Summary
In How to Make Smart Notes, Ahren Sonke unveils a method where ideas flow like champagne, each note a sparkling thread in the intricate web of thought. The system, as elegant as it is efficient, turns the mundane act of note-taking into a creative dance, capturing the essence of knowledge with precision. Through this, the pursuit of learning becomes not a chore, but an art—one that shapes and refines the mind in ways that linger long after the final page is turned.
Three groups of readers who will find this as an interesting read:
Students
Ahren Sonke`s learning processes is an inspiration to all, especially what he shares about using slip box technique and breaks down a complex system into steps.
Scholars
The entire book is written in a scholar`s perspective. It is a rich read to see what the thought processes of Ahren Sonke are to manage his own learning journey.
Knowledge workers
They could manage change and learning transforming Ahren Sonke`s methods in a different context while they can directly take a few tips and tools while executing their learning activities.
Key takeaways
Always take fleeting notes when learning in action. And always have system to process these notes later when your memory of reading experience is still fresh.
When taking notes, it is helpful to keep the contextual details like page. It is useful for making associations later.
Having a slipbox transforms my learning and writing journey. Many work is doing inside of that box but I could expand my awareness to the entire learning process.
It constantly feels like all the pressure from society steals my pleasure of learning away. However, this book makes me realize I am responsible for my own learning journey and I have the power to transform that with many systems and toolsets outlined in the book.
A chapter-by-chapter outline
Chapter 1: Introduction
Ahrens introduces the idea that systematic note-taking is essential for enhancing learning, writing, and creative thinking.
Chapter 2: Everything You Need to Know
The Zettelkasten method is presented as a powerful system for organizing and developing knowledge through interconnected notes.
Chapter 3: The Tool that Can Change Your Life
Ahrens emphasizes the transformative potential of the slip-box as a tool for consistent and productive thinking and writing.
Chapter 4: Writing is the Only Thing That Matters
Writing is highlighted as an integral part of the thinking process, not just a final step.
Chapter 5: The Slip-Box - Getting Started
Ahrens provides practical guidance on setting up a slip-box and categorizing notes for long-term knowledge development.
Chapter 6: Writing a Paper
The chapter outlines how to use the slip-box to organize ideas, develop arguments, and write coherent papers.
Chapter 7: Simplicity is Paramount
Ahrens argues that simplicity in the note-taking system is crucial for maintaining consistency and focus.
Chapter 8: The Key to Good Research
The slip-box method is shown to enhance research by managing information effectively and integrating new ideas.
Chapter 9: Learning as a Creative Process
Ahrens connects learning with creativity, advocating for an active engagement with ideas through systematic note-taking.
Chapter 10: The Extended Mind
The slip-box is described as an extension of the mind, aiding deeper and more creative thinking by externalizing thoughts.
Detailed notes
### Notes on Effective Note-Taking
Notes should be an outcome of understanding and coming up with ideas.
Writing is the best facilitator for thinking.
To learn something for the long run, write it down. To really understand, translate it into your own words.
Writing benefits comprehension.
Smart notes matter because writing matters. Writing is crucial for thinking, reading, learning, understanding, and generating ideas.
1. Make Fleeting Notes
- Capture every idea that pops into your mind. These notes serve as reminders of what happened in your mind, similar to a spreadsheet.
- Write proper and permanent notes for your slip-box if your notes are already sorted. You can skip the step of writing fleeting notes if you're already organized.
- What if you write slowly? You can write in any way that suits you, and these notes will be discarded in a day or two. They are just reminders.
2. Make Literature Notes
- Write down what you do not want to forget or think might be useful for your own thinking or writing. Keep it short and selective, and use your own words to demonstrate understanding.
3. Make Permanent Notes
- Go through your notes once a day before forgetting what you meant.
- Relate the notes to what is relevant for your own research, thinking, or interests.
- The goal is not to collect information but to develop ideas, arguments, and discussions. See if new information contradicts, correlates, supports, or adds to what you already have. Consider if you can combine ideas to generate something new. What questions are triggered?
- Write in an understandable way. Concise and clear brief writing. One note for each idea, as if writing for someone else.
4. Add New Permanent Notes to the Slip-Box
- Fill out and archive each note behind one or more related notes.
- Add links to related notes.
- Find these notes more easily by linking to them from your index or by linking them to an “entry note” to a discussion or topic.
5. Develop Topics, Questions, and Research Projects from Within the System
- Look at what’s there, what’s missing, and what questions arise. Consider what questions can arise in the future. Later, you can refer to the notes when those questions arise.
### Effective Notetaking Strategy
Do not brainstorm on a topic. Instead, look in the slip-box to see where chains of notes have developed and ideas have built up into clusters.
Don't cling to one idea if another gains momentum.
Let interest lead to more reading and thinking. This will generate more notes and more questions. Your interest can change, and that is where insights lie.
Try ideas out even when not ready. Give yourself time to go back to reading and notetaking to improve ideas. It is an ongoing process.
Turn notes into a rough draft. Do not copy notes directly into a manuscript. Instead, translate them into something coherent and embed them into the context of your argument.
Detect the holes, fill them, and adjust your argument as needed.
Edit and proofread thoroughly.
In reality, work on many ideas simultaneously at different stages.
Keep notes even if they might not seem immediately useful. They could be useful for something else you haven't thought about—serendipity.
Good tools do not add unnecessary features and options but help reduce distractions from the main work.
The slip-box acts as an external scaffold. It helps with thinking tasks and restores information.
Think with an undistracted brain and rely on a well-organized collection of notes.
Capture ideas using napkin apps or notebooks, not for hoarding, but for processing within a short time.
### Tools
- Zotero: A reference management tool to organize research.
- Daniel Lüdecke's Zettelkasten: A digital tool for managing a slip-box system.
### Importance of Effective Note-Taking
Studying as Independent Research
- A fact must be reproduced to be truly understood. Independent study involves internalizing new information and being able to reproduce it accurately.
Experience with Note-Taking
- By studying something new each night and making notes, you can hope to learn it in the long run. This practice also increases your awareness of your learning and writing processes.
Improving Writing and Thinking
- Allowing your mind to engage in other activities rather than constantly repeating what you plan to write can lead to better writing and clearer thinking. There is no need to hold onto the exact words you plan to write; let your mind flow freely.
Purpose of Professors and Students
- Professors and students are united in their quest for truth, rather than for each other.
Deliberate Learning
- A deliberate approach is the only serious way to engage in learning.
Benefits of Better Writing and Note-Taking
1. Enhanced Focus: Taking notes can help you stay more focused during lectures, discussions, or seminars, sharpening your overall concentration.
2. Engaged Reading and Thinking: By making notes, you engage more deeply in reading, writing, and thinking because you know you cannot write down everything.
3. Purposeful Action: Writing with a clear purpose encourages you to think beyond the task at hand.
Challenges with Chronological Order
- Strict chronological order does not add value in finding, combining, or rearranging ideas productively. Instead, the more you learn and collect, the more beneficial your notes should become. This allows for ideas to mingle and give birth to new ones, making it easier to write intelligent texts with less effort.
Context of Using Notes
- Fleeting Notes:
- These should be made quickly with minimal interruption to your reading flow. They are useful only if reviewed within a day or converted into proper notes. Fleeting notes serve as reminders of your thoughts but become useless if not acted upon soon.
- Permanent Notes:
- These are valuable because they can still be retrieved after the context in which they were written is forgotten. The goal of making fleeting notes is to lower the barrier to note-taking and ensure you can capture your thoughts quickly.
Purpose of Making Notes
- The primary point of making notes, especially fleeting notes, is to make the process easy and to ensure that you can capture and later retrieve your thoughts without much effort.
### Chapter 8: Let the Work Carry You Forward
We have to make plans guided by our interests, curiosity, and intuition, which are shaped and informed by actual reading, thinking, discussing, writing, and developing ideas.
Without supporting materials at hand, you cannot track ideas back to their origins. You may have to write something risky or locate ideas (which can be boring), and this might lead to plagiarism.
The linear process of writing rarely delivers its promise:
1. You may have trouble finding topics without much research.
2. There might be nothing at hand to fill the blank paper.
3. You might procrastinate while blindly deciding on a topic as the deadline approaches.
This same principle applies to pursuing a career.
Living a life without passion is like writing something without notes or with undeveloped thinking.
If you are already developing your thinking through writing, focus on what is interesting. Do what is most interesting for you.
Positive experiences create a virtuous cycle: with a good workflow, you can take on the next task with ease and get better.
On the other hand, being constantly stuck leads to demotivation and procrastination, resulting in fewer positive experiences, such as missed deadlines.
### Chapter 9: Separate and Interlocking Tasks
Studies show that trying to do multiple things at once decreases our ability to multitask effectively and exhausts us.
We feel like we do better because:
1. We do it often, and mere exposure makes us believe we have become good at it.
2. We lack a controlled grip or an objective external measurement that could provide us with the feedback we need to learn.
There are two types of attention:
One requires focus and willpower to sustain. It is essential for learning, understanding, and getting things done.
Using structure can minimize the challenge of focusing for a long time.
For example, the slip-box provides a clear structure to work in by allowing us to consciously shift our attention as we complete tasks in reasonable timeframes before moving on to the next one.
### Giving Each Task the Right Kind of Attention
Proofreading requires a different state of mind than the attempt to find the right words. When proofreading, we wear our critical reading glasses and take a step back to see the text as a neutral reader. We scan the text for typos, try to smooth out patches, and check the structure. This allows us to see what the text really says on the paper, blocking out the knowledge of what we meant to write.
We shouldn't place the critic constantly and let our workflow come to a standstill. Get our thoughts on the paper first.
Finding the right words is different from proofreading and requires floating attention.
It is easier to focus on finding the right words if we don't have to think about the structure of the text at the same time.
Whenever we need to update the structure, we need to take a step back, look at the big picture, and change accordingly.
Be flexible and adjust one's reading to whatever speed or approach a text requires.
The key to creativity is being able to switch between a wide-open, playful mind and a narrow analytical frame.
We need a flexible work structure that doesn’t break down every time we depart from a preconceived plan.
### Become an Expert Instead of a Planner
Experts rely on embodied experience more than rigid rules. Novices can only rely on that and think consciously about each step of the process.
Bodily involvement, speed, and intimate knowledge of concrete cases in the form of good examples are required for true expertise. Rather than rules, principles, and universal solutions.
To become an expert, we need the freedom to make our own decisions and all the necessary mistakes that help us learn.
Gut feeling is the crystalline mind by deeply learned practice through many feedback loops on success or failure.
The slip-box gives you a structure of clearly separable tasks, which can be completed within reasonable time and provides you with instant feedback through interconnected writing tasks. The more experience you gain, the more reliable your intuition is to tell you what to do next.
Real experts don’t make plans according to Fleishchberg.
### 9.5 Get Closure
We need strategies to avoid wasting our short-term memory capacity with thoughts that we can better delegate to an external system. According to Miller (1956), our short-term memory can handle seven items, plus or minus two.
For memory artists, they bundle items together in a meaningful way and remember the bundles. According to Levin and Levin (1990), they can remember up to about seven bundles, but more recent research by Cowan (2001) suggests this number is up to four.
1. How does this fact fit into my idea of...?
2. How can this phenomenon be explained by that theory?
3. Are these two ideas contrasting or do they complement each other?
4. Isn't this argument similar to that one?
5. Haven't I heard this before?
And overall: What does it mean for you?
The Zeigarnik effect suggests that open tasks occupy our short-term memory until they are resolved.
According to David Allen's "Getting Things Done," the secret to having a "mind like water" is to get everything out of short-term memory. The only way to do this is to have an external system to keep track of all our nagging thoughts and trust that they will not be lost.
The same is true for a slip-box. Unfinished tasks are recorded but will not waste our mental resources.
For writing, the first step is to break down the tasks. The second step is to make sure we always write down the outcomes of our thinking. When a task is written and possible connections are made visible, it becomes easy to pick up the work at any time without having to keep it all in our mind all the time.
How to use the Zeigarnik effect to our advantage: We can intentionally keep unanswered questions in our mind, ruminate on them, and let our mind play around with them even when we take a rest, since our brain cannot help but do so.
We use it to our advantage by not letting ourselves be distracted or by intentionally distracting ourselves with unrelated things.
### Reduce the Number of Decisions
If we minimize the number of decisions to be made by integrating them into part of our routine, we can direct more mental energy towards more useful tasks.
Finishing a task in a timely manner and being able to pick up the work where we left off is advantageous to restoring our attention. It allows us to have breaks without the fear of losing the thread, which is crucial for learning and allows our brain to move the information to long-term memory.
### P72 Read for Understanding
According to Franklin, use a pen to mark while reading; when you feel something is important or might be useful, as this is the best way to imprint such particulars in your memory.
Don’t jot down quotes and strip them out of context. Instead, jot down the whole idea.
### P73
Deal with ideas that serve a specific purpose in a particular context. Support a specific argument or part of a theory that isn’t ours or written in a language we wouldn’t use. Translate them into our language to prepare them to be embedded into our own context.
Elaborate notes are useful for understanding and grasping the text in challenging cases. In other cases, it might be more useful to jot down a few keywords.
### P75
People who write notes slowly have a better understanding because they focus on the gist rather than completeness.
It’s all about understanding and preparing for the next step; translating ideas into your own context of your own coherent thoughts in the slip box.
### P76 Keep an Open Mind
### P77 To Combat Confirmation Bias:
1. Use the writing process.
2. Indiscriminately gather as much relevant information regardless of their supporting arguments.
Focus on insights rather than making decisions on hypotheses you write about. Don’t let confirmation bias run rampant.
1. Don’t use your present understanding as a starting point, and create a conflict of interest between getting things down and generating insights.
Develop arguments and ideas from the bottom up instead of top-down, which opens you up for more insights.
Instead of filling our mind with conclusions, we want to confront what we have by separating tasks and focusing on understanding the text we read.
Find the relevance of it and make connections.
Selective objectivity in reading: the only filter is whether it adds to the discussion in the slip-box.
Use slip-box ideas to develop your thoughts as an addition or a contradiction.
2. Take steps to prime ourselves for seeking disconfirming information.
3. Only draw conclusions after reading and collecting data, connecting thoughts, and discussing how they fit together.
### 10.3 Get the Gist
P80 Taking smart notes involves making deliberate decisions about what to use as reference points, helping to differentiate the important from the less important, and the new information from the repeated. It requires practice. By reformulating a text and rewriting the existing content, one trains their attention to focus on frames, patterns, categories in observations, conditions, and assumptions.
### 10.4 Learn to Read
Rereading is dangerous because of the mere-exposure effect.
Rereading or reviewing does not indicate if we have truly learned something. Only the ability to retrieve information demonstrates our learning.
Choose an external system so that we only have to make a conscious choice once and leave the rest to automation.
Exercise helps reduce stress, which supports the learning process.
It's better if we try to remember something even without feedback. Trying to answer a question before knowing how to answer it helps us remember the correct answer better later.
P85 The slip-box method isn’t about cramming. It aids in elaboration by encouraging us to think about how ideas connect with each other through playful experimentation.
There is a clear division of labor between the brain, which handles deep understanding and the big picture, and the slip-box, which manages the details and references.
### CH 11: Take Smart Notes
P86
Good readers approach a text with questions in mind and try to relate it to other possible perspectives. They can identify the limitations of a particular approach by noticing what is not mentioned in the text.
To truly understand information within a context, one must be able to go beyond it, reframe it, and consider what it might mean for someone else.
According to Lyman, it’s better to write brief summaries of the main ideas of a text rather than just collecting quotes.
Think more critically about how this information connects with other ideas from different contexts. It can inform questions that are not already part of the author’s text.
P87
11.1 Make a Career One Note at a Time
Making a few notes every day can be a realistic goal that breaks down an ambitious project into manageable steps.
11.2 Think Outside the Brain
Notes are not just tools to ease thinking—they are the thinking process itself. External scaffolds like notes help structure our thoughts.
When curating reasons for why and how humans act differently when they experience scarcity, have questions in mind like: Is this convincing? What methods do they use? Which references are familiar?
Upon first exposure, consider what this information means for your own research and the questions you think about in your slip-box. Why does this particular information pique your interest?
Use "why" questions to trigger further follow-up inquiries. For example: Isn’t this already discussed in pet care or pet medical research? If yes, who discussed it? If not, why not? And where can I find answers to these questions? Use the slip-box as a starting resource for further inquiry.
Writing makes new perspectives and limitations visible, and it forces us to clarify and distinguish ideas from each other.
11.3 Learn by Not Trying
Learning is about building bridges and connections between pieces of information to circumvent mental blocks at the right moment. Think strategically to remember the most useful information when you need it.
Deploy a different strategy by focusing on retrieval strength. Think strategically about what kinds of cues will trigger the retrieval of a memory.
Use the slip-box to connect each piece of information to as many meaningful contexts as possible. Make the different pieces in the slip-box work together.
Hermann Ebbinghaus, the godfather of learning theory, once deliberately used information like random letter combinations to ensure they had no accidental meaning. From his interpretation, meaning would distract from the actual learning process. However, he didn’t realize that he was detaching the learning process from what learning actually is: making meaningful connections.
Ebbinghaus established a tradition in learning theories that separates understanding from learning.
The need for elaboration arises because meaning isn’t always obvious. That’s why we do the work of connecting one piece of information to another in a meaningful way.
Korbell and Bjork show that elaborating on the differences and similarities of notes, and sorting them by topic, facilitates learning as well as the ability to categorize.
11.4 Adding Permanent Notes to Slip-Box
Steps:
1. Add a note to the slip-box, either directly after the note it references or behind the last note in the series. Number it accordingly. (You can use a Zettelkasten system to automate the numbering process.)
2. Create links to other notes, or add links from other notes to your new note.
3. Ensure the note can be easily found in the index. Add an entry in the index if it helps with searching.
4. Build a latticework of mental models.
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Chapter 12: Develop Ideas
The slip-box is the medium we think in, not just something we think about. A note is only as good as the reference network it is embedded in.
12.1 Develop Topics
In Zettelkasten, keywords can easily be added to a note, much like tags, and will then show up in the index.
Assigning keywords can aid in elaboration and make it more likely that you will connect the note with other notes.
Creating links is a crucial step in making meaningful connections.
Four Types of Cross-References in Luhmann’s File Box:
1. Overview References: These give you an overview of a topic.
2. Local Physical Clusters: These notes provide an overview of a local, physical cluster of topics within the slip-box (though this is not as relevant for digital systems). They help maintain the original line of thought after adding subtopics and sub-subtopics, making the original thoughts stand out.
3. Follow-Up Links: These links show the subsequent notes that follow even when there isn’t enough space on the paper (not applicable to digital systems).
4. Plain Note-to-Note Links: The most common form of reference, these establish new lines of thought.
---
Use the slip-box as a tool to compel yourself to check the references: How do they connect to the facts and ideas you already have?
12.3 Compare, Correct, and Differentiate
Working with the slip-box can be disillusioning, but it prevents us from mistaking others’ ideas for our own. This increases the likelihood that we actually progress in our thinking, rather than just feeling like we are making progress.
Using the slip-box allows us to make small but crucial differences between thoughts visible.
Comparing notes helps us detect contradictions, paradoxes, or oppositions, which can lead to insights. A paradox might indicate that we haven’t thought thoroughly enough about a problem, or that we have exhausted the possibilities of a certain paradigm. Opposition helps to shape ideas by providing contrast. Contradictions help others detect problems.
Constant comparison can lead to the correction of contradictory interpretations, the complementing of ideas (where two unrelated ideas provide proof of the same point), or the improvement of old ideas by adding new elements that reveal weaknesses.
This process also helps with the feature-positive effect, where using the context increases relevancy rather than being biased by recency or availability.
12.4 Assemble a Toolbox for Thinking
A toolbox for thinking makes it easier to spot versatile theories and models.
Charlie Munger points out that having the most proven and useful mental models helps him understand markets and human behavior. Using a broad theoretical toolbox provides a good pragmatic grasp on reality. It's important to seek out the most powerful concepts in every discipline and understand them thoroughly so they become part of our thinking. When we start to combine these mental models and use them to interpret our own experiences, we gain a lot of wisdom. The key is to use a broad range of mental models and avoid becoming too attached to just a few.
“Array your vicarious and direct experiences on this latticework of theory, and it becomes a usable form.”
Make sense of things by drawing from a resource of interpretation schemes rather than by knowing everything. Turn this reflected experience into versatile mental models that are usable in multiple scenarios.
According to Helmut D. Sachs, the more information (or “hooks”) we connect new information to, the easier it is to form long-term memories. Learning becomes fun and forms a positive feedback loop.
1. Pay attention to what you want to remember.
2. Encode the information you want to keep by thinking about suitable cues.
3. Practice recall.
Use the slip-box as a creativity machine.
James Zull states that comparing is our main form of perception, where our cognitive interpretation is in lockstep with our actual eye movement.
The brain is more likely to notice details when it scans than when it focuses.
12.6 Think Inside the Box
Liberate ideas from their original context by using abstraction and respecification.
We use abstraction in our thinking, which is a practical approach rather than just theoretical.
For example, we can abstract "Romeo and Juliet" into a story of love and hate that resonates with our personal experiences, regardless of time, space, or particular circumstances.
We also use abstraction to analyze and compare concepts, make analogies, and combine ideas.
P115
Again, abstraction and respecification of ideas require a system. Creating concrete standardization of notes in a single format allows us to shuffle them freely, add one idea to multiple contexts, and compare and combine them in a creative way without losing sight of their true content.
Our brain loves routines. We digest new information by fitting it into what we already know or letting it vanish from our perception. These processes often go unnoticed.
P116
To truly see things as they are is a skill. It’s not just a character trait like open-mindedness. Nobody can completely hold back from interpreting.
P117
Make it a habit to ask what is not in the picture but could be relevant.
P118
In research, it is important to ask counterfactual questions like "what if" to discover what doesn't work, such as rediscovering the function of money by asking, "What if strangers could exchange goods without using money?"
What kind of answers can you expect from asking in this particular way? What is missing?
P119
Making things more complicated than they are can be a way to avoid the underlying complexity of simple ideas.
Simple ideas can be distilled into consistent theories that build up complexity. This does not work in the same way for complicated ideas.
Using a slip-box limits us to space, making it a habit to always ask what is missing when we write down our own ideas.
Facilitate creativity through restrictions.
Not having to think about organization frees our mental resources to focus on more relevant content.
A lack of structure and restrictions can limit creativity and scientific progress. Use structure to differentiate, compare, and experiment with ideas. Use restriction to decide what is truly worthwhile.
It is misleading to think of “opening ourselves up” in this sense.
The Time to Share
The question of what to write has already been broken down daily when we decide what is valuable.
A visibly developed cluster attracts more ideas and possibilities, which influences our choices on what to read or think about. It acts as a signpost for our daily work, orienting us toward what is worth thinking about.
The slip-box helps with asking good questions by letting the questions arise from it.
Steve is a thinker, innovator, practitioner of digital marketing and digital experience design with a master degree at the University of Waterloo. His day-time job is to use technology and AI-driven content help marketing. When he is not hard at work, he likes reading, writing and trading. He writes about productivity, trading and business opportunities in his blog: 1000 book notes and dedicates to deliver insights for you from the books he read to simplify your life.
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