How to Take Smart Notes Quotes

“2. Make literature notes. Whenever you read something, make notes about the content.”
― Sönke Ahrens, How to Take Smart Notes: One Simple Technique to Boost Writing, Learning and Thinking

“1. Make fleeting notes. Always have something at hand to write with to capture every idea that pops into your mind.”
― Sönke Ahrens, How to Take Smart Notes: One Simple Technique to Boost Writing, Learning and Thinking

“Thinking, reading, learning, understanding and generating ideas is the main work of everyone who studies, does research or writes. If you write to improve all of these activities, you have a strong tailwind going for you. If you take your notes in a smart way, it will propel you forward.”
― Sönke Ahrens, How to Take Smart Notes: One Simple Technique to Boost Writing, Learning and Thinking

“Thinking takes place as much on paper as in your own head. “Notes on paper, or on a computer screen [...] do not make contemporary physics or other kinds of intellectual endeavour easier, they make it possible,”
― Sönke Ahrens, How to Take Smart Notes: One Simple Technique to Boost Writing, Learning and Thinking

“He would then add another note to his slip-box, on which he would sort a topic by sorting the links of the relevant other notes. The last element in his file system was an index, from which he would refer to one or two notes that would serve as a kind of entry point into a line of thought or topic. Notes with a sorted collection of links are, of course, good entry points.”
― Sönke Ahrens, How to Take Smart Notes: One Simple Technique to Boost Writing, Learning and Thinking

“Another way is by adding a link on this and/or the other note, which could be anywhere in the system.”
― Sönke Ahrens, How to Take Smart Notes: One Simple Technique to Boost Writing, Learning and Thinking

“Whenever he added a note, he checked his slip-box for other relevant notes to make possible connections between them.”
― Sönke Ahrens, How to Take Smart Notes: One Simple Technique to Boost Writing, Learning and Thinking

“He did not just copy ideas or quotes from the texts he read, but made a transition from one context to another. It was very much like a translation where you use different words that fit a different context, but strive to keep the original meaning as truthfully as possible.”
― Sönke Ahrens, How to Take Smart Notes: One Simple Technique to Boost Writing, Learning and Thinking

“And while the notes on the literature were brief, he wrote them with great care, not much different from his style in the final manuscript: in full sentences and with explicit references to the literature from which he drew his material.”
― Sönke Ahrens, How to Take Smart Notes: One Simple Technique to Boost Writing, Learning and Thinking

“Whenever he read something, he would write the bibliographic information on one side of a card and make brief notes about the content on the other side”
― Sönke Ahrens, How to Take Smart Notes: One Simple Technique to Boost Writing, Learning and Thinking

“two slip-boxes: a bibliographical one, which contained the references and brief notes on the content of the literature, and the main one in which he collected and generated his ideas, mainly in response to what he read.”
― Sönke Ahrens, How to Take Smart Notes: One Simple Technique to Boost Writing, Learning and Thinking

“It is in the nature of writing, especially insight-oriented writing, that questions change, the material we work with turns out to be very different from the one imagined or that new ideas emerge, which might change our whole perspective on what we do. Only if the work is set up in a way that is flexible enough to allow these small and constant adjustments can we keep our interest, motivation and work aligned – which is the precondition to effortless or almost effortless work.”
― Sönke Ahrens, How to Take Smart Notes: One Simple Technique to Boost Writing, Learning and Thinking

“He realised that one idea, one note was only as valuable as its context, which was not necessarily the context it was taken from. So he started to think about how one idea could relate and contribute to different contexts.”
― Sönke Ahrens, How to Take Smart Notes: One Simple Technique to Boost Writing, Learning and Thinking

“A good structure is something you can trust. It relieves you from the burden of remembering and keeping track of everything. If you can trust the system, you can let go of the attempt to hold everything together in your head and you can start focusing on what is important: The content, the argument and the ideas.”
― Sönke Ahrens, How to Take Smart Notes: One Simple Technique to Boost Writing, Learning and Thinking

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

“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 (Duckworth and Seligman, 2005; Tangney, Baumeister, and Boone, 2004).”
― Sönke Ahrens, How to Take Smart Notes: One Simple Technique to Boost Writing, Learning and Thinking

“The quality of a paper and the ease with which it is written depends more than anything on what you have done in writing before you even made a decision on the topic.”
― Sönke Ahrens, How to Take Smart Notes: One Simple Technique to Boost Writing, Learning and Thinking

“good, productive writing is based on good note-taking. Getting something that is already written into another written piece is incomparably easier than assembling everything in your mind and then trying to retrieve it from there.”
― Sönke Ahrens, How to Take Smart Notes: One Simple Technique to Boost Writing, Learning and Thinking

“Zettelkasten numbers”
― Sönke Ahrens, How to Take Smart Notes

“To elaborate, to understand, to connect and therefore to learn seriously.”
― Sönke Ahrens, How to Take Smart Notes

“David Allen’s “Getting things done” system works: The secret to have a “mind like water” is to get all the little stuff out of our short-term memory.”
― Sönke Ahrens, How to Take Smart Notes

“Become an Expert Instead of a Planner “(An) exclusive use of analytical rationality tends to impede further improvement in human performance because of analytical rationality’s slow reasoning and its emphasis on rules, principles, and universal solutions. Second, bodily involvement, speed, and an intimate knowledge of concrete cases in the form of good examples is a prerequisite for true expertise.” (Flyvbjerg 2001, 15)”
― Sönke Ahrens, How to Take Smart Notes

“学术写作本身并不是一个需要各种复杂工具的复杂过程，但它却常常被不必要的干扰所阻碍。”
― Sönke Ahrens, How to Take Smart Notes

“The best way to maintain the feeling of being in control is to stay in control. And to stay in control, it's better to keep your options open during the writing process rather than limit yourself to your first idea.”
― Sönke Ahrens, How to Take Smart Notes: One Simple Technique to Boost Writing, Learning and Thinking

“If you want to learn something for the long run, you have to write it down. If you want to really understand something, you have to translate it into your own words. Thinking takes place as much on paper as in your own head.”
― Sönke Ahrens, How to Take Smart Notes: One Simple Technique to Boost Writing, Learning and Thinking

“Psychologists used to associate scientific work exclusively with focused attention, while other, more floating kinds of attention were exclusively associated with creative work like art. We know today that we need both kinds of attention for art and science.”
― Sönke Ahrens, How to Take Smart Notes: One Simple Technique to Boost Writing, Learning and Thinking

“We tend to think that big transformations have to start with an equally big idea. But more often than not, it is the simplicity of an idea that makes it so powerful (and often overlooked in the beginning)”
― Sönke Ahrens, How to Take Smart Notes

“success is not the result of strong willpower and the ability to overcome resistance, but rather the result of smart working environments that avoid resistance in the first place”
― Sönke Ahrens, How to Take Smart Notes

“Only if we know that everything is taken care of, from the important to the trivial, can we let go and focus on what is right in front of us. Only if nothing else is lingering in our working memory and taking up valuable mental resources can we experience what Allen calls a “mind like water”
― Sönke Ahrens, How to Take Smart Notes

“those who are not very good at something tend to be overly confident, while those who have made an effort tend to underestimate their abilities”
― Sönke Ahrens, How to Take Smart Notes