How to Take Smart Notes. One Simple Technique to Boost Writing, Learning and Thinking
2 edition, 2022
let’s see how much my notes improve over the course of reading and learning from this book.
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.
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.
Even though planning is often at odds with the very idea of research and learning, it is the mantra of most study guides and self-help books on academic writing. How do you plan for insight, which, by definition, cannot be anticipated?
The challenge is to structure one’s workflow in a way that insight and new ideas can become the driving forces that push us forward. We do not want to make ourselves dependent on a plan that is threatened by the unexpected, like a new idea, discovery – or insight.
“everyone has a plan before they get punched in theface” i think their teaching us that plans that have step by step need not be the main fovus, instead focus should instead also stratagies(effectiveness)
so plan for the unexpected, or at least less likely?
strategy is more important than then the plan
Planners are also unlikely to continue with their studies after they finish their examinations. They are rather glad it is over. Experts, on the other hand, would not even consider voluntarily giving up what has already proved to be rewarding and fun: learning in a way that generates real insight, is accumulative and sparks new ideas.
Good students also look beyond the obvious. They peek over the fences of their own disciplines – and once you have done that, you cannot go back and do what everyone else is doing, even if you now must deal with heterogeneous ideas that come without a manual on how they might fit together.
That means that 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.
without thinking they act, regardless of consequrnses; i think there is beuaty in that. And when they do succeed? People call it luck!(which misses the point is not entirely wrong i suppose)
have into smaller stacks, piles or separate folders. They sort their notes by topics and sub-topics, which makes it look less complex, but quickly becomes very complicated. Plus, it reduces the likelihood of building and finding surprising connections between the notes themselves, which means a trade-off between its usability and usefulness. my_PKM
It is not about redoing what you have done before, but about changing the way of working from now on.
Even the best tool will not improve your productivity considerably if you don’t change your daily routines the tool is embedded in, just as the fastest car won’t help you much if you don’t have proper roads to drive it on.
or just ride bad
Read: gettong things done
Everything needs to be taken care of, other-wise the neglected bits will nag us until the unimportant tasks become urgent. Even the best tools won’t make much of a difference if they are used in isolation.
When it comes to writing, everything, from research to proofreading, is closely connected. All the little steps must be linked in a way that will enable you to go seamlessly from one task to another, but still be kept separate enough to enable us to flexibly do what needs to be done in any given situation.
Luhmann, how did you have so many ideas? How did he write so much? How did he learn so much? How did he publish so much? How how how. I must learn from him. Copy his workflow, and integrates what works for me.
He not only stressed that he never forced himself to do something he didn’t feel like, he even said: “I only do what is easy. I only write when I immediately know how to do it. If I falter for a moment, I put the matter aside and do something else.” (Luhmann et al., 1987, 154f.)3
what the fuck, how? How did he know where to pick up from next? Or did he just start a new project or work on another one.
We are still so used to the idea that a great outcome requires great effort that we tend not to believe that a simple change in our work routines could not only make us more productive,
what? No, it’s more like a fundamental change; when you realise your doing nothing wrong)/is then ofc you would change nothing. I would argue it’s very complex and difficult to realise something is wrong when almost everybody is doing the same thing [wrong].
Studies have proven again and again that 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 (cf. Neal et al. 2012; Painter et al. 2002; Hearn et al. 1998).
effortless focus?
It is about having the right tools and knowing how to use them – and very few understand that you need both.
Instead of struggling with adverse dynamics, highly productive people deflect resistance, very much like judo champions.
well yeah, that seems fun, how do I do that?
why is not everybody using a slip-box and working effortlessly towards success? Is it because it is too complicated? Certainly not. It is rather surprisingly simple. The reasons are much more mundane:
- Until very recently, when the first results from the research on the file system were published, some crucial misunderstandings prevailed about how Luhmann actually worked, which led to disappointing results for many who tried to emulate the system. The main misunderstanding stems from an isolated focus on the slip-box and a neglect of the actual workflow in which it is embedded.
- Almost everything that is published about this system was only accessible in German and was almost exclusively discussed within a small group of devoted sociologists who specialised in Luhmann’s theory of social systems – hardly the kind of critical mass that would draw much attention.
- The third and maybe the most important reason is the very fact that it is simple. Intuitively, most people do not expect much from simple ideas. They rather assume that impressive results must have equally impressively complicated means.
The contemporaries of Henry Ford did not understand why something as simple as the conveyor belt should be that revolutionary. What difference does it make to let the cars move from worker to worker instead of letting the workers walk from car to car?
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 (Schmidt 2013, 170). These notes would end up in the bibliographic slip-box. In a second step, shortly after, he would look at his brief notes and think about their relevance for his own thinking and writing. He then would turn to the main slip-box and write his ideas, comments and thoughts on new pieces of paper, using only one for each idea and restricting himself to one side of the paper, to make it easier to read them later without having to take them out of the box. He usually kept them brief enough to make one idea fit on a single sheet, but would sometimes add another note to extend a thought.
WOA BAZINGA, is that kinda maybe like I’m doing here in this note? Like per quaote I find interesting I’m writing a thought? Am I not amazing?
He usually wrote his notes with an eye towards already existing notes in the slip-box. 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. More often than not, a new note would directly follow up on another note and would become part of a longer chain of notes. He then would add references to notes somewhere else in the slipbox, some of which were nearby, others in completely different areas and contexts. Some were directly related and read more like comments, others contained not-so-obvious connections. Rarely would a note stay in isolation.
oh we’ll, guess not. What am I missing from understanding? Explicit references? A separate note folder? Want? Like saved articles I can reference?
I don’t think that’s quite if though.
Hmmm, something is wrong, I don’t think I’m grasping the core.
the notes I have been making, some are worth expanding on (for evergreen/permanent/refimement) but not all.
should I write all my notes as if I wrote them for my future self for referencing??
I also don’t think so…
what is it then?
probb just goldilocs, I think I can just refine/make worthy notes better after finishing this book? Yeah.
sometimes I need to think in order to reflect and learn, forgoing that and only writing permanent notes forgoes that.
…
expanding on that, my note taking system should be for creating a system of thinking? At least learning, just capturing information misses the point, I would say.Now that doesn’t mean I must forging capturing information or the creation of permanent notes.
The trick is that he did not organise his notes by topic, but in the rather abstract way of giving them fixed numbers. The numbers bore no meaning and were only there to identify each note permanently. If a new note was relevant or directly referred to an already existing note, such as a comment, correction or addition, he added it directly behind the previous note. If the existing note had the number 22, the new note would become note number 23. If 23 already existed, he named the new note 22a. By alternating numbers and letters, with some slashes and commas in between, he was able to branch out into as many strings of thought as he liked. For example, a note about causality and systems theory carried the number 21/3d7a7 following a note with the number 21/3d7a6 (cf. appendix).
that seems.. Inefficient,? Suboptimal at least.
I would say if creating permanent note, then give the note a fitting/explicit/direct name(Best pointer usage for mouse Building a emergency fund ETC)
why did he not do that? Perhaps limitations of only papar? Give it a name of what the note is about? But it is a implementation detail? So don’t get stuck up on it?
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.
liken what I’m trying with Body meta? (tracks has links to all my notes todo with the body: wetshaving, longlivity, suplement stack, sleep optimization, and nopoo/shampoo projects)
if I were forced to boil it down to a single bullet point, it would be this: We need a reliable and simple external structure to think in that compensates for the limitations of our brains.
hmm, I had I feeling that my current notes system is a mess and insufficient, I was working on thatmy_PKM
At this point, it should become clear that you don’t need to wait for a genie to appear, as each step is clearly not only within your abilities, but also straightforward and welldefined: Assemble notes and bring them into order, turn these notes into a draft, review it and you are done.
okay, yeah. but how do I do that? how do I implement that? what would the system look like in obsidian for example. how do I implement my own system?
2.1 Writing a paper step by step
- Make fleeting notes. Always have something at hand to write with to capture every idea that pops into your mind. 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. They should not cause any distraction. Put them into one place, which you define as your inbox, and process them later. I usually have a simple notebook with me, but I am happy with napkins or receipts if nothing else is at hand. Sometimes I leave a voice record on my phone. If your thoughts are already sorted and you have the time, you can skip this step and write your idea directly down as a proper, permanent note for your slip-box
- Make literature notes. Whenever you read something, make notes about the con-tent. Write down what you don’t want to forget or think you might use in your own thinking or writing. Keep it very short, be extremely selective, and use your own words. Be extra selective with quotes – don’t copy them to skip the step of really understanding what they mean. Keep these notes together with the bibliographic details in one place – your reference system.
- Make permanent notes. Now turn to your slip-box. Go through the notes you made in step one or two (ideally once a day and before you forget what you meant) and think about how they relate to what is relevant for your own research, thinking or interests. This can soon be done by looking into the slip-box – it only contains what interests you anyway. The idea is not to collect, but to develop ideas, arguments and discussions. Does the new information contradict, correct, support or add to what you already have (in the slip-box or on your mind)? Can you combine ideas to generate something new? What questions are triggered by them?
inbox notes I’m doing good, I have a inbox folder for all my notes, literature notes I’m not sure. is it kinda what I’m doing with this note?, maybe kinda, I think I will have a literature note when I filter this and improve my comments that are in this note.
permanent notes I don’t understand at all, like the idea is not getting trhough to me.
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.
exponential growth. things accumulate. even the tiniest [fleeting] will contribute to the betterment of the system? efficiency of thoughts?
- Now add your new permanent notes to the slip-box by: a) Filing each one behind one or more related notes (with a program, you can put one note “behind” multiple notes; if you use pen and paper like Luhmann, you have to decide where it fits best and add manual links to the other notes). Look to which note the new one directly relates or, if it does not relate directly to any other note yet, just file it behind the last one. b) Adding links to related notes. c) Making sure you will be able to find this note later by either linking to it from your index or by making a link to it on a note that you use as an entry point to a discussion or topic and is itself linked to the index.
so just a MOC/index folder. like Body meta
- Develop your topics, questions and research projects bottom up from within the system. See what is there, what is missing and what questions arise. Read more to challenge, strengthen, change and develop your arguments according to the new information you are learning about. Take more notes, develop ideas further and see where things will take you. Just follow your interest and always take the path that promises the most insight. Build upon what you have. Even if you don’t have anything in your slip-box yet, you never start from scratch – you already have ideas on your mind to be tested, opinions to be challenged and questions to be answered. Do not brainstorm for a topic. Look into the slip-box instead to see where chains of notes have developed and ideas have been built up to clusters. Don’t cling to an idea if another, more promising one gains momentum. The more you become interested in something, the more you will read and think about it, the more notes you will collect and the more likely it is that you will generate questions from it. It might be exactly what you were interested in from the beginning, but it is more likely that your interests will have changed – that is what insight does.
research projects,? like PARA system?
BTW how should notes be linked?
- After a while, you will have developed ideas far enough to decide on a topic to write about. Your topic is now based on what you have, not based on an unfounded idea about what the literature you are about to read might provide. Look through the connections and collect all the relevant notes on this topic (most of the relevant notes will already be in partial order), copy them into an outliner5 and bring them in order. Look for what is missing and what is redundant. Don’t wait until you have everything together. Rather, try ideas out and give yourself enough time to go back to reading and note-taking to improve your ideas, arguments and their structure.
I don’t understand, develop XOR merge permanent folders so much they bbecome topics? which I can write about?
and what abt afterwards? do I delete the linked/permanent notes?
- Turn your notes into a rough draft. Don’t simply copy your notes into a manuscript. Translate them into something coherent and embed them into the context of your argument while you build your argument out of the notes at the same time. Detect holes in your argument, fill them or change your argument.
oh well this explains part of it.
There is this story where NASA tried to figure out how to make a ballpoint pen that works in space. If you have ever tried to use a ballpoint pen over your head, you have probably realised it is gravity that keeps the ink flowing. 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 story itself, unfortunately, is an urban myth, but the lesson of it encapsulates the core idea of the slip-box: Focus on the essentials and don’t complicate things unnecessarily.
first focus on fundamentals, then later, when mastered. expand the system.
Academic writing in itself is not a complicated process that requires a variety of complicated tools, but is in constant danger of being clogged with unnecessary distractions. Unfortunately, most students collect and embrace over time a variety of learning and note-taking techniques, each promising to make something easier, but combined have the opposite effect.
The whole workflow becomes complicated: There is the technique of underlining important sentences (sometimes in different colours or shapes), commenting in the margins of a text, writing excerpts, employing reading methods with acronyms like SQ3R7 or SQ4R,8 writing a journal, brainstorming a topic or following multi-step question sheets – and then there are, of course, the one thousand and twelve apps and programs that are supposed to help with learning and writing.
look into this, but only when I have mastered this method of noteking(zetellkasten)
Few of these techniques are particularly complicated in themselves, but they are usually used without any regard to the actual workflow, which then quickly becomes a mess. As nothing really fits together, working within this arrangement becomes extremely complicated indeed and difficult to get anything done. And if you stumble upon one idea and think that it might connect to another idea, what do you do when you employ all these different techniques? Go through all your books to find the right underlined sentence? Reread all your journals and excerpts? And what do you do then? Write an excerpt about it? Where do you save it and how does this help to make new connections? Every little step suddenly turns into its own project without bringing the whole much further forward. Adding another promising technique to it, then, would make things only worse.
and this is my fundamental problem. see my_PKM for more details, but the gist is that this vault is a blog, PKM, jiurnal, digital garden etc.
That is why the slip-box is not introduced as another technique, but as a crucial element in an overarching workflow that is stripped of everything that could distract from what is important. Good tools do not add features and more options to what we already have, but help to reduce distractions from the main work, which here is thinking. The slip-box provides an external scaffold to think in and helps with those tasks our brains are not very good at, most of all objective storage of information.
this is what I was searching for, a (meta?) system to supplant my current one.
3.1
The Toolbox We need four tools: •
- Something to write with and something to write on (pen and paper will do) •
- A reference management system (Zotero, Citavi or whatever works best for you) •
- The slip-box (paper or digital).
- An editor (Word, LaTeX, Google Docs or whatever works best for you).
these can all just be the file manager and a text editor.
but for me: 1, 3, and 4 can just be obsidian, and 2 i can use zotero or paperless.(could also use obsidian, but it’s less optimized for that use case)
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.
and that is what Zettelkasten ideal is based on.? that every moment of studying can contribute to research(paper)? or taker further, that studying is researching, (but without a specific research paper question to answer?)
Working as if nothing else counts than writing does not mean spending more time writing at the expense of everything else. Only if we compartmentalise our work into different, isolated tasks will it seem like focusing on writing reduces the time we spend on other tasks. But it does not mean to read less, for this is the main source of the writing material.
a [obsidian] vault partially fixes that, but it largely depends on how you implement this system in your life. so you need to understand it. Zettelkasten is one such implementation.
Having a clear, tangible purpose when you attend a lecture, discussion or seminar will make you more engaged and sharpen your focus. You will not waste your time with the attempt to figure out what you “should” learn. Rather, 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.
focus on learning efficiently, not if it is what you should learn? I that in school they usually push a bunch of tangibally unrelated bullshit in the lessons. and I just refused to learn that. if I just focus on learning despite of that, would that work? I know the author didn’t really account the rise of ai and the dumbing down of schools.
Even if you decide never to write a single line of manuscript, you will improve your reading, thinking and other intellectual skills just by doing everything as if nothing counts other than writing.
is that it? Writing, taking notes, capturing and refining(permanent notes)?
why not give it a try?
Many students and academic writers think like the early ship owners when it comes to note-taking. They handle their ideas and findings in the way it makes immediate sense: If they read an interesting sentence, they underline it. If they have a comment to make, they write it into the margins. If they have an idea, they write it into their notebook, and if an article seems important enough, they make the effort and write an excerpt.
what is wrong with this? that seems like perfectly fine way to work, I would only say to keep you notes in 1 place. instead of scattered across different notebooks and books and whatnot.
Working like this will leave you with a lot of different notes in many different places. Writing, then, will mean relying heavily on your brain to remember where and when these notes were written down. A text must then be conceptualised independently from these notes, which explains why so many resort to brainstorming to arrange the resources afterwards according to this preconceived idea. In this textual infrastructure, this so-often-taught workflow, it indeed does not make much sense to rewrite these notes and put them into a box, only to take them out again later when a certain quote or reference is needed during writing and thinking.
I was right but I missed the core. so rewriting them means I need to make them permanent 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? Most students sort their material by topic or even by seminars and semester. From the perspective of someone who writes, that makes as much sense as sorting your errands by purchase date and the store they were bought from. Can’t find your trousers? Maybe they are with the bleach you bought the same day at your department store.
nice comparison
- 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.
didn’t they just say that lituartue are separate from permanent notes?
typical mistake is made by many diligent students who are adhering to the advice to keep a scientific journal. A friend of mine does not let any idea, interesting finding or quote he stumbles upon dwindle away and writes everything down. He always carries a notebook with him and often makes a few quick notes during a conversation. The advantage is obvious: No idea ever gets lost. The disadvantages are serious, though: As he treats every note as if it belongs to the “permanent” cate-gory, the notes will never build up to a critical mass. The collection of good ideas is diluted to insignificance by all the other notes, which are only relevant for a specific project or actually not that good on second sight.
makes sense, so I need to apply a filter, and remove low quality notes. but what determines what a good quality note is? what qualities does a fleeting/literature note need to have in order to be made permanent.
btw, how to implement my notes in obsidian
should I order my notes a quotes
or as codeblock?
will continue with quotes for now
is not surprising that my friend has a bookshelf filled with notebooks full of wonderful ideas, but not a single publication to show.
I would call that a digital hoarder, a hoarder physical stuff, a hoarder of physical stuff but sorts them(only minimally better then former), and hoarders of the information/digital. (which can also be either be sorted or not)
should make note of this, don’t be a hoarder. archavist fallacy. Collector’s Fallacy
The second typical mistake is to collect notes only related to specific projects. On first sight, it makes much more sense. You decide what you are going to write about and then collect everything that helps you to do that. The disadvantage is that you have to start all over after each project and cut off all other promising lines of thought. That means that everything you found, thought or encountered during the time of a project will be lost. If you try to mitigate the effect by opening a new folder for every potential new project whenever you stumble upon something that might be interesting for that, you will soon end up with an overwhelming amount of unfinished projects. If that in itself does not become a drag on your motivation, the task of keeping track of them will. But most importantly, without a permanent reservoir of ideas, you will not be able to develop any major ideas over a longer period of time because you are restricting yourself either to the length of a single project or the capacity of your memory. Exceptional ideas need much more than that.
so I have been half doing that with a sort of digital garden/digital garden projects. I create a minimal note for a project and give it a plant emoji 🌰, eventually when I stumble upon it again or decide I want to work on it, then I will just work on it.
That might even apply to reading, if you want to focus on a text without interrupting your reading flow. Then you might want to just underline sentences or write short comments in the margins. It is important to understand, though, that underlining sentences or writing comments in the margins are also just fleeting notes and do nothing to elaborate on a text. They will very soon become completely useless – unless you do something with them. If you already know that you will not go back to them, don’t take these kind of notes in the first place. Take proper notes instead. Fleeting notes are only useful if you review them within a day or so and turn them into proper notes you can use later. Fleeting literature notes can make sense if you need an extra step to understand or grasp an idea, but they will not help you in the later stages of the writing process, as no underlined sentence will ever present itself when you need it in the development of an argument. These kinds of notes are just reminders of a thought, which you haven’t had the time to elaborate on yet. 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.
damn, that’s almost exactly what I’m doing with the notes of this book. tf should I be doing then?
what are proper notes then? permanent notes?
A good indication that a note has been 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.
so that answered (partially?) the question of how to filter.
The only permanently stored notes are the literature notes in the reference system and the main notes in the slip-box. The former can be very brief as the context is clearly the text they refer to.
I don’t really understand the reference system, he means kinda what I’m doing now?
The [permanent] notes are no longer reminders of thoughts or ideas, but contain the actual thought or idea in written form. This is a crucial difference.
filter idea
There is one reliable sign if you managed to structure your workflow according to the fact that writing is not a linear process, but a circular one: the problem of finding a topic is replaced by the problem of having too many topics to write about. Having trouble finding the right topic is a symptom of the wrong attempt to rely heavily on the limitations of the brain, not the inevitable problematic starting point, as most study guides insinuate. If you on the other hand develop your thinking in writing, open questions will become clearly visible and give you an abundance of possible topics to elaborate further in writing.
[[sort writhing by context/thought, not by chronological XOR topic]]