Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/How-Take-Smart-Notes-Nonfiction-ebook/dp/B06WVYW33Y

Book website: https://takesmartnotes.com/

This book is an ode on the originator of the Zettelkasten method, Professor Niklas Luhmann. The author, Sönke Ahrens, has done extensive research on how the method was used, its philosophies, and how we can apply it.

This can be a way we can move from an endless stack of notes to an expanding tapestry of ideas.

Note taking is verification of our understanding.

The act of rephrasing forces us to face the problem of truly understanding the issues we have an interest in. Without engaging in or apply the knowledge, there is no way to test our competency and familiarity of those ideas.

Writing these notes is also not the main work. Thinking is. Reading is. Understanding and coming up with ideas is. And this is how it is supposed to be. The notes are just the tangible outcome of it.

If we don’t try to verify our understanding during our studies, we will happily enjoy the feeling of getting smarter and more knowledgeable while in reality staying as dumb as we were.

Writing notes actualises the outcome of thinking.

Once the output of thinking is placed on paper or the screen, we can observe it dispassionately and evaluate it with our unburdened mind.

Writing is, without dispute, the best facilitator for thinking, reading, learning, understanding and generating ideas we have

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.

Connect the ideas together, instead of just stacking them

Effective learning comes from building meaningful connections across ideas and concepts.

The key point of the notes lay in their potential to be connected to one another. By relating notes to one another, they are able to add value to each other, when combined into a piece of writing. With repeated addition and connection between notes, we create a unique tapestry of ideas.

By adding these links between notes, Luhmann was able to add the same note to different contexts.

"Learning would be not so much about saving information, like on a hard disk, but about building connections and bridges between pieces of information to circumvent the inhibition mechanism in the right moment."

"Things we understand are connected, either through rules, theories, narratives, pure logic, mental models or explanations."

Through the continuous immersion of what we are interested in, we generate questions that are relevant to our encounters every day. Since we think of those questions when engaging our material, they come with relevant data that we can use to start of investigation with.

By generating questions in the course of our everyday work, we bring the law of large numbers on our side. The truth is that few questions are suitable to be answered within an article, a thesis or a book."

"The ideas we decide on are not taken out of thin air, but are already embedded in a content-rich context and come with material that we can use.

Follow the thread of our interests.

We avoid the inertia and friction of starting a new project, because we are already doing what we are inclined towards. There is minimum energy used in engaging in something we are already interested in.

For insight to happen, there must have been sufficient exposure to the problem. Most see innovation as a flash of inspiration, but they fail to see the creeping buildup of charge. That build up only comes when we think about the ideas for a long period of time.

Even groundbreaking paradigm shifts are most often the consequence of many small moves in the right direction instead of one big idea.

How does that help us?

Externalising our memory

In the current age, there are roughly two trends about the availability of information:

• Vastly increasing knowledge available and accessible, mainly via the Internet and amount of storage available.
• Vastly increasing ease of note-taking and tools to leverage on records

One train of thought is that the lack of a memory prevents us from developing intuition: we have not internalised the knowledge sufficiently to develop it on demand.

On the other hand, holding onto and processing thought within the mind reduces the capacity of creating new ideas. We can offload the task to recalling this information onto our notes, to use our mind for more important processes.

...no underlined sentence will ever present itself when you need it in the development of an argument.

"If you haven’t written along the way, the brain is indeed the only place to turn to. On its own, it is not such a great choice: it is neither objective nor reliable–two quite important aspects in academic or nonfiction writing.

Good structure in note-taking helps achieve flow in writing.

More of our energy and attention is focused on the thinking.

Building this structure enables the easy collection of thoughts, both past and present. Every idea that you have can be used to craft new knowledge blocks, and add to the tapestry of your knowledge base.

A good structure is something you can trust. It relieves you from the burden of remembering and keeping track of everything.

A good structure enables flow, the state in which you get so completely immersed in your work that you lose track of time and can just keep on going as the work becomes effortless.

A plan does not help because cognitive load is not reduced, in having to adapt the plan to future changes.

If you make a plan, you impose a structure on yourself; it makes you inflexible.

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.

Having the materials in place to just put together cultivates a playful mindset, encouraging the mixing and matching of pieces to craft a cathedral.

"Just amassing notes in one place would not lead to anything other than a mass of notes"

"It would certainly make things a lot easier if you already had everything you need right in front of you:"

Creating a virtuous cycle of writing

In writing, we learn to think and translate our thoughts better and faster. This makes future writing quicker, and gives us a boost of motivation to continue. Thus, we write more to propagate this virtuous cycle.

But the better we become, the easier and quicker we can make notes, which again increases the number of learning experiences.

Choose topics based on what is already in the slip box, because they are already existing outputs of work done. Future work then goes into synthesising them, which is minimal compared to creating a topic from scratch. That is akin trying to construct a cathedral with dirt as opposed fashioned bricks.

With the available material, projects become a task of choosing the relevant pieces, instead of having to create them. We then only select the truly critical.

The challenge of starting with a conclusion in mind, is not having enough material to elaborate on or support that conclusion. The slip-box works in the reverse direction, where the material is already generated from the exploration of our inclinations.

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.

Maybe you are wrong, but it still might contain some interesting thoughts worth keeping and useful.

Not only write, but write publicly. Having a goal of publishing focuses our energy, instead of directionlessly collecting information.

Aiming to produce publicly keeps us accountable in continuing the practice, and generating value with our work. An unpublished note is one that no one will ever benefit or learn from.

An idea kept private is as good as one you never had. And a fact no one can reproduce is no fact at all.

The hallmark of a good workflow is the amount of energy needed to progress to the next step. How does one then reduce the friction between steps?

A good workflow can easily turn into a virtuous circle, where the positive experience motivates us to take on the next task with ease...

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.

Setting up the environment

The activation energy of each action is drastically reduced. Our actions can flow into the next step effortlessly, and there is no choice but to fall into success.

Friction in future research effort

That is reduced by (i) making the note easy to access, (ii) recording the bibliographical effort for possible future reference and (iii) linking between notes to create research paths.

"As the outcome of each task is written down and possible connections become visible, it is easy to pick up the work any time where we left it without having to keep it in mind all the time. "

The by-products of writing in the slip-box becomes the input of other projects, either writing or through other possible mediums.

"This is a setup in which the inevitable by-product of one production line becomes the resource for another, which again produces by-products that can be used in other processes and so on...

Call to Action

For an idea you have, decompose to it to the smallest ingredients you can.

Interesting quotes

Writing plays such a central role in learning, studying and research that it is surprising how little we think about it.

Writing these notes is also not the main work. Thinking is. Reading is. Understanding and coming up with ideas is. And this is how it is supposed to be. The notes are just the tangible outcome of it.

"Maybe you are wrong, but it still might contain some interesting thoughts worth keeping and useful."

"...everything is streamlined towards one thing only: insight that can be published."