How to Take Smart Notes: One Simple Technique to Boost Writing, Learning and Thinking – For Students, Academics and Nonfiction Book Writers §

Metadata §

• Author: Ahrens, Sönke
• Full Title: How to Take Smart Notes: One Simple Technique to Boost Writing, Learning and Thinking – For Students, Academics and Nonfiction Book Writers
• Category:#books
• Summary: The book “How to Take Smart Notes” by Sönke Ahrens emphasizes the importance of effective note-taking for improving writing, learning, and thinking. By using a slip-box system, individuals can organize their ideas and connect them, enhancing their understanding and creativity. This method promotes active engagement with material and transforms notes into a valuable resource for future writing.

Highlights §

• This book aims to fill this gap by showing you how to efficiently turn your thoughts and discoveries into convincing written pieces and build up a treasure of smart and interconnected notes along the way. You can use this pool of notes not only to make writing easier and more fun for yourself, but also to learn for the long run and generate new ideas. But most of all, you can write every day in a way that brings your projects forward. (View Highlight)

• By breaking down the amorphous task of “writing a paper” into small and clearly separated tasks, you can focus on one thing at a time, complete each in one go and move on to the next one (View Highlight)

• There are few serious knowledge workers left who haven’t heard of “GTD” and that is for a good reason: It works. The principle of GTD is to collect everything that needs to be taken care of in one place and process it in a standardised way. This doesn’t necessarily mean that we actually do everything we once intended to do, but it forces us to make clear choices and regularly check if our tasks still fit into the bigger picture. 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” - the state where we can focus on the work right in front of us without getting distracted by competing thoughts. The principle is simple but holistic. It is not a quick fix or a fancy tool. It doesn’t do the work for you. But it does provide a structure for our everyday work that deals with the fact that most distractions do not come so much from our environment, but our own minds. (View Highlight)

• And this is the other insight of David Allen: Only if you can trust your system, only if you really know that everything will be taken care of, will your brain let go and let you focus on the task at hand. (View Highlight)

• There are more than a few colleagues I know who would give a lot to be as productive in their whole lifetime as Luhmann was after his death. (View Highlight)

• Even hard work can be fun as long as it is aligned with our intrinsic goals and we feel in control. (View Highlight)

  • Note: Логично. Если ты любишь своё дело, то сложные задачи для тебя даже интереснее.

• Luhmann was able to focus on the important things right in front of him, pick up quickly where he left off and stay in control of the process because the structure of his work allowed him to do this. (View Highlight)

  • Note: Для этого нужно: иметь чёткие списки задач по GTD, чтобы не занимать голову ими; разбивать текущую задачу на небольшие подзадачи; фиксировать, что на данный момент выполнено, какой следующий шаг; готовить справочные материалы до начала непосредственной работы, чтобы не тратить на это время.

• Intuitively, most people do not expect much from simple ideas. They rather assume that impressive results must have equally impressively complicated means. (View Highlight)

  • Note: Перекликается с идеей из Atomic Habits. Небольшие, но регулярные и целенаправленные действия могут приводит к значительным результатам.

• We need a reliable and simple external structure to think in that compensates for the limitations of our brains. (View Highlight)

• 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. (View Highlight)

• 2.Make literature notes. Whenever you read something, make notes about the content. 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. (View Highlight)

  • Note: Идея о заметках и их краткости перекликается с BASB.

• Write exactly one note for each idea and write as if you were writing for someone else: Use full sentences, disclose your sources, make references and try to be as precise, clear and brief as possible. (View Highlight)

• 1.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. (View Highlight)

• 3.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. (View Highlight)

New highlights added January 7, 2025 at 9:31 AM §

• 4.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 decidewhere 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. (View Highlight)

  • Note: Установить связи между заметками, добавить темы.

• 5.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 and strengthen your arguments and 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. (View Highlight)

  • Note: Прорабатывать темы, задавать вопросы, делать новые заметки и дорабатывать существующие.

• 6.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 youhave, 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 (View Highlight)

• As the only way to find out if something is worth reading is by reading it (even just bits of it), it makes sense to use the time spent in the best possible way. We constantly encounter interesting ideas along the way and only a fraction of them are useful for the particular paper we started reading it for. Why let them go to waste? (View Highlight)

  • Note: Интересные идеи, найденные или появившиеся во время чтения, нужно фиксировать - независимо от того, нужны ли они для текущей работы.

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📂 Reading | Последнее изменение: 07.01.2025 09:31