How to Take Smart Notes
Sönke Ahrens

Introduction

And nobody needs willpower to do something they wanted to do anyway.

Every task that is interesting, meaningful and well-defined will be done, because there is no conflict between long- and short-term interests.

1 Everything You Need to Know

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.

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 (Csikszentmihalyi, 1975).

Having a clear structure to work in is completely different from making plans about something.

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.

Learning in a way that generates real insight, is accumulative and sparks new ideas.

All that means is that a system is needed to keep track of the everincreasing pool of information, which allows one to combine different ideas in an intelligent way with the aim of generating new ideas.

1.1 Good Solutions are Simple – and Unexpected

You will have to deal with an increasingly complex body of content, especially because it is not just about collecting thoughts, but about making connections and sparking new ideas.

The best way to deal with complexity is to keep things as simple as possible and to follow a few basic principles.

Make clear choices and regularly check if our tasks still fit into the bigger picture.

GTD relies on clearly defined objectives, whereas insight cannot be predetermined by definition.

GTD requires projects to be broken down into smaller, concrete “next steps.”

It is also difficult to anticipate which step has to be taken after the next one.

Writing is not a linear process. We constantly have to jump back and forth between different tasks.

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.

1.2 The Slip-box

Instead of adding notes to existing categories or the respective texts, Niklas Luhmann wrote them all on small pieces of paper, put a number in the corner and collected them in one place: the slip-box.

Studies on highly successful people 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).

Why is not everybody using a slip-box and working effortlessly towards success?

1. The main misunderstanding stems from an isolated focus on the slip-box and a neglect of the actual workflow in which it is embedded.
2. 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.
3. The third and maybe the most important reason is the very fact that it is simple.

The contemporaries of Henry Ford did not understand why something as simple as the conveyor belt should be that revolutionary.

1.3 The slip-box manual

Strictly speaking, Luhmann had two slip-boxes:
a bibliographical one, which contained the references and brief notes on the content of the literature,
and the main one in which he collected and generated his ideas, mainly in response to what he read.
The notes were written on index cards and stored in wooden boxes.

The trick is that he did not organise his notes by topic, but in the rather abstract way of giving them fixed numbers.

Whenever he added a note, he checked his slip-box for other relevant notes to make possible connections between them.

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.

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

2 Everything You Need to Do

Each step is clearly not only within your abilities, but also straightforward and well defined: Assemble notes and bring them into order, turn these notes into a draft, review it and you are done.

2.1 Writing a paper step by step

1. Make fleeting notes. Always have something at hand to write with to capture every idea that pops into your mind.
2. Make literature notes. Whenever you read something, make notes about the content.
3. Make permanent notes. 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.
4. Add your new permanent notes to the slip-box, add links to related notes.
5. Develop your topics, questions and research projects bottom up from within the system.
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 you have, not based on an unfounded idea about what the literature you are about to read might provide.
7. Turn your notes into a rough draft.
8. Edit and proofread your manuscript.

3 Everything You Need to Have

The slip-box follows the Russian model: Focus on the essentials, don’t complicate things unnecessarily.

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.

3.1 The Tool Box

We need four tools:

1. Something to write with and something to write on. Make sure everything ends up in one place, a central inbox or something like that, where you can process it soon, ideally within a day.
2. A reference management system. ISBN/DOI
3. The slip-box
4. An editor

4 A Few Things to Keep in Mind

The slip-box, for example, would most likely be used as an archive for notes – or worse: a graveyard for thoughts (cf. Hollier 2005, 40 on Mallarmé’s index cards).

And this is what this book is for: To give you all the resources you need to work in the best possible way with the best technique available.

The Four Underlying Principles

5 Writing Is the Only Thing That Matters

6 Simplicity Is Paramount

The biggest advantage compared to a top-down storage system organised by topics is that the slip-box becomes more and more valuable the more it grows, instead of getting messy and confusing.

The slip-box is designed to present you with ideas you have already forgotten, allowing your brain to focus on thinking instead of remembering.

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.

Fleeting notes are there for capturing ideas quickly while you are busy doing something else.

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.

Project-related notes can be:
· comments in the manuscript
· collections of project-related literature
· outlines
· snippets of drafts
· reminders
· to-do lists
· and of course the draft itself.

7 Nobody Ever Starts From Scratch

We will not be guided by a blindly made-up plan picked from our unreliable brains, but by our interest, curiosity and intuition, which is formed and informed by the actual work of reading, thinking, discussing, writing and developing ideas – and is something that continuously grows and reflects our knowledge and understanding externally.

The problem of finding a topic is replaced by the problem of having too many topics to write about.

8 Let the Work Carry You Forward

Nothing motivates us more than the experience of becoming better at what we do.

We tend to think we understand what we read – until we try to rewrite it in our own words.

Expressing our own thoughts in writing makes us realise if we really thought them through.

The Six Steps to Successful Writing

9 Separate and Interlocking Tasks

9.1 Give Each Task Your Undivided Attention

The constant interruption of emails and text messages cuts our productivity by about 40% and makes us at least 10 IQ points dumber.

9.2 Multitasking is not a good idea

Writing a paper involves much more than just typing on the keyboard. It also means reading, understanding, reflecting, getting ideas, making connections, distinguishing terms, finding the right words, structuring, organizing, editing, correcting and rewriting.

flow: the state in which being highly focused becomes effortless (Csikszentmihalyi, 1975).

9.3 Give Each Task the Right Kind of Attention

The key to creativity is being able to switch between a wide-open, playful mind and a narrow analytical frame. (Dean, 2013, 152)

9.4 Become an Expert Instead of a Planner

Experts rely on embodied experience, which enables them to reach the state of virtuosity.

Dreyfuses five-grade expert scale

9.5 Get Closure

Attention is not our only limited resource. Our short-term memory is also limited.

We can hold a maximum of seven things in our head at the same time, plus/minus two (Miller 1956).

But what we actually do when we use memo techniques is to bundle items together in a meaningful way and remember the bundles – up to about seven (Levin and Levin, 1990).

The maximum capacity of our working memory is not seven plus/minus two, but more like a maximum of four (Cowan 2001).

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

Every step is accompanied by questions like:
How does this fact fit into my idea of …?
How can this phenomenon be explained by that theory?
Are these two ideas contradictory or do they complement each other?
Isn’t this argument similar to that one?
Haven’t I heard this before?
And above all: What does x mean for y?

the Zeigarnik effect: Open tasks tend to occupy our short-term memory – until they are done.

9.6 Reduce the Number of Decisions

Next to the attention that can only be directed at one thing at a time and the short-term memory that can only hold up to seven things at once, the third limited resource is motivation or willpower.

Today, willpower is compared to muscles: a limited resource that depletes quickly and needs time to recover.

Acts of selfcontrol, responsible decision making, and active choice seem to interfere with other such acts that follow soon after.(Baumeister et al., 1998, 1263f)

10 Read for Understanding

10.1 Read With a Pen in Hand

After finishing the book I go through my notes and think how these notes might be relevant for already written notes in the slip-box.

Because students can’t write fast enough to keep up with everything that is said in a lecture, they are forced to focus on the gist of what is being said, not the details. But to be able to note down the gist of a lecture, you have to understand it in the first place.

10.2 Keep an Open Mind

Charles Darwin forced himself to write down (and therefore elaborate on) the arguments that were the most critical of his theories.

Developing arguments and ideas bottom-up instead of top-down is the first and most important step to opening ourselves up for insight.

The experience of how one piece of information can change the whole perspective on a certain problem is exciting.

The slip-box is pretty agnostic about the content it is fed. It just prefers relevant notes. It is after reading and collecting relevant data, connecting thoughts and discussing how they fit together that it is time to draw conclusions and develop a linear structure for the argument.

10.3 Get the Gist

The ability to distinguish relevant from less relevant information is another skill that can only be learned by doing. It is the practice of looking for the gist and distinguishing it from mere supporting details.

10.4 Learn to Read

“If you can’t say it clearly, you don’t understand it yourself.” (John Searle)

We have to choose between feeling smarter or becoming smarter.

10.5 Learn by Reading

Learning requires effort, because we have to think to understand and we need to actively retrieve old knowledge to convince our brains to connect it with new ideas as cues.

If learning is your goal, cramming is an irrational act. (Doyle and Zakrajsek 2013).

Elaboration means nothing other than really thinking about the meaning of what we read, how it could inform different questions and topics and how it could be combined with other knowledge.

The slip-box takes care of storing facts and information. Thinking and understanding is what it can’t take off your shoulders, which is why it makes sense to focus on this part of the work.

There is a clear division of labour between the brain and the slip-box: The slip-box takes care of details and references and is a long-term memory resource that keeps information objectively unaltered. That allows the brain to focus on the gist, the deeper understanding and the bigger picture, and frees it up to be creative.

11 Take Smart Notes

We think about what they mean for other lines of thoughts, then we write this explicitly on paper and connect them literally with the other notes.

11.1 Make a Career One Note at a Time

More notes mean more possible connections, more ideas, more synergy between different projects and therefore a much higher degree of productivity.

11.2 Think Outside the Brain

Only in the written form can an argument be looked at with a certain distance – literally.

11.3 Learn by not Trying

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.

cramming: the attempt to reinforce and solidify information in the brain by repetition.

What does help for true, useful learning is to connect a piece of information to as many meaningful contexts as possible, which is what we do when we connect our notes in the slipbox with other notes.

The first step of elaboration is to think enough about a piece of information so we are able to write about it. The second step is to think about what it means for other contexts as well.

Learned right, which means understanding, which means connecting in a meaningful way to previous knowledge, information almost cannot be forgotten anymore and will be reliably retrieved if triggered by the right cues.

11.4 Adding Permanent Notes to the Slip-Box

1. Each note can follow multiple other notes and therefore be part of different note sequences.
2. Add links to other notes or links on other notes to your new note.
3. Make sure it can be found from the index; add an entry in the index if necessary or refer to it from a note that is connected to the index.
4. Build a Latticework of Mental Models

12 Develop Ideas

By alternating numbers and letters, Luhmann was able to branch out into an infinite number of sequences and sub-sequences internally with no hierarchical order.

Because the slip-box is not intended to be an encyclopaedia, but a tool to think with, we don’t need to worry about completeness.

As an extension of our own memory, the slip-box is the medium we think in, not something we think about. The note sequences are the clusters where order emerges from complexity.

12.1 Develop Topics

After adding a note to the slip-box, we need to make sure it can be found again. This is what the index is for.

Do they wonder where to store a note or how to retrieve it?
The archivist asks: Which keyword is the most fitting?
A writer asks: In which circumstances will I want to stumble upon this note, even if I forget about it?

Keywords should always be assigned with an eye towards the topics you are working on or interested in, never by looking at the note in isolation.
This is also why this process cannot be automated or delegated to a machine or program – it requires thinking.

12.2 Make Smart Connections

Luhmann used four basic types of cross-references in his file-box (Schmidt 2013, 173f; Schmidt 2015, 165f).

1. The first type of links are those on notes that are giving you the overview of a topic.
2. A similar though less crucial kind of link collection is on those notes that give an overview of a local, physical cluster of the slip-box.
3. The current note is a follow-up and those links that indicate the note that follows on the current note.
4. The most common form of reference is plain note-to-note links.

The search for meaningful connections is a crucial part of the thinking process towards the finished manuscript.

Our ideas will be rooted in a network of facts, thought-through ideas and verifiable references.

12.3 Compare, Correct and Differentiate

The addition of one note leads to a correction, a complementation or an improvement of old ideas.

12.4 Assemble a Toolbox for Thinking

The beauty of this approach is that we co-evolve with our slip-boxes: we build the same connections in our heads while we deliberately develop them in our slip-box – and make it easier to remember the facts as they now have a latticework we can attach them to.

12.5 Use the Slip-Box as a Creativity Machine

Even sudden breakthroughs are usually preceded by a long, intense process of preparation.

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

You can spread out multiple notes on a desk instead of just seeing them on a computer screen.

12.6 Think Inside the Box

Abstraction should indeed not be the final goal of thinking, but it is a necessary in-between step to make heterogeneous ideas compatible.

Abstraction is also the key to analyse and compare concepts, to make analogies and to combine ideas.

We don’t see lines on a paper first, then realise that these are words, then use them to build sentences and finally decipher the meaning. We immediately read on the level of meaningful understanding.

Problems rarely get solved directly, anyway. Most often, the crucial step forward is to redefine the problem in such a way that an already existing solution can be employed.

Sometimes the breakthrough in a scientific process is the discovery of a simple principle behind a seemingly very complicated process.

12.7 Facilitate Creativity through Restrictions

By restricting ourselves to one format, we also restrict ourselves to just one idea per note and force ourselves to be as precise and brief as possible.

Literature is condensed on a note saying, “On page x, it says y,”

13 Share Your Insight

The perspective changes another time: Now, it is not about understanding something in the context of another author’s argument, and it is also not about looking for multiple connections in the slip-box, but about developing one argument and bringing it into the linearity of a manuscript.

13.1 From Brainstorming to Slip-box-Storming

Brainstorming still has a modern sound to it, even though it was described in 1919 by Alex Osborn and introduced to a broader audience in 1958 in the book“Brainstorming: The Dynamic New Way to Create Successful Ideas” from Charles Hutchison Clark.

The brain more easily remembers information that it encountered recently, which has emotions attached to it and is lively, concrete or specific. Ideally, it rhymes as well (cf. Schacter, 2001; Schacter, Chiao and Mitchell, 2003).

We have to work, write, connect, differentiate, complement and elaborate on questions – but this is what we do when we take smart notes.

13.2 From Top Down to Bottom Up

13.3 Getting Things Done by Following Your Interests

13.4 Finishing and Review

Structure the text and keep it flexible.

Try working on different manuscripts at the same time.

13.5 Becoming an Expert by Giving up Planning

13.6 The Actual Writing

14 Make It a Habit

Afterword

The slip-box is as simple as it gets. Read with a pen in your hand, take smart notes and make connections between them. Ideas will come by themselves and your writing will develop from there.

http://takesmartnotes.com

Bibliography

Index