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

by Sönke Ahrens

Yes, we have to be selective, but not in terms of pros and cons, but in terms of relevant or irrelevant.

the more diverse the content of the slip-box is, the further it can bring our thinking forward – provided we haven’t decided on the direction upfront.

Contradictions within the slip-box can be discussed on follow-up notes or even in the final paper.

It is after reading and collecting relevant data, connecting thoughts and discussing how they fit together that it is time to draw conclusions and develop a linear structure for the argument.

But this dynamic can only start if we ourselves deliberately decide to take on the task of reading and being selective about it, relying on nothing other than our own judgement of what is important and what is not.

That would be rote learning. To put it differently: One has to read extremely selectively and extract widespread and connected references. One has to be able to follow recurrences.

Probably the best method is to take notes – not excerpts, but condensed reformulated accounts of a text. Rewriting

It makes sense to always ask the question: What is not meant, what is excluded if a certain claim is made?

division of labour between the brain and the slip-box: The slip-box takes care of details and references and is a long-term memory resource that keeps information objectively unaltered. That allows the brain to focus on the gist, the deeper understanding and the bigger picture, and frees it up to be creative.

Lonka recommends what Luhmann recommends: Writing brief accounts on the main ideas of a text instead of collecting quotes.

We don’t just play with ideas in our heads, but do something with them in a very concrete way: We think about what they mean for other lines of thoughts, then we write this explicitly on paper and connect them literally with the other notes.

Only in the written form can an argument be looked at with a certain distance – literally. We need this distance to think about an argument

The slip-box is forcing us to do the exact opposite: To elaborate, to understand, to connect and therefore to learn seriously.

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.

After adding a note to the slip-box, we need to make sure it can be found again. This is what the index is for.

But liberating our brains from the task of organizing the notes is the main reason we use the slip-box in the first place.

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.

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.

A paradox can be a sign that we haven’t thought thoroughly enough about a problem or, conversely, that we exhausted the possibilities of a certain paradigm.

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.

helps with what is known as the feature-positive effect (Allison and Messick 1988; Newman, Wolff, and Hearst 1980; Sainsbury 1971). This is the phenomenon in which we tend to overstate the importance of information that is (mentally) easily available to us and tilts our thinking towards the most recently acquired facts, not necessarily the most relevant ones.

You may have noticed students who just try to remember and pound back what is remembered. Well, they fail in school and in life. You’ve got to hang experience on a latticework of models in your head.” (Munger 1994).

We retrieve information from the slip-box whenever we try to connect new notes with old notes. Just by doing this, we mix up contexts, shuffle notes and retrieve the information in irregular intervals.

Being able to abstract and re-specify ideas is, again, only one side of the equation. It is not good for anything if we don’t have a system in place that allows us to put this into practice. Here, it is the concrete standardization of notes in just one format that enables us to literally shuffle them around, to add one idea to multiple contexts and to compare and combine them in a creative way without losing sight of what they truly contain.

The ability to generate new ideas has more to do with breaking with old habits of thinking than with coming up with as many ideas as possible.

Indifference is the worst environment for insight. And the slip-box is, above all, a tool for enforcing distinctions, decisions and making differences visible.

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.

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.

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.

A key point: Structure the text and keep it flexible. While the slip-box was very much about experimenting with and generating new ideas, we now need to bring our thoughts into a linear order. The key is to structure the draft visibly.

We know from sports that it doesn’t help when athletes imagine themselves as winners of a race, but it makes a big difference if they imagine all the training that is necessary to be able to win. Having a more realistic idea in mind not only helps them to perform better, it also boosts their motivation (Singer et al. 2001).

According to the famous law of Parkinson, every kind of work tends to fill the time we set aside for it, like air fills every corner of a room (Parkinson 1957).

which our brains tend to stay occupied with a task until it is accomplished (or written down). If we have the finish line in sight, we tend to speed up, as everyone knows who has ever run a marathon. That means that the most important step is to get started. Rituals help, too (Currey 2013). 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.”

It is really easy to predict the behaviour of people in the long run. In all likelihood, we will do in a month, a year or two years from now exactly what we have done before: eat as many chocolates as before, go to the gym as often as before, and get ourselves into the same kinds of arguments with our partners as before. To put it differently, good intentions don’t last very long, usually.

The trick is not to try to break with old habits and also not to use willpower to force oneself to do something else, but to strategically build up new habits that have a chance to replace the old ones. The goal here is to get into the habit of fetching pen and paper whenever we read something, to write down the most important and interesting aspects.

The slip-box is as simple as it gets. 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. There is no need to start from scratch. Keep doing what you would do anyway: Read, think, write. Just take smart notes along the way.