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

by Sönke Ahrens

What does make a significant difference along the whole intelligence spectrum is something else: how much self-discipline or self-control one uses to approach the tasks at hand

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.

“I never force myself to do anything I don’t feel like. Whenever I am stuck, I do something else.”

Having a clear structure to work in is completely different from making plans about something. If you make a plan, you impose a structure on yourself; it makes you inflexible.

It is a huge misunderstanding that the only alternative to planning is aimless messing around.

the professor is not there for the student and the student not for the professor. Both are only there for the truth. And truth is always a public matter.

This is why the presentation and the production of knowledge cannot be separated, but are rather two sides of the same coin (Peters and Schäfer 2006, 9). If writing is the medium of research and studying nothing else than research, then there is no reason not to work as if nothing else counts than writing.

Even if you decide never to write a single line of a manuscript, you will improve your reading, thinking and other intellectual skills just by doing everything as if nothing counts other than writing.

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

1. Fleeting notes, which are only reminders of information, can be written in any kind of way and will end up in the trash within a day or two. 2. Permanent notes, which will never be thrown away and contain the necessary information in a permanently understandable way. They are always stored in the same way in the same place, either as literature notes in the reference system or written as if for print, in the slip-box. 3. Project notes, which are only relevant to one particular project. They are kept within a project-specific folder and can be discarded or archived after the project is finished.

Fleeting notes are there for capturing ideas quickly while you are busy doing something else.

Fleeting notes are only useful if you review them within a day or so and turn them into proper notes you can use later.

Permanent notes, on the other hand, are written in a way that can still be understood even when you have forgotten the context they are taken from.

That is why the threshold to write an idea down has to be as low as possible, but it is equally crucial to elaborate on them within a day or two.

In contrast to the fleeting notes, every permanent note for the slip-box is elaborated enough to have the potential to become part of or inspire a final written piece,

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.

The last type of note, the ones that are related to only one specific project, are kept together with other project-related notes in a project-specific folder.

We will not be guided by a blindly made-up plan picked from our unreliable brains, but by our interest, curiosity and intuition, which is formed and informed by the actual work of reading, thinking, discussing, writing and developing ideas

a clear, reliable structure is paramount.

A good workflow can easily turn into a virtuous circle, where the positive experience motivates us to take on the next task with ease, which helps us to get better at what we are doing, which in return makes it more likely for us to enjoy the work, and so on.

Following a circular approach, on the other hand, allows you to implement many feedback loops, which give you the chance to improve your work while you are working on it.

Reading with a pen in the hand, for example, forces, us to think about what we read and check upon our understanding. It is the simplest test: We tend to think we understand what we read – until we try to rewrite it in our own words.

The ability to express understanding in one’s own words is a fundamental competency for everyone who writes –

Expressing our own thoughts in writing makes us realise if we really thought them through.

The slip-box is not a collection of notes. Working with it is less about retrieving specific notes and more about being pointed to relevant facts and generating insight by letting ideas mingle.

It is not the slip-box or our brains alone, but the dynamic between them that makes working with it so productive.

The slip-box provides not only a clear structure to work in, but also forces us to shift our attention consciously as we can complete tasks in reasonable time before moving on to the next one.

The moment we stop making plans is the moment we start to learn.

It is similar to the moment where our training wheels were taken off and we started to learn bicycling properly. We might have felt a bit insecure in the first moment, but at the same time, it became obvious that we would never have learned to bicycle if we left the training wheels on.

To become an expert, we need the freedom to make our own decisions and all the necessary mistakes that help us learn.

Here, gut feeling is not a mysterious force, but an incorporated history of experience. It is the sedimentation of deeply learned practice through numerous feedback loops on success or failure.

This is why it is so much easier to remember things we understand than things we don’t. It is not that we have to choose to focus either on learning or understanding. It is always about understanding – and if it is only for the sake of learning.

Open tasks tend to occupy our short-term memory – until they are done. That is why we get so easily distracted by thoughts of unfinished tasks, regardless of their importance.

we don’t actually have to finish tasks to convince our brains to stop thinking about them. All we have to do is to write them down in a way that convinces us that it will be taken care of.

To be able to focus on the task at hand, we have to make sure other, unfinished tasks are not lingering in our heads and wasting precious mental resources.

first step is to break down the amorphous task of “writing” into smaller pieces of different tasks that can be finished in one go. The second step is to make sure we always write down the outcome of our thinking, including possible connections to further inquiries.

That is one of the main advantages of thinking in writing – everything is externalised anyway.

Letting thoughts linger without focusing on them gives our brains the opportunity to deal with problems in a different, often surprisingly productive way. While we have a walk or a shower or clean the house, the brain cannot help but play around with the last unsolved problem it came across.

If you understand what you read and translate it into the different context of your own thinking, materialised in the slip-box, you cannot help but transform the findings and thoughts of others into something that is new and your own.

The slip-box is an idea generator that develops in lockstep with your own intellectual development. Together, you can turn previously separated or even isolated facts into a critical mass of interconnected ideas.

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.

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.

But whether you write them by hand or not, keep in mind that it is all about the essence, the understanding and preparation for the next step — the transferring of ideas into the context of your own lines of thoughts in the slip-box.

naturally drawn to everything that makes us feel good, which is everything that confirms what we already believe we know.

classic role model would be Charles Darwin. He forced himself to write down (and therefore elaborate on) the arguments that were the most critical of his theories.

Charles Darwin. He forced himself to write down (and therefore elaborate on) the arguments that were the most critical of his theories.

changing the incentives from finding confirming facts to an indiscriminate gathering of any relevant information regardless of what argument it will support.

We postpone the decision on what to write about specifically and focus on building a critical mass within the slip-box.

Instead of having the hypothesis in mind all the time, we want to: • Confirm that we have separated tasks and focus on understanding the text we read • Make sure we have given a true account of its content • Find the relevance of it and make connections.

The only thing that matters is that it connects or is open to connections.