How to Take Smart Notes Quotes

“The former can be very brief as the context is clearly the text they refer to. The latter need be written with more care and details as they need to be self-explanatory.”
― Sönke Ahrens, How to Take Smart Notes

“The only permanently stored notes are the literature notes in the reference system and the main notes in the slip-box.”
― Sönke Ahrens, How to Take Smart Notes

“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.”
― Sönke Ahrens, How to Take Smart Notes

“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.”
― Sönke Ahrens, How to Take Smart Notes

“Fleeting notes are only useful if you review them within a day or so and turn them into proper notes you can use later.”
― Sönke Ahrens, How to Take Smart Notes

“underlining sentences or writing comments in the margins are also just fleeting notes”
― Sönke Ahrens, How to Take Smart Notes

“But it should be just the opposite: The more you learn and collect, the more beneficial your notes should become,”
― Sönke Ahrens, How to Take Smart Notes

“What all these category-confusing approaches have in common is that the benefit of note-taking decreases with the number of notes you keep.”
― Sönke Ahrens, How to Take Smart Notes

“The third typical mistake is, of course, to treat all notes as fleeting ones. You can easily spot this approach by the mess that comes with it, or rather by the cycle of slowly growing piles of material”
― Sönke Ahrens, How to Take Smart Notes

“The disadvantage is that you have to start all over after each project and cut off all other promising lines of thought.”
― Sönke Ahrens, How to Take Smart Notes

“The second typical mistake is to collect notes only related to specific projects”
― Sönke Ahrens, How to Take Smart Notes

“As he treats every note as if it belongs to the “permanent” category, the notes will never build up a critical mass.”
― Sönke Ahrens, How to Take Smart Notes

“Only if the notes of these three categories are kept separated it will be possible to build a critical mass”
― Sönke Ahrens, How to Take Smart Notes

“Project notes, which are only relevant to one particular”
― Sönke Ahrens, How to Take Smart Notes

“Permanent notes, which will never be thrown away”
― Sönke Ahrens, How to Take Smart Notes

“Fleeting notes, which are only reminders of information,”
― Sönke Ahrens, How to Take Smart Notes

“The slip-box is designed to present you with ideas you have already forgotten, allowing your brain to focus on thinking instead of remembering.”
― Sönke Ahrens, How to Take Smart Notes

“everything is streamlined towards one thing only: insight that can be published.”
― Sönke Ahrens, How to Take Smart Notes

“The slip-box is the shipping container of the academic world.”
― Sönke Ahrens, How to Take Smart Notes

“In the old system, the question is: Under which topic do I store this note? In the new system, the question is: In which context will I want to stumble upon it again?”
― Sönke Ahrens, How to Take Smart Notes

“as if nothing counts other than writing.”
― Sönke Ahrens, How to Take Smart Notes

“you will try to learn as efficiently as possible so you can quickly get to the point where actual open questions arise, as these are the only questions worth writing about.”
― Sönke Ahrens, How to Take Smart Notes

“I strongly recommend using a free program like Zotero,”
― Sönke Ahrens, How to Take Smart Notes

“left unprocessed too long is when you no longer understand what you meant or it appears banal. In the first case, you forgot what it was supposed to remind you of. In the second case, you forgot the context that gave it its meaning.”
― Sönke Ahrens, How to Take Smart Notes

“It is not only impossible to focus on more than one thing at a time, but also to have a different kind of attention on more than one thing at a time.”
― Sönke Ahrens, How to Take Smart Notes

“Don’t worry too much about how you write it down or what you write it on. These are fleeting notes, mere reminders of what is in your head.”
― Sönke Ahrens, How to Take Smart Notes

“If you want to really understand something, you have to translate it into your own words.”
― Sönke Ahrens, How to Take Smart Notes

“If you want to learn something for the long run, you have to write it down.”
― Sönke Ahrens, How to Take Smart Notes

“Writing is, without dispute, the best facilitator for thinking, reading, learning, understanding and generating ideas we have.”
― Sönke Ahrens, How to Take Smart Notes

“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.”
― Sönke Ahrens, How to Take Smart Notes: One Simple Technique to Boost Writing, Learning and Thinking