How to Take Smart Notes

Quote from Niklas Luhmann:

“Focusing on writing as if nothing else counts does not necessarily mean you should do everything else less well, but it certainly makes you do everything else differently.” (Sönke Ahrens, How to Take Smart Notes)

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“To achieve a critical mass, it is crucial to distinguish clearly between three types of notes: 1.  Fleeting notes, which are only reminders of information, can be written in any kind of way and will end up in the trash within a day or two. 2.  Permanent notes, which will never be thrown away and contain the necessary information in themselves in a permanently understandable way. They are always stored in the same way in the same place, either in the reference system or, written as if for print, in the slip-box. 3.  Project notes, which are only relevant to one particular project. They are kept within a project-specific folder and can be discarded or archived after the project is finished. Only if the notes of these three categories are kept separated it will be possible to build a critical mass of ideas within the slip-box. One of the major reasons for not getting much writing or publishing done lies in the confusion of these categories.” (Sönke Ahrens, How to Take Smart Notes)

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Should be sure to differentiate between types of notes.

“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)

“When we take permanent notes, it is much more a form of thinking within the medium of writing and in dialogue with the already existing notes within the slip-box than a protocol of preconceived ideas. Any thought of a certain complexity requires writing. Coherent arguments require the language to be fixed, and only if something is written down is it fixed enough to be discussed independently from the author. The brain alone is too eager to make us feel good – even if it is by politely ignoring inconsistencies in our thinking. Only in the written form can an argument be looked at with a certain distance – literally. We need this distance to think about an argument – otherwise the argument itself would occupy the very mental resources we need for scrutinizing it.” (Sönke Ahrens, How to Take Smart Notes)

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“Zeigarnik successfully reproduced what is now known as the Zeigarnik effect: Open tasks tend to occupy our short-term memory – until they are done. That is why we get so easily distracted by thoughts of unfinished tasks, regardless of their importance. But thanks to Zeigarnik’s follow-up research, we also know that we don’t actually have to finish tasks to convince our brains to stop thinking about them. All we have to do is to write them down in a way that convinces us that it will be taken care of. That’s right: The brain doesn’t distinguish between an actual finished task and one that is postponed by taking a note. By writing something down, we literally get it out of our heads. This is why 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. And as we can’t take care of everything once and for all right now, the only way to do that is to have a reliable external system in place where we can keep all our nagging thoughts about the many things that need to be done and trust that they will not be lost. And the same is true for the work with the slip-box. To be able to focus on the task at hand, we have to make sure other, unfinished tasks are not lingering in our head and wasting precious mental resources.” (Sönke Ahrens, How to Take Smart Notes)

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“The attempt to rephrase an argument in our own words confronts us without mercy with all the gaps in our understanding. It certainly feels less good, but this struggle is the only chance we have to improve our understanding, to learn and move forward (cf. below). This, again, is deliberate practice. Now we are faced with a clear choice: We have to choose between feeling smarter or becoming smarter. And while writing down an idea feels like a detour, extra time spent, not writing it down is the real waste of time, as it renders most of what we read as ineffectual.” (Sönke Ahrens, How to Take Smart Notes)

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Writing as thinking

“There is no such thing as private knowledge in academia. An idea kept private is as good as one you never had. And a fact no one can reproduce is no fact at all. Making something public always means to write it down so it can be read. There is no such thing as a history of unwritten ideas.” (Sönke Ahrens, How to Take Smart Notes)

Real ideas are written ideas The case for public notes

“To get a good paper written, you only have to rewrite a good draft; to get a good draft written, you only have to turn a series of notes into a continuous text. And as a series of notes is just the rearrangement of notes you already have in your slip-box, all you really have to do is have a pen in your hand when you read.” (Sönke Ahrens, How to Take Smart Notes)

Turning notes into papers

“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” - the state where we can focus on the work right in front of us without getting distracted by competing thoughts.” (Sönke Ahrens, How to Take Smart Notes)

Flow Zeigarnik effect

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“It is a huge misunderstanding that the only alternative to planning is aimless messing around. 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.” (Sönke Ahrens, How to Take Smart Notes)

Flow A good system stimulates insight that pushes us forward

“Oshin Vartanian compared and analysed the daily workflows of Nobel Prize winners and other eminent scientists and concluded that it is not a relentless focus, but flexible focus that distinguishes them. “Specifically, the problem-solving behavior of eminent scientists can alternate between extraordinary levels of focus on specific concepts and playful exploration of ideas. This suggests that successful problem solving may be a function of flexible strategy application in relation to task demands.” (Vartanian 2009, 57) These studies help to solve a puzzle that has bothered psychologists who study creative people as well. “On one hand, those with wandering, defocused, childlike minds seem to be the most creative; on the other, it seems to be analysis and application that’s important. The answer to this conundrum is that creative people need both … The key to creativity is being able to switch between a wide-open, playful mind and a narrow analytical frame.” (Dean, 2013, 152)” (Sönke Ahrens, How to Take Smart Notes)

Creative problem solving requires a mix of focused and diffuse thinking