# How to Take Smart Notes  Author:: Sönke Ahrens ## AI-Generated Summary None ## Highlights > They seem to forget that the process of writing starts much, much earlier than that blank screen and that the actual writing down of the argument is the smallest part of its development. ([Location 68](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B09V5M8FR5&location=68)) > there is no measurable correlation between a high IQ and academic success – at least not north of 120. ([Location 101](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B09V5M8FR5&location=101)) > digital). It is not about redoing what you have done before, but about changing the way of working from now on. There is really no need to reorganise anything you already have. ([Location 182](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B09V5M8FR5&location=182)) > His slip-box became his dialogue partner, main idea generator and productivity engine. ([Location 240](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B09V5M8FR5&location=240)) > When he was asked if he missed anything in his life, he famously answered: “If I want something, it’s more time. The only thing that really is a nuisance is the lack of time.” (Luhmann, Baecker, and Stanitzek, 1987, 139) ([Location 264](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B09V5M8FR5&location=264)) > 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. ([Location 319](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B09V5M8FR5&location=319)) > And while the notes on the literature were brief, he wrote them with great care, not much different from his style in the final manuscript: in full sentences and with explicit references to the literature from which he drew his material. ([Location 327](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B09V5M8FR5&location=327)) > By adding these links between notes, Luhmann was able to add the same note to different contexts. While other systems start with a preconceived order of topics, Luhmann developed topics bottom up. He would then add another note to his slip-box, on which he would sort a topic by sorting the links of the relevant other notes. ([Location 346](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B09V5M8FR5&location=346)) > 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. Notes with a sorted collection of links are, of course, good entry points. ([Location 348](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B09V5M8FR5&location=348)) > 1. Make fleeting notes. Always have something at hand to write with to capture every idea that pops into your mind. ([Location 400](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B09V5M8FR5&location=400)) > 2. Make literature notes. Whenever you read something, make notes about the content. ([Location 405](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B09V5M8FR5&location=405)) > 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. ([Location 409](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B09V5M8FR5&location=409)) > 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. Throw away the fleeting notes from step one and put the literature notes from step two into your reference system. You can forget about them now. All that matters is going into the slip-box. ([Location 414](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B09V5M8FR5&location=414)) > 4. Now add your new permanent notes to the slip-box by: a) Filing each one behind one or more related notes ([Location 417](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B09V5M8FR5&location=417)) > b) Adding links to related notes. ([Location 421](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B09V5M8FR5&location=421)) > 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. ([Location 422](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B09V5M8FR5&location=422)) > 5. Develop your topics, questions and research projects bottom up from within the system. ([Location 424](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B09V5M8FR5&location=424)) > Do not brainstorm for a topic. Look into the slip-box instead to see where chains of notes have developed and ideas have been built up to clusters. ([Location 428](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B09V5M8FR5&location=428)) > 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. Look through the connections and collect all the relevant notes on this topic (most of the relevant notes will already be in partial order), copy them into an outliner5 and bring them in order. ([Location 432](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B09V5M8FR5&location=432)) > 7. Turn your notes into a rough draft. ([Location 438](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B09V5M8FR5&location=438)) > 8. Edit and proofread your manuscript. ([Location 440](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B09V5M8FR5&location=440)) > We need four tools: • Something to write with and something to write on (pen and paper will do) • A reference management system (Zotero, Citavi or whatever works best for you) • The slip-box (paper or digital). • An editor (Word, LaTeX, Google Docs or whatever works best for you). ([Location 489](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B09V5M8FR5&location=489)) > As he treats every note as if it belongs to the “permanent” category, the notes will never build up to a critical mass. The collection of good ideas is diluted to insignificance by all the other notes, ([Location 673](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B09V5M8FR5&location=673)) > Just collecting unprocessed fleeting notes inevitably leads to chaos. ([Location 686](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B09V5M8FR5&location=686)) > Feedback loops are not only crucial for the dynamics of motivation, but also the key element to any learning process. Nothing motivates us more than the experience of becoming better at what we do. And the only chance to improve in something is getting timely and concrete feedback. ([Location 831](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B09V5M8FR5&location=831)) > 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. Here, too, the environmental design of our workflow makes all the difference. ([Location 1109](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B09V5M8FR5&location=1109)) > How extensive the literature notes should be really depends on the text and what we need it for. ([Location 1176](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B09V5M8FR5&location=1176)) > Whenever we explore a new, unfamiliar subject, our notes will tend to be more extensive, but we shouldn’t get nervous about it, as this is the deliberate practice of understanding we cannot skip. ([Location 1182](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B09V5M8FR5&location=1182)) > You need to take some form of literature note that captures your understanding of the text, so you have something in front of your eyes while you are making the slip-box note. But don’t turn it into a project in itself. Literature notes are short and meant to help with writing slip-box notes. Everything else either helps to get to this point or is a distraction. ([Location 1199](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B09V5M8FR5&location=1199)) > Handwriting is slower and can’t be corrected as quickly as electronic notes. 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. So if you are writing by hand, you are forced to think about what you hear (or read) – otherwise you wouldn’t be able to grasp the underlying principle, the idea, the structure of an argument. Handwriting makes pure copying impossible, but instead facilitates the translation of what is said (or written) into one’s own words. The students who typed into their laptops were much quicker, which enabled them to copy the lecture more closely, but circumvented actual understanding. They focused on completeness. ([Location 1208](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B09V5M8FR5&location=1208)) > As the psychologist Raymond Nickerson puts it: “If one were to attempt to identify a single problematic aspect of human reasoning that deserves attention above all others, the confirmation bias would have to be among the candidates for consideration” (Nickerson 1998, 175). ([Location 1230](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B09V5M8FR5&location=1230)) > “If you can’t say it clearly, you don’t understand it yourself.” –John Searle ([Location 1317](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B09V5M8FR5&location=1317)) > the best-researched and most successful learning method is elaboration. It is very similar to what we do when we take smart notes and combine them with others, which is the opposite of mere re-viewing (Stein et al. 1984) 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. ([Location 1388](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B09V5M8FR5&location=1388)) > Working with the slip-box, therefore, doesn’t mean storing information in there instead of in your head, i.e. not learning. On the contrary, it facilitates real, long-term learning. It just means not cramming isolated facts into your brain – something you probably wouldn’t want to do anyway. The objection that it takes too much time to take notes and sort them into the slip-box is therefore short-sighted. Writing, taking notes and thinking about how ideas connect is exactly the kind of elaboration that is needed to learn. Not learning from what we read because we don’t take the time to elaborate on it is the real waste of time. ([Location 1397](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B09V5M8FR5&location=1397)) > you. On the other hand, most people feel that writing a page a day (and having a day a week off) is quite manageable, not realising that this would mean finishing a doctoral thesis within a year – something that does not happen very often in reality. ([Location 1425](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B09V5M8FR5&location=1425)) > Luhmann’s slip-box contains about 90,000 notes, which sounds like an incredibly large number. But it only means that he wrote six notes a day from the day he started to work with his slip-box until he died. ([Location 1448](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B09V5M8FR5&location=1448)) > Forgetting, then, would not be the loss of a memory, but the erection of a mental barrier between the conscious mind and our long-term memory. Psychologists call this mechanism active inhibition (cf. MacLeod, 2007). ([Location 1560](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B09V5M8FR5&location=1560)) > 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. Luhmann wrote an index with a typewriter on index cards. In a digital system, keywords can easily be added to a note like tags and will then show up in the index. They should be chosen carefully and sparsely. ([Location 1690](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B09V5M8FR5&location=1690)) > Because it should not be used as an archive, where we just take out what we put in, but as a system to think with, the references between the notes are much more important than the references from the index to a single note. ([Location 1694](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B09V5M8FR5&location=1694)) > 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? It is a crucial difference. ([Location 1712](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B09V5M8FR5&location=1712)) > Good keywords are usually not already mentioned as words in the note. ([Location 1738](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B09V5M8FR5&location=1738)) > Luhmann used four basic types of cross-references (Schmidt 2013, 173f; Schmidt 2015, 165f). Only the first and last are relevant for digital versions of the slip-box; the other two are merely compensating for restrictions of the analogue pen and paper version. ([Location 1745](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B09V5M8FR5&location=1745)) > 1. The first type of links are those on notes that are giving you the overview of a topic. These are notes directly referred to from the index and usually used as an entry point into a topic that has already developed to such a degree that an overview is needed or at least becomes helpful. On a note like this, you can collect links to other relevant notes to this topic or question, preferably with a short indication of what to find on these notes (one or two words or a short sentence is sufficient). This kind of note helps to structure thoughts and can be seen as an in-between step towards the development of a manuscript. ([Location 1748](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B09V5M8FR5&location=1748)) Note: MoCs > You will know when you need to write one. Luhmann collected up to 25 links to other notes on these kind of entry notes. ([Location 1752](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B09V5M8FR5&location=1752)) > 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. ([Location 1759](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B09V5M8FR5&location=1759)) > It is important to always keep in mind that making these links is not a chore, a kind of file-box maintenance. The search for meaningful connections is a crucial part of the thinking process towards the finished manuscript. ([Location 1778](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B09V5M8FR5&location=1778))