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

by Sönke Ahrens

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 (Kruger and Dunning, 1999).

You can start working and developing ideas immediately by taking smart notes.

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.

There is no point in having great tools if they don’t fit together.

Studies on highly successful people have

proven again and again that success is not the result of strong willpower and the ability to overcome resistance, but rather the result of smart working environments that avoid resistance in the first place (cf. Neal et al. 2012; Painter et al. 2002; Hearn et al. 1998).

The ideas, the arguments, the quotes, long developed passages, complete with bibliography and references.

Writing is, without dispute, the best facilitator for thinking, reading, learning, understanding and generating ideas we have.

Always have something at hand to write with to capture every idea that pops into your mind.

Whenever you read something, make notes about the content.

Keep these notes together with the bibliographic details in one place – your reference system.

Go through the notes you made in step one or two (ideally once a day and before you forget what you meant) and think about how they relate to what is relevant for your own research, thinking or interests.

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.