn. Rather, you will try to learn as efficiently as possible so you can quickly get to the point where actual open questions arise, as these are the only questions worth writing about.

quickly learn to distinguish good-sounding arguments from actual good ones,

you will have to think them through whenever you try to write t...

them with your previous ...

you cannot rephrase anything in your own words if you don’t understand what it is about.

By doing this, you will elaborate on the meaning, which will make it much more likely that you will remember it.

think beyond the things you read, because you need to turn it into something new. And by doing everything with the clear purpose of writing about ...

6 Simplicity Is Paramount

The slip-box is the shipping container of the academic world. Instead of having different storage for different ideas, everything goes into the same slip-box and is standardised into the same format. Instead of focusing on the in-between steps and trying to make a science out of underlining systems, reading techniques or excerpt writing, everything is streamlined towards one thing only: insight that can be published.

Even though the slip-box, being organised bottom-up, does not face the trade-off problem between too many or too few topics, it too can lose its value when notes are added to it indiscriminately. It can only play out its strengths when we aim for a critical mass, which depends not only on the number of notes, but also their quality and the way they are handled.

To achieve a critical mass, it is crucial to distinguish clearly between three types of notes:

it is crucial to distinguish clearly between thre...

1. Fleeting notes, which are only reminders of information, can be written in any kind of way and will end up i...

2. Permanent notes, which will never be thrown away and contain the necessary information in a permanently understandable way. They are always stored in the same way in the same place, either as literature n...

3. Project notes, which are only relevant to one particular project. They are kept within a project-specific folder and can be discarded or ...

It is important to reflect on the purpose of these different types of notes.

Fleeting notes are there for capturing ideas quickly while you are busy doing something else.

a quick note is the best you can do without interrupting what you are in the middle of doing. That might even apply to reading, if you want to focus on a text without interrupting your reading flow. Then you might want to just underline sentences or write short comments in the margins.

Fleeting notes are only useful if you review them within a day or so and turn them into proper notes you can use later.

Fleeting literature notes can make sense if you need an extra step to understand or grasp an idea,

Permanent notes, on the other hand, are written in a way that can still be understood even when you have forgotten the context they are taken from.

That is why the threshold to write an idea down has to be as low as possible, but it is equally crucial to elaborate on them within a day or two.

The only permanently stored notes are the literature notes in the reference system and the main notes in the slip-box.

Luhmann never underlined sentences in the text he read or wrote comments in the margins. All he did was take brief notes about the ideas that caught his attention in a text on a separate piece of paper: “I make a note with the bibliographic details. On the backside I would write ‘on page x is this, on page y is that,’ and then it goes into the bibliographic slip-box where I collect everything I read.” (Hagen, 1997)

In contrast to the fleeting notes, every permanent note for the slip-box is elaborated enough to have the potential to become part of or inspire a final written piece, but that cannot be decided on up front as their relevance depends on future thinking and developments. The notes are no longer reminders of thoughts or ideas, but contain the actual thought or idea in written form. This is a crucial difference.

permanent note for the slip-box is elaborated enough to have the potential to become part of or inspire a final written piece, but that cannot be decided on up front as their relevance depends on future thinking and developments. The notes are no longer reminders of thoughts or ideas, but contain the actual thought or idea in written form. This is a crucial difference.

Only because every note is in the same format at the same place can they later be combined and assembled into something new and no thought is ever wasted on the question of where to put or label it.

The last type of note, the ones that are related to only one specific project, are kept together with other project-related notes in a project-specific folder. It doesn’t matter in which format these notes are as they are going to end up in the bin after the project is finished anyway (or in an archive – the bin for the indecisive).

Project-related notes can be: • comments in the manuscript • collections of project-related literature • outlines • snippets of drafts • reminders • to-...

The same applies to the reference system. In Zotero, you can collect literature in project-specific folders without taking them out of the reference system itself. All this keeps the permanent notes from the project-related notes clearly separated and allows you to experiment and tinker with them as much as you like within the boundaries of each project without interfering with the actual slip-box.

I suggest keeping a physical binder for each project to keep all the handwritten notes and printouts separate from the rest and combined in one place. When you close the folder for your current project in the evening and nothing is left on your desk other than pen and paper, you know that you have achieved a clear separation between fleeting, permanent and project-related notes.

7 Nobody Ever Starts Fr...

“The white sheet of paper – or today: the blank screen – is a fundamental misunderstanding” – Nassehi 2015, 185

“When you have chosen a topic that is right for you, having taken into consideration your personal interests and any necessary background knowledge that may be needed, assess the availability of sources.”

a topic that is right for you, having taken into consideration your personal interests and any necessary background knowledge that may be needed, assess the availability of sources.”

you will certainly find a multi-step plan you are su...

Be it twelve steps, according to the Academic Skills & Learning Centre of the Austra...

or eight, if you go with the recommendations of the Writing Center of the U...

what Hans-Georg Gadamer called the hermeneutic circle (Gadamer 2004). And even though the hermeneutic circle is regularly taught in university, writing at the same time continues to be taught as if we could start from scratch and move forward in a straight line

When it finally comes to the decision on what to write about, you will already have made the decision – because you made it on every single step along the way, again and again every day, improving it gradually.

Instead of spending your time worrying about finding the right topic, you will spend your time actually working on your already existing interests and doing what is necessary to make informed decisions – reading, thinking and writing. By doing the work, you can trust that interesting questions will emerge.

You might not know where you will end up (and you don’t need to), but you can’t force insight into a ...

8 Let the Work Carry You Forward

Only if the work itself becomes rewarding can the dynamic of motivation and reward become self-sustainable and propel the whole process forward (DePasque and Tricomi, 2015).