How to Take Smart Notes

Highlights

• Writing is not what follows research, learning or studying, it is the medium of all this work.
• The right question is: What can we do differently in the weeks, months or even years before we face the blank page that will get us into the best possible position to write a great paper easily?
• Having a meaningful and well-defined task beats willpower every time. Not having willpower, but not having to use willpower indicates that you set yourself up for success.
• 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.
• 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).
• The best way to deal with complexity is to keep things as simple as possible and to follow a few basic principles. The simplicity of the structure allows complexity to build up where we want it: on the content level.
• 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.
• Instead of struggling with adverse dynamics, highly productive people deflect resistance, very much like judo champions.
• If you want to learn something for the long run, you have to write it down. If you want to really understand something, you have to translate it into your own words. Thinking takes place as much on paper as in your own head.
• 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.
• If writing is the medium of research and studying nothing else than research, then there is no reason not to work as if nothing else counts than writing.
• You quickly learn to distinguish good-sounding arguments from actual good ones, as you will have to think them through whenever you try to write them down and connect them with your previous knowledge.
• And by doing everything with the clear purpose of writing about it, you will do what you do deliberately.
• Deliberate practice is the only serious way of becoming better at what we are doing
• students sort their material by topic or even by seminars and semester. From the perspective of someone who writes, that makes as much sense as sorting your errands by purchase date and the store they were bought from. Can’t find your trousers? Maybe they are with the bleach you bought the same day at your department store.
• The slip-box is the shipping container of the academic world. Instead of having different storage for different ideas, everything goes into the same slip-box and is standardised into the same format. Instead of focusing on the in-between steps and trying to make a science out of underlining systems, reading techniques or excerpt writing, everything is streamlined towards one thing only: insight that can be published.
• The slip-box is designed to present you with ideas you have already forgotten, allowing your brain to focus on thinking instead of remembering.
• Fleeting notes are there for capturing ideas quickly while you are busy doing something else. When you are in a conversation, listening to a lecture, hear something noteworthy or an idea pops into your mind while you are running errands, a quick note is the best you can do without interrupting what you are in the middle of doing.
• 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.
• A good indication that a note has been left unprocessed too long is when you no longer understand what you meant or it appears banal. In the first case, you forgot what it was supposed to remind you of. In the second case, you forgot the context that gave it its meaning.
• As it is not possible to foresee the development of the slip-box, the fate of the notes is nothing to worry about.
• already existing preconception, which then can be transformed during further inquires and can serve as a starting point for following endeavours. Basically, that is what Hans-Georg Gadamer called the hermeneutic circle (Gadamer 2004).
• The seemingly pragmatic and down-to-earth-sounding advice – to decide what to write about before you start writing – is therefore either misleading or banal. It is banal if it means only that you should think before you put words on paper. It is misleading if it means that you could make a sound plan on what to write before you have immersed yourself in the topics at hand, which involves writing.
• If something comes too early and too late at the same time, it is not possible to fix it by rearranging the order as the fictional linearity is the problem in itself. Taking smart notes is the precondition to break with the linear order.
• Having trouble finding the right topic is a symptom of the wrong attempt to rely heavily on the limitations of the brain, not the inevitable problematic starting point, as most study guides insinuate.
• You may remember from school the difference between an exergonic and an endergonic reaction. In the first case, you constantly need to add energy to keep the process going. In the second case, the reaction, once triggered, continues by itself and even releases energy. The dynamics of work are not so different.
• 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.
• Ironically, it is therefore often the highly gifted and talented students, who receive a lot of praise, who are more in danger of developing a fixed mindset and getting stuck. Having been praised for what they are (talented and gifted) rather than for what they do, they tend to focus on keeping this impression intact, rather than exposing themselves to new challenges and the possibility of learning from failure.
• Embracing a growth mindset means to get pleasure out of changing for the better (which is mostly inwardly rewarding) instead of getting pleasure in being praised (which is outwardly rewarding).
• The ability to express understanding in one’s own words is a fundamental competency for everyone who writes – and only by doing it with the chance of realizing our lack of understanding can we become better at it.
• Yes, our ability to learn isolated facts is indeed limited and probably decreases with age. But if facts are not kept isolated nor learned in an isolated fashion, but hang together in a network of ideas, or “latticework of mental models” (Munger, 1994), it becomes easier to make sense of new information.
• The second is what psychologists call the mere-exposure effect: doing something many times makes us believe we have become good at it – completely independent of our actual performance (Bornstein 1989). We unfortunately tend to confuse familiarity with skill.
• Focused attention is different from “sustained attention,” which we need to stay focused on one task for a longer period and is necessary to learn, understand or get something done.
• The key to creativity is being able to switch between a wide-open, playful mind and a narrow analytical frame.”
• Experts rely on embodied experience, which enables them to reach the state of virtuosity.
• Teachers tend to mistake the ability to follow (their) rules with the ability to make the right choices in real situations.
• Experts, on the other hand, have internalised the necessary knowledge so they don’t have to actively remember rules or think consciously about their choices. They have acquired enough experience in various situations to be able to rely on their intuition to know what to do in which kind of situation. Their decisions in complex situations are explicitly not made by long rational-analytical considerations, but rather come from the gut
  • Tags: [[knowledge]] [[learning]]
• This is why it is so much easier to remember things we understand than things we don’t. It is not that we have to choose to focus either on learning or understanding. It is always about understanding – and if it is only for the sake of learning. Things we understand are connected, either through rules, theories, narratives, pure logic, mental models or explanations.
• 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.
• The secret to having 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 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.
• Conversely, we can use the Zeigarnik effect to our advantage by deliberately keeping unanswered questions in our minds. We can ruminate about them, even when we do something that has nothing to do with work and ideally does not require our full attention.
• Drawing from the slip-box to develop a draft is more like a dialogue than a mechanical act.
• Different independent studies indicate that writing by hand facilitates understanding.
• We want to make the right decisions without too much mental effort – very much like Odysseus, who made it impossible for himself to follow the luring singing of the Sirens by getting himself tied to the mast of his ship.
  • Note: Structure sets you free
• Confirmation bias is tackled here in two steps: First, by turning the whole writing process on its head, and secondly, by changing the incentives from finding confirming facts to an indiscriminate gathering of any relevant information regardless of what argument it will support.
• The linear process promoted by many study guides, which insanely starts with the decision on the hypothesis or the topic to write about, is a surefire way to let confirmation bias run rampant.
• The most important advantage of writing is that it helps us to confront ourselves when we do not understand something as well as we would like to believe.
• Rereading is especially dangerous because of the mere-exposure effect: The moment we become familiar with something, we start believing we also understand it. On top of that, we also tend to like it more
• 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.
• 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.
• No written piece is ever a copy of a thought in our mind.
• By explicitly writing down how something connects or leads to something else, we force ourselves to clarify and distinguish ideas from each other.
• 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).
• Robert and Elizabeth Ligon Bjork from the University of California suggest distinguishing between storage capacity and retrieval capacity (Bjork 2011). They speculate that while our ability to retrieve information is severely limited, the storage capacity, our brain’s ability to store memories, could be considered virtually unlimited.
• 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 enable circumventing the inhibition mechanism in the right moment. It is about making sure that the right “cues” trigger the right memory, about how we can think strategically to remember the most useful information when we need it.
• The challenge of writing as well as learning is therefore not so much to learn, but to understand, as we will already have learned what we understand.
• 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.
• That the slip-box is not sorted by topics is the precondition for actively building connections between notes. Connections can be made between heterogeneous notes – as long as the connection makes sense.
• As the slip-box is not a book with just one topic, we don’t need to have an overview of it. On the contrary, we are much better off accepting as early as possible that an overview of the slip-box is as impossible as having an overview of our own thinking while we are thinking.
• Most notes will be found through other notes. The organisation of the notes is in the network of references in the slip-box, so all we need from the index are entry points. A few wisely chosen notes are sufficient for each entry point.
• The slip-box is like a well-informed but down-to-earth communication partner who keeps us grounded. If we try to feed it some lofty ideas, it will force us to check first: What is the reference? How does that connect to the facts and the ideas you already have?
• If we forget about an idea and have it again, our brains get as excited as if we are having it the first time. Therefore, working with the slip-box is disillusioning, but at the same time it increases the chance that we actually move forward in our thinking towards uncharted territory, instead of just feeling like we are moving forward.
• Sometimes, the confrontation with old notes helps to detect differences we wouldn’t have noticed otherwise. What seems to be the same idea sometimes turns out to be slightly, but crucially, different.
• The more we know, the more information (hooks) we have to connect new information to, the easier we can form long-term memories.
• Experimental scientists regularly describe their decision-making process as being based on intuition (Rheinberger 1997), and there is no reason why it should be different in the social sciences.
• To be able to play with ideas, we first have to liberate them from their original context by means of abstraction and re-specification.
• Abstraction should indeed not be the final goal of thinking, but it is a necessary in-between step to make heterogeneous ideas compatible.
• A good rule of thumb for working digitally is: Each note should fit onto the screen and there should be no need of scrolling.
• The scientific revolution started with the standardization and controlling of experiments, which made them comparable and repeatable (cf.
• the more control we have to steer our work towards what we consider interesting and relevant, the less willpower we have to put into getting things done.
• How we structure a topic is how we think about a topic and therefore a thought in itself. It belongs in the slip-box as a note, becoming therefore something to be tested, questioned and discussed.
• The Zettelkasten is a dialogue partner you should have fun collaborating with.