Status Updates From How to Take Smart Notes

Intresting

Project-related notes: comments in the manuscript; collections of project-related literature; outlines; snippets of drafts; reminders;to-do lists; the draft itself

finished ch 8

Deliberate practice is the only serious way of becoming better at what we are doing.

Much more insightful than I thought. The challenge is to structure ones workflow in a way that insight and new ideas can become the driving forces that push us forward.

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.
A good structure allows you to do that, to move seamlessly from one task to another - without threatening the whole arrangement or losing sight of the bigger picture.

finished section 2. reading one section every day :D

nicee

"Membaca sambil mencatat makan lebih banyak waktu; membaca tanpa mencatat itu buang-buang waktu." Oke, sa kemakan~

It is a very useful book. Must read!

Buku yang betul-betul kubutuhkan untuk trial-error metode mencatatku

Sampai ga kepingin skimming karena argumennya padet

Buku demi buku soal metode "menjalani hidup" dan akhirnya sampai di buku ini, yang banyak beririsan sama kerja2 di warung arsip, yakni soal pemanfaatan anotasi sebagai bahan menulis, tapi Ahrens membawa diskusinya lebih jauh, dengan Niklas Luhman, sosiolog produktif banget, sebagai model, membongkar metode mengorganisir catatan yang bikin tulisan bukan hasil dari beberapa kali duduk saja, tapi akumulasi kebiasaan.

"The ability to express understanding in one's own words is a fundamental competency for everyone who writes - and only by doing it with the chance of realizing our lack of understanding can we become better at it."

"Tools are only as good as your ability to work with them. Everybody knows how to handle a flute ... but nobody would try it out once and then judge the instrument on what they hear." Perhaps not particularly mindblowing, but I think this passage helps with keeping the right mindset. It's just a reminder.

"After a series of prototypes, several test runs and tons of money invested, NASA developed a fully functional gravity-independent pen, which pushes the ink onto the paper by means of compressed nitrogen. According to this story, the Russians faced the same problem. So they used pencils (De Bono, 1998, 141). The slip-box follows the Russian model: Focus on the essentials, don’t complicate things unnecessarily."

On the permanent note and making sure ideas are in alignment with your interests, research, and thinking process: "The idea is not to collect, but to develop ideas, arguments, and discussions." Instead of hoarding information, the goal is to build upon it.

"Even hard work can be fun as long as it is aligned with our intrinsic goals and we feel in control. The problems arise when we set up our work in such an inflexible way that we can’t adjust it when things change and become arrested in a process that seems to develop a life of its own."

"But moreover, it describes how he implemented them into his
workflow so he could honestly say: “I never force myself to do anything I don’t feel like. Whenever I am stuck, I do something else.” A good structure allows you to do that, to move seamlessly from one task to another – without threatening the whole arrangement or losing sight of the bigger picture."

"But moreover, it describes how he implemented them into his
workflow so he could honestly say: “I never force myself to do anything I don’t feel like. Whenever I am stuck, I do something else.” A good structure allows you to do that, to move seamlessly from one task to another – without threatening the whole arrangement or losing sight of the bigger picture."

“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. While it doesn’t help to imagine oneself the great author of a successful and timely finished paper, it does make a difference if we have a realistic idea about what needs to be done to get there in our minds.”

“What we learn in practice is always much more thorough and complex than what we could put into words. That is why even purely theoretical work cannot be reduced to explicit knowledge, which is consciously available.”

“By learning, retaining, and building on the retained basics, we are creating a rich web of associated information. The more we know, the more information (hooks) we have to connect new information to, the easier we can form long-term memories. […]

“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.”

“The search for meaningful connections is a crucial part of the thinking process towards the finished manuscript”

“2.    Add links to other notes or links on other notes to your new note.
3.    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.
4.    Build a Latticework of Mental Models”

Although the attitude of this book is about making better notes, a lot of the stuff mentioned in the book pertains to psychological theories of knowing and being familiar with things. It also touches upon using this note-taking system to disillusion yourself about an idea you or somebody already had rather than redundantly stroking your ego for thinking it's new. It encourages to deepen your ideas about those ideas.

On a more conceptual level, this book is emphasizing that most successful people often find the more easier way out, and it requires no willpower or "hard word" on their part; contrary to popular belief. Note-taking method creator "Niklas Luhmann" employed such a system leading him to publish 50 books and a couple of other articles in his life time. His method is simple, like the conveyor belt, but revolutionary.

Trying to keep my notes more organized on Notion.

“The content, the argument and the ideas. By breaking down the amorphous task of “writing a paper” into small and clearly separated tasks, you can focus on one thing at a time, complete each in one go and move on to the next one”