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

by Sönke Ahrens

The first step of elaboration is to think enough about a piece of information so we are able to write about it. The second step is to think about what it means for other contexts as well.

is the first step these notes linked to highlights and the second permanent notes?

Connections can be made between heterogeneous notes – as long as the connection makes sense. This is the best antidote to the impeding way most information is given to us in our learning institutions. Most often, it comes in modular form, sorted by topic, separated by disciplines and generally isolated from other information. The slip-box is forcing us to do the exact opposite: To elaborate, to understand, to connect and therefore to learn seriously.

Questions have us connect ideas that may not usually live together. This helps our brains build connections. This gives us better understanding. This comes from trying to get these ideas down in notes and other writing.

Make sure it can be found from the index; add an entry in the index if necessary or refer to it from a note that is connected to the index.

Some sort of index needs to exist for easy reference. Notes don't need to be directly referenced by the index. They can be referenced to something already connected to the index.

A pure abstract order would not allow idea clusters and topics to be built bottom up. The individual notes would stay mostly independent and isolated with only one-dimensional references – pretty much like a one-person Wikipedia stripped of the knowledge and fact-checking abilities of the community.

If notes stay disconnected they are likely not much use. This answers my question if what use the graph is, other than a pretty thinking to look at.

Because the slip-box is not intended to be an encyclopaedia, but a tool to think with, we don’t need to worry about completeness. We don’t need to write anything down just to bridge a gap in a note sequence. We only write if it helps us with our own thinking.

The notes we write are to help our own thinking. So, don't write notes just for completeness. Write notes to get thoughts down.

As an extension of our own memory, the slip-box is the medium we think in, not something we think about. The note sequences are the clusters where order emerges from complexity.

The slip box is where we think not what we think about. It is a tool, not the final work.

The reason he was so economical with notes per keyword and why we too should be very selective lies in the way the slip-box is used. Because it should not be used as an archive, where we just take out what we put in, but as a system to think with, the references between the notes are much more important than the references from the index to a single note.

Use tags but sparingly by main topic. It is more important that notes are linked together, creating thoughts and new ideas, than indexed.

Every consideration on the structure of a topic is just another consideration on a note – bound to change and dependent on the development of our understanding.

index notes are just thoughts about how information can work together. great them mentally, like permanent notes.

A writer asks: In which circumstances will I want to stumble upon this note, even if I forget about it? It is a crucial difference.

When indexing and tagging, think about how it when you'd like to come across the note while thinking with your slip box

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.

Index notes are great places for outlines or just putting together ideas on a future writing topic.

Adding new notes to old notes and being forced to compare them leads not only to a constant improvement of one’s own work, but often discloses weaknesses in the texts we read. We have to compensate for that by being extra critical as readers and careful with extracting information from texts, and we always have to check the original source of a claim.30

Contradicting ideas, difference of perceived cause and other paradoxes are not problems in a negative sense but signals that there is a mystery to solve.

The information on flashcards is neither elaborated on nor embedded in some form of context. Each flashcard stays isolated instead of being connected with the network of theoretical frames, our experiences or our latticework of mental models. This not only makes it much more difficult to learn, but to understand the implications and meaning of information (cf. Birnbaum et al., 2013).

flash cards are great for working with language learning. but are still a form of cramming. it's there a good way to go one step further and think about how you might use that information in a conversation, or a script?

But intuition is not the opposition to rationality and knowledge, it is rather the incorporated, practical side of our intellectual endeavours, the sedimented experience on which we build our conscious, explicit knowledge (cf. Ahrens 2014).

I remember there was a book on the importance of following your intuition. this work improves your intuition.

To be able to play with ideas, we first have to liberate them from their original context by means of abstraction and re-specification. We did this when we took literature notes and translated them into the different contexts within the slip-box.

By taking ideas out of the context we find them and converting them to the slip box, we give ourselves the opportunity to pay with them and connect them to other contexts.

In their book “The 5 Elements of Effective Thinking,” the mathematicians Edward B. Burger and Michael Starbird collected different strategies to do that (2012).

take a look at this book

We check if what we understood from a text is really in the text by having our understanding in written form in front of our eyes. We learn to focus on the gist of an idea by restricting ourselves in terms of space. We can make it a habit to always think about what is missing when we write down our own ideas. And we can practice asking good questions when we sort our notes into the slip-box and connect them with other notes.

Asking if we really remember the thing we take notes on correctly, asking what (information) is missing and asking other good questions is party of the discipline needed to get the most out of the notes we take.

The restriction to one idea per note is also the precondition to recombine them freely later. Luhmann wrote notes on A6 paper (4.1 x 5.8 in or 105 x 148 mm). A good rule of thumb for working digitally is: Each note should fit onto the screen and there should be no need of scrolling.

atomicity helps to allow creativity in putting notes together. by having LEGO bricks you can make a lot more than if you only had complete structures.

Every time we read something, we make a decision on what is worth writing down and what is not. Every time we make a permanent note, we also make a decision about the aspects of a text we regard as relevant for our longer-term thinking and the development of our ideas. We constantly make explicit how ideas and information connect with each other and turn them into literal connections between our notes. By doing this, we develop visible clusters of ideas that are now ready to be turned into manuscripts.

at first, there is nothing. then one meaningful note. then one meaningful connection between notes. then one thing worth writing about. then many.

Jeremy Dean, who has written extensively on routines and rituals and suggests seeing old ways of thinking as thinking routines, puts it well when he writes that we cannot break with a certain way of thinking if we are not even aware that it is a certain way of thinking (Dean, 2013).

first learn the rules and why they are there. then you'll be able to choose when it makes sense to break those rules.

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.

grow your interests by asking what is interesting and relevant (to the reason you are learning) when you are reading/learning

It is not just about feeling in control, it is about setting up the work in a way that we really are in control. And the more control we have to steer our work towards what we consider interesting and relevant, the less willpower we have to put into getting things done. Only then can work itself become the source of motivation, which is crucial to make it sustainable.

by having agency and control over the work, through following interest and relevant paths, we will be more sustainable in our ability to complete tasks.

Organizing the work so we can steer our projects in the most promising direction not only allows us to stay focused for longer, but also to have more fun – and that is a fact (Gilbert 2006).35

I should find this and cite it when dealing with stuff that I have no interest in doing in the way presented. e.g. upskilling on ai

It is vital to have a separate, project-specific place to sort your notes for a particular project. An outliner helps with developing a rough structure, but also allows you to keep it flexible. The structure of an argument is part of it and therefore will change during the process of developing it – it is not a vessel to be filled with content. As soon as the structure no longer changes much, we can happily call it a “table of contents.” But even then, it helps to see it as a structural guideline and not a prescription. It is not unusual to change the order of chapters at the very end.

outlines and thoughts for how stuff is to be put together is for individual(writing) projects and won't have value when you are done. this is scaffolding. it's okay to get rid of it.

When he was asked what else he did when he was stuck, his answer was: “Well, writing other books. I always work on different manuscripts at the same time. With this method, to work on different things simultaneously, I never encounter any mental blockages.” (Luhmann, Baecker, and Stanitzek 1987, 125–55)

use the slip box to "hold your place" while you work on other (writing) projects. this allows you to follow the momentum. remember Raven Oak's website and where she is on multiple manuscripts.

The lesson to draw is to be generally sceptical about planning, especially if it is merely focused on the outcome, not on the actual work and the steps required to achieve a goal.

planning should alsk, not about the outcome, but about what is required to achieve the outcome

But the biggest difference lies in the task you are facing to start with. It is much easier to get started if the next step is as feasible as “writing a note,” “collect what is interesting in this paper” or “turning this series of notes into a paragraph” than if we decide to spend the next days with a vague and ill-defined task like “keep working on that overdue paper.”

keep working on X is a red flag for planning. it's difficult to measure if you did what you set out to do.

One of the most difficult tasks is to rigorously delete what has no function within an argument – “kill your darlings.”38 This becomes much easier when you move the questionable passages into another document and tell yourself you might use them later. For every document I write, I have another called “xy-rest.doc,” and every single time I cut something, I copy it into the other document, convincing myself that I will later look through it and add it back where it might fit.

this one weird truck gets us to remove unnecessary parts of a narrative.

Learning, thinking and writing should not be about accumulating knowledge, but about becoming a different person with a different way of thinking.

Read with a pen in your hand, take smart notes and make connections between them. Ideas will come by themselves and your writing will develop from there.