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

by Sönke Ahrens

What does help for true, useful learning is to connect a piece of information to as many meaningful contexts as possible, which is what we do when we connect our notes in the slip-box with other notes. Making these connections deliberately means building up a self-supporting network of interconnected ideas and facts that work reciprocally as cues for each other.

Writing notes and sorting them into the slip-box is nothing other than an attempt to understand the wider meaning of something. The slip-box forces us to ask numerous elaborating questions: What does it mean? How does it connect to … ? What is the difference between … ? What is it similar to?

The consideration of how to structure a topic, therefore, belongs on notes as well – and not on a meta-hierarchical level.

The first type of links are those on notes that are giving you the overview of a topic. These are notes directly referred to from the index and usually used as an entry point into a topic that has already developed to such a degree that an overview is needed or at least becomes helpful.

A similar though less crucial kind of link collection is on those notes that give an overview of a local, physical cluster of the slip-box.

Equally less relevant for the digital version are those links that indicate the note to which the current note is a follow-up and those links that indicate the note that follows on the current note.

The most common form of reference is plain note-to-note links. They have no function other than indicating a relevant connection between two individual notes.

Comparing notes also helps us to detect contradictions, paradoxes or oppositions – important facilitators for insight.

When we realise that we used to accept two contradicting ideas as equally true, we know that we have a problem – and problems are good because we now have something to solve.

Pay attention to what you want to remember. 2. Properly encode the information you want to keep. (This includes thinking about suitable cues.) 3. Practice recall.

We learn something not only when we connect it to prior knowledge and try to understand its broader implications (elaboration), but also when we try to retrieve it at different times (spacing) in different contexts (variation), ideally with the help of chance (contextual interference) and with a deliberate effort (retrieval).

Only by abstraction and re-specification can we apply ideas in the singular and always different situations in reality

A visibly developed cluster attracts more ideas and provides more possible connections, which in return influence our choices on what to read and think further.

If we, on the other hand, let questions arise from the slip-box, we know that they are tried and tested among dozens or even hundreds of other possible questions.

Good questions are in the sweet spot of being relevant and interesting, not too easy to answer but possible to tackle with material that is available or at least within our reach. When it comes to finding good questions, it is therefore not enough to think about it. We have to do something with an idea before we know enough about it to make a good judgement. We have to work, write, connect, differentiate, complement and elaborate on questions. This is what we do when we take smart notes.

If we instead set out to write, say, three notes on a specific day, review one paragraph we wrote the day before or check all the literature we discovered in an article, we know exactly at the end of the day what we were able to accomplish and can adjust our expectations for the next day.