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

by Sönke Ahrens

By explicitly writing down how something connects or leads to something else, we force ourselves to clarify and distinguish ideas from each other.

Transferring ideas into the external memory also allows us to forget them. And even though it sounds paradoxical, forgetting actually facilitates long-term learning.

Although he was very good at remembering facts, Shereshevsky was almost incapable of getting the gist of something, the concepts behind the particulars and distinguishing the relevant facts from minor details. He had great trouble relating to literature or poetry. He could repeat a novel word by word, but the greater meaning would be lost on him.

The science of learning is still undecided on the question of whether we all share Shereshevsky’s ability to memorise virtually everything we ever have encountered, but are only better at suppressing it. After all, sometimes we suddenly remember scenes from the past in great detail, triggered by a cue like the scent of a madeleine in Proust’s recherche. These moments of involuntary memory might be like small cracks in the mental barrier through which we can catch a glimpse of all the memories we have collected over our lifetimes, but might never again have access to. Forgetting, then, would not be the loss of a memory, but the erection of a mental barrier between the conscious mind and our long-term memory.

Robert and Elizabeth Ligon Bjork from the University of California suggest distinguishing between storage capacity and retrieval capacity (Bjork 2011). They speculate that while our ability to retrieve information is severely limited, the storage capacity, our brain’s ability to store memories, could be considered virtually unlimited.

it does make sense to shift the attention from the question of how to prevent information from getting lost or decaying over time to how to keep access to it. How “accessible it is at a given point in time” therefore depends on “how entrenched or interassociated that representation is with related representations in memory”

Learning would be not so much about saving information, like on a hard disk, but about building connections and bridges between pieces of information to enable circumventing the inhibition mechanism in the right moment.

There is nothing interesting about the capability of a normal person to remember thousands of words, countless facts, numerous subjects, the names of celebrities, friends, family members and colleagues over a long period of time. But when someone is able to remember a series of twenty or thirty seemingly meaningless bits of information almost instantly, it fascinates us and reminds us of our struggles at school.

The challenge of writing as well as learning is therefore not so much to learn, but to understand, as we will already have learned what we understand. The problem is that the meaning of something is not always obvious and needs to be explored. That is why we need to elaborate on it. But elaboration is nothing more than connecting information to other information in a meaningful way. 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.

The way people choose their keywords shows clearly if they think like an archivist or a writer. Do they wonder where to store a note or how to retrieve it? The archivist asks: Which keyword is the most fitting? 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.

As writers, we approach the question of keywords differently. We look at our slip-box for already existing lines of thought and think about the questions and problems already on our minds to which a new note might contribute.

Just by working with the slip-box, we retrieve old ideas and facts on an irregular basis and connect them with other bits of information – very much how experts recommend we learn

Charlie Munger, Warren Buffett’s partner and vice chairman of Berkshire Hathaway, stresses the importance of having a broad theoretical toolbox – not to be a good academic, but to have a good, pragmatic grip on reality. He regularly explains to students which mental models have proven most useful to help him understand markets and human behaviour. He advocates looking out for the most powerful concepts in every discipline and to try to understand them so thoroughly that they become part of our thinking. The moment one starts to combine these mental models and attach one’s experiences to them, one cannot help but gain what he calls “worldly wisdom.” The importance is to have not just a few, but a broad range of mental models in your head.

A truly wise person is not someone who knows everything, but someone who is able to make sense of things by drawing from an extended resource of interpretation schemes. This stands in harsh contrast to the common but not-so-wise belief that we need to learn from experience. It is much better to learn from the experiences of others – especially when this experience is reflected on and turned into versatile “mental models” that can be used in different situations.

“Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn’t really do it, they just saw something.” – Steve Jobs

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

The neurobiologist James Zull points out that comparing is our natural form of perception, where our cognitive interpretation is in lockstep with our actual eye movements. Therefore, comparing should be understood quite literally.

Our brains evolved to notice details by shifting focus from one area to another, by repeatedly scanning the surroundings. [...] The brain is more likely to notice details when it scans than when it focuses.”

To be able to play with ideas, we first have to liberate them from their original context by means of abstraction and re-specification.

Abstraction should indeed not be the final goal of thinking, but it is a necessary in-between step to make heterogeneous ideas compatible.

The ability to truly see what is in front of one’s eyes is often listed as a trait of experts. And that is easily explained by the fact that our perception does not follow the order of seeing first and interpreting second. It does both at the same time: We always perceive something as something – our interpretation is instantaneous.

We immediately read on the level of meaningful understanding. To really understand a text is therefore a constant revision of our first interpretation.

One possibility to deal with this tendency is to ask counterfactual questions, like “what if?” (Markman, Lindberg, Kray and Galinsky, 2007). It is easier to learn about the function of money in a society if we wonder how strangers would exchange goods without using money than if we just focus on the obvious problems we have in a society based on money exchange. Sometimes, it is more important to rediscover the problems for which we already have a solution than to think solely about the problems that are present to us.

Problems rarely get solved directly, anyway. Most often, the crucial step forward is to redefine the problem in such a way that an already existing solution can be employed. The first question should always be directed towards the question itself: What kind of answer can you expect from asking a question in this particular way? What is missing?

Burger and Starbird remind us of the long history of human attempts to fly: We tried to emulate birds by flapping wing-like apparatuses with feathers and all, but in the end, it was about not getting distracted by details and discovering that the subtle bending of the wing is the only thing that counts.

“Writing itself makes you realise where there are holes in things. I’m never sure what I think until I see what I write. And so I believe that, even though you’re an optimist, the analysis part of you kicks in when you sit down to construct a story or a paragraph or a sentence. You think, ‘Oh, that can’t be right.’ And you have to go back, and you have to rethink it all.” – Carol Loomis33

“Remember the lesson: ‘An idea or a fact is not worth more merely because it is easily available to you.’” – Charles T. Munger

Whenever someone struggles with finding a good topic to write about, someone else will recommend brainstorming. It still has a modern sound to it, even though it was described in 1919 by Alex Osborn and introduced to a broader audience in 1958 in the book “Brainstorming: The Dynamic New Way to Create Successful Ideas” from Charles Hutchison Clark. For many people, it is still the best method to generate new ideas. I suggest seeing it rather as an expression of an outdated fixation on the brain, which is mirrored in the fixation of our educational system to learn things by heart – which means to think without external tools.

And before you now wonder if it would be a good idea to overcome the limitations of brainstorming by assembling a group of friends to brainstorm together, forget it: More people in a brainstorming group usually come up with less good ideas and restrict themselves inadvertently to a narrower range of topics (Mullen, Johnson, and Salas 1991).

As soon as the slip-box has grown a bit, we can replace our thoughts on what is interesting and what we think is relevant with a pragmatic look into the slip-box, where we can plainly see what truly proved to be interesting and where we found material to work with.

By generating questions in the course of our everyday work, we bring the law of large numbers on our side. The truth is that few questions are suitable to be answered within an article, thesis or book. Some are too broad, some are too narrow, some are impossible to answer with knowledge we can reasonably acquire, but for most, we just don’t have the material to work with. Those who start with a plan and an idea about what to write will probably encounter that truth somewhere along the way. They might be able to correct an unfortunate choice once or twice, but will have to stick with what they have chosen at one point or they will never finish their project. 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.

It seems counterintuitive that we become more open to new ideas the more familiar we are with ideas we have already encountered, but historians of science will happily confirm this (Rheinberger 1997). It makes sense when you think about it: without intense elaboration on what we already know, we would have trouble seeing its limitations, what is missing or possibly wrong. Being intimately familiar with something enables us to be playful with it, to modify it, to spot new and different ideas without running the risk of merely repeating old ideas believing they are new.

Jacob Warren Getzels and Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi showed that this is also true in art: New, groundbreaking work is rarely created on a whim by some accidental artist who believes himself to be amazingly innovative. On the contrary: The more time an artist devotes to learning about an aesthetic “problem,” the more unexpected and creative his solution will be regarded later by art experts (Getzels and Csikszentmihalyi 1976).

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.

The ability to change the direction of our work opportunistically is a form of control that is completely different from the attempt to control the circumstances by clinging to a plan. The beginning of the research project that led to the discovery of DNA’s structure was the application for a grant. The grant was not to discover DNA’s structure, but find a treatment for cancer. If the scientists had stuck to their promises, not only would they probably not have found a cure for cancer, but they definitely would not have discovered the structure of DNA. Most likely, they would have lost interest in their work. Luckily, they did not stick to their plan, but followed their intuition and interest and took the most promising path to insight whenever one opened up. The actual research program developed along the way (Rheinberger 1997).

If a person is offered choice among options that he or she does not value, that are trivial or irrelevant, the choice is unlikely to be vitalizing and may be depleting, even if there is no subtle pressure toward a particular option. On the other hand, having autonomous choice among options that do have personal value may indeed be quite energizing.” –Moller, 2006, 1034

Another key point: Try working on different manuscripts at the same time. While the slip-box is already helpful to get one project done, its real strength comes into play when we start working on multiple projects at the same time.

Remember: Luhmann’s answer to the question of how one person could be so productive was that he never forced himself to do anything and only did what came easily to him. “When I am stuck for one moment, I leave it and do something else.” 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)