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

by Sönke Ahrens

Every task that is interesting, meaningful and well-defined will be done, because there is no conflict between long-and short-term interests.

Having a meaningful and well-defined task beats willpower every time. Not having willpower, but not having to use willpower indicates that you set yourself up for success.

A good structure is something you can trust. It relieves you from the burden of remembering and keeping track of everything. 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: The content, the argument and the ideas.

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 (Csikszentmihalyi, 1975).

Writing is not a linear process. We constantly have to jump back and forth between different tasks. It wouldn’t make any sense to micromanage ourselves on that level. Zooming out to the bigger picture does not really help, either, because then we have next steps like “writing a page.” That does not really help with navigating the things you have to do to write a page, often a whole bunch of other things that can take an hour or a month. One has to navigate mostly by sight.

Everything needs to be taken care of, otherwise the neglected bits will nag us until the unimportant tasks become urgent.

He did not just copy ideas or quotes from the texts he read, but made a transition from one context to another. It was very much like a translation where you use different words that fit a different context, but strive to keep the original meaning as truthfully as possible.

It would certainly make things a lot easier if you already had everything you need right in front of you: The ideas, the arguments, the quotes, long developed passages, complete with bibliography and references. And not just readily available, but already in order, sorted by chapters that have descriptive headlines.

At this point, it should become clear that you don’t need to wait for a genie to appear, as each step is clearly not only within your abilities, but also straightforward and well-defined: Assemble notes and bring them into order, turn these notes into a draft, review it and you are done.

Writing these notes is also not the main work. Thinking is. Reading is. Understanding and coming up with ideas is. And this is how it is supposed to be. The notes are just the tangible outcome of it. All you have to do is to have a pen in your hand while you are doing what you are doing anyway (or a keyboard under your fingers). Writing notes accompanies the main work and, done right, it helps with it.

Writing is, without dispute, the best facilitator for thinking, reading, learning, understanding and generating ideas we have. Notes build up while you think, read, understand and generate ideas, because you have to have a pen in your hand if you want to think, read, understand and generate ideas properly anyway. If you want to learn something for the long run, you have to write it down. If you want to really understand something, you have to translate it into your own words. Thinking takes place as much on paper as in your own head. “Notes on paper, or on a computer screen [...] do not make contemporary physics or other kinds of intellectual endeavour easier, they make it possible,” neuroscientist Neil Levy concludes in the introduction to the Oxford Handbook of Neuroethics, summarizing decades of research. Neuroscientists, psychologists and other experts on thinking have very different ideas about how our brains work, but, as Levy writes: “no matter how internal processes are implemented, (you) need to understand the extent to which the mind is reliant upon external scaffolding.” (2011, 270)

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.

That is why the slip-box is not introduced as another technique, but as 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 distractions from the main work, which here is thinking. The slip-box provides an external scaffold to think in and helps with those tasks our brains are not very good at, most of all objective storage of information.

There is no such thing as a history of unwritten ideas.

It will change the way you read as well: You will become more focused on the most relevant aspects, knowing that you cannot write down everything. You will read in a more engaged way, because 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. You also have to 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 it, you will do what you do deliberately.

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.

The slip-box is designed to present you with ideas you have already forgotten, allowing your brain to focus on thinking instead of remembering.

As he treats every note as if it belongs to the “permanent” category, the notes will never build up to a critical mass. The collection of good ideas is diluted to insignificance by all the other notes, which are only relevant for a specific project or actually not that good on second sight.

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)11

Literature note

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 functions

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.

After many years of working with students, I am convinced that the attempt of these study guides to squeeze a nonlinear process like writing into a linear order is the main reason for the very problems and frustrations they promise to solve. How can you not have trouble finding a topic if you believe you have to decide on one before you have done your research, have read and learned about something? How can you not feel threatened by an empty page if you have literally nothing at hand to fill it with? Who can blame you for procrastinating if you find yourself stuck with a topic you decided on blindly and now have to stick with it as the deadline is approaching? And how can anyone be surprised that students feel overwhelmed with writing assignments when they are not taught how to turn months and years of reading, discussing and research into material they can really use?

When we think we multitask, what we really do is shift our attention quickly between two (or more) things. And every shift is a drain on our ability to shift and delays the moment we manage to get focused again. Trying to multitask fatigues us and decreases our ability to deal with more than one task.

Writing a paper involves much more than just typing on the keyboard. It also means reading, understanding, reflecting, getting ideas, making connections, distinguishing terms, finding the right words, structuring, organizing, editing, correcting and rewriting. All these are not just different tasks, but tasks requiring a different kind of attention. It is not only impossible to focus on more than one thing at a time, but also to have a different kind of attention on more than one thing at a time.

The key to creativity is being able to switch between a wide-open, playful mind and a narrow analytical frame.” (Dean, 2013, 152)

The outcome of reading with a pen in the hand is not possible to anticipate, either, and here, too, the idea is not to copy, but to have a meaningful dialogue with the texts we read.

As well, the mere copying of quotes almost always changes their meaning by stripping them of context, even though the words aren’t changed. This is a common beginner mistake, which can only lead to a patchwork of ideas, but never a coherent thought.

The linear process promoted by many study guides, which insanely starts with the decision on the hypothesis or the topic to write about, is a surefire way to let confirmation bias run rampant. First, you basically fix your present understanding as the outcome instead of using it as the starting point, priming yourself for one-sided perception. Then you artificially create a conflict of interest between getting things done (finding support for your preconceived argument) and generating insight, turning any departure from your preconceived plan into a mutiny against the success of your own project. This is a good rule of thumb: If insight becomes a threat to your academic or writing success, you are doing it wrong.

What distinction is made? A distinction towards ‘non-human rights?’ ‘Human duties?’ Is it a cultural comparison or one with some historic people who didn’t have the concept of human rights, but lived okay together anyway? Often, the text does not give an answer or a clear answer to this question. But then one has to resort to one’s own imagination.”

Luhmann as cited in Ahrens, 2022.

And while writing down an idea feels like a detour, extra time spent, not writing it down is the real waste of time, as it renders most of what we read as ineffectual.

It is not surprising, therefore, that the best-researched and most successful learning method is elaboration. It is very similar to what we do when we take smart notes and combine them with others, which is the opposite of mere re-viewing (Stein et al. 1984) Elaboration means nothing other than really thinking about the meaning of what we read, how it could inform different questions and topics and how it could be combined with other knowledge.

The educational psychologist Kirsti Lonka compared the reading approach of unusually successful doctoral candidates and students with those who were much less successful. One difference stood out as critical: The ability to think beyond the given frames of a text (Lonka 2003, 155f). Experienced academic readers usually read a text with questions in mind and try to relate it to other possible approaches, while inexperienced readers tend to adopt the question of a text and the frames of the argument and take it as a given. What good readers can do is spot the limitations of a particular approach and see what is not mentioned in the text.

And that is because taking a note and sorting it into the slip-box can be done in one go, while writing a manuscript page could involve weeks and months of preparation involving other tasks as well. You could therefore measure your daily productivity by the number of notes written.

Stein et al. illustrate how commonsensical this is in the example of a biology novice who learns the difference between veins and arteries: “[he] may find it difficult at first to understand and remember that arteries have thick walls, are elastic, and do not have valves, whereas veins are less elastic, have thinner walls, and have valves” (ibid.). But by elaborating a little bit on this difference and asking the right questions, like “why?” the students can connect this knowledge with prior knowledge, like their understanding of pressure and the function of the heart. Just by making the connection to the common knowledge that the heart presses the blood into the arteries, they immediately know that these walls need to sustain more pressure, which means they need to be thicker than veins, in which the blood flows back to the heart with less pressure. And, of course, this makes valves necessary to keep the blood from flowing back. Once understood, the attributes and differences are almost impossible to disentangle from the knowledge of veins and arteries.

But if you focus your time and energy on learning without trying to understand, you will not only not understand, but also probably not learn. And the effects are cumulative.

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? That the slip-box is not sorted by topics is the precondition for actively building connections between notes.

The consideration of how to structure a topic, therefore, belongs on notes as well – and not on a meta-hierarchical level. We can provide ourselves with a (temporarily valid) overview over a topic or subtopic just by making another note. If we then link from the index to such a note, we have a good entry point. If the overview on this note ceases to correctly represent the state of a cluster or topic, or we decide it should be structured differently, we can write a new note with a better structure and update the respective link from the index.

Keywords should always be assigned with an eye towards the topics you are working on or interested in, never by looking at the note in isolation.

Those who think of themselves as being open-minded are often even more prone to stick to their first understanding, as they believe they don’t have natural prejudices and therefore don’t see the need to counterbalance them.

Product developers make the same mistake on such a regular basis, one has to wonder if they do it on purpose. As marketing expert Robert McMath assembled the biggest-ever collection of supermarket products, he realised midway it was becoming almost exclusively a collection of failed products because they make up the vast majority of all products ever produced. He thought a museum would be a great place for product developers to see what already proved not to work so they didn’t have to repeat the same mistake. Alas, rarely does a product developer show any interest in learning from the experience of others. Often, companies don’t even keep track of their own failed attempts, providing McMath with whole series in which one kind of mistake was made in multiple variations, sometimes from each generation of developers in the same company (McMath and Forbes 1999).

Literature is condensed on a note saying, “On page x, it says y,” and later stored with the reference in one place.

The biggest threat to creativity and scientific progress is therefore the opposite: a lack of structure and restrictions. Without structure, we cannot differentiate, compare or experiment with ideas.

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 accompany every step of our work with the question, “What is interesting about this?” and everything we read with the question, “What is so relevant about this that it is worth noting down?” we do not just choose information according to our interest. By elaborating on what we encounter, we also discover aspects we didn’t know anything about before and therefore develop our interests along the way. It would be quite sad if we did not change our interests during research.