How to Take Smart Notes

zettelkasten strategy

Knowledge Management Strategies

How to Take Smart Notes: A Step-by-Step Guide by Nat Eliason

Video With Author of How to Take Smart Notes - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nPOI4f7yCag

Elaboration is exploring the information you're studying. What does it mean? How does it connect? What does it mean in the context of your argument or exploration?

what makes sense is to review the material, then set it aside and attempt to give an account of what you thought you already learned. "Teach it". This will show you the gaps in your understanding. Also known as 'self-testing'.

Writing plays such a central role in learning, studying and research that it is surprising how little we think about it. (Location 93)

Consequently, these “written pieces” are also what most self-help books for academics or study guides focus on, but very few give guidance for the everyday note-taking that takes up the biggest chunk of our writing. (Location 96)

Writing is not what follows research, learning or studying, it is the medium of all this work. (Location 108)

Like breathing, it is vital to what we do, but because we do it constantly, it escapes our attention. (Location 109)

how we take notes of what we encounter and what we do with them, will make all the difference for the moment we do face the blank page/screen – or rather not, as those who take smart notes will never have the problem (Location 111)

a blank screen again. (Location 113)

without an immediate experience of failure, there is also not much demand for help. (Location 114)

If we take notes unsystematically, inefficiently or simply wrong, we might not even realize it until we are in the midst of a deadline panic and wonder why there always seem to be a few who get a lot of good writing done and still have time for a coffee every time we ask them. (Location 117)

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? (Location 123)

They struggle because they believe, as they are made to believe, that writing starts with a blank page. If you believe that you have indeed nothing at hand to fill it, you have a very good reason to panic. (Location 127)

That is why good, productive writing is based on good note-taking. (Location 129)

Getting something that is already written into another written piece is incomparably easier than assembling everything in your mind and then trying to retrieve it from there. (Location 130)

the key to successful writing lies in the preparation, (Location 133)

that the single most important indicator of academic success is not to be found in people’s heads, (Location 136)

but in the way they do their everyday work. (Location 136)

What does make a significant difference along the whole intelligence spectrum is something else: how much self-discipline or self-control one uses to approach the tasks at hand (Duckworth and Seligman, 2005; Tangney, Baumeister, and Boone, 2004). (Location 139)

is not so important who you are, but what you do. Doing the work required and doing it in a smart way leads, somehow unsurprisingly, to success. (Location 142)

The bad news is that we do not have this kind of control over ourselves. Self-discipline or self-control is not that easy to achieve with willpower alone. Willpower is, as far as we know today,2

We know today that self-control and self-discipline have much more to do with our environment than with ourselves (cf. Thaler, 2015, ch. 2) – (Location 149)

and the environment can be changed. (Location 150)

Nobody needs willpower not to eat a chocolate bar when there isn’t one around. And nobody needs willpower to do something they wanted to do anyway. (Location 150)

Having a meaningful and well-defined task beats willpower every time. (Location 152)

Whenever I am stuck, I do something else.” A good structure allows you to do that, to move seamlessly from one task to another (Location 161)

A good structure is something you can trust. (Location 163)

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. - Smart Notes

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

Having a clear structure to work in is completely different from making plans about something. (Location 173)

This is not only demotivating, but also unsuitable for an open-ended process like research, thinking or studying in general, where we have to adjust our next steps with every new insight, understanding or achievement (Location 175)

How do you plan for insight, which, by definition, cannot be anticipated? (Location 178)

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. We do not want to make ourselves dependent on a plan that is threatened by the unexpected, like a new idea, discovery – or insight. (Location 179)

if you are a student seeking help with your writing, the chances are that you already aim high too, because it is usually the best students who struggle the most. (Location 187)

Good students wrestle with their sentences because they care about finding the right expression. (Location 188)

they have to juggle more information. (Location 191)

Having read more does not automatically mean having more ideas. (Location 191)

it means having fewer ideas to work with, because you know that others have already thought of most of them. (Location 191)

Good students also look beyond the obvious. (Location 193)

They peek over the fences of their own disciplines (Location 193)

even if you now must deal with heterogeneous ideas that come without a manual on how they might fit together. (Location 194)

a system is needed to keep track of the ever-increasing pool of information, (Location 195)

which allows one to combine different ideas in an intelligent way with the aim of generating new ideas. (Location 195)

This is why high achievers who have had a taste of the vast amount of knowledge out there are likely to suffer from what psychologists call imposter syndrome, the feeling that you are not really up to the job, even though, of all people, they are (Location 206)

Complexity is an issue, though. Even if you don’t aim to develop a grand theory and just want to keep track of what you read, organise your notes and develop your thoughts, you will have to deal with an increasingly complex body of content, (Location 214)

especially because it is not just about collecting thoughts, but about making connections and sparking new ideas. (Location 216)

They sort their notes by topics and sub-topics, which makes it look less complex, but quickly becomes very complicated. Plus, it reduces the likelihood of building and finding surprising connections between the notes themselves, which means a trade-off between its usability and usefulness. (Location 218)

The best way to deal with complexity is to keep things as simple as possible and to follow a few basic principles. (Location 221)

The simplicity of the structure allows complexity to build up where we want it: on the content level. (Location 221)

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. Just deal with things differently the moment you have to deal with them anyway. (Location 226)

We only need to combine two well-known and proven ideas. (Location 228)

Even the best tool will not improve your productivity considerably if you don’t change your daily routines the tool is embedded in, just as the fastest car won’t help you much if you don’t have proper roads to drive it on. (Location 233)

a change in working habits means going through a phase where you are drawn back to your old ways. The new way of working might feel artificial at first and not necessarily like what you intuitively would do. (Location 235)

Only when all the related work becomes part of an overarching and interlocked process, where all bottlenecks are removed, can significant change take place (Location 238)

(which is why none of the typical “10 mind-blowing tools to improve your productivity” tips you can find all over the internet will ever be of much help). (Location 239)

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. (Location 243)

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. (Location 245)

focus on the work right in front of us without getting distracted by competing thoughts. (Location 247)

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. (Location 248)

cannot simply be transferred to the task of insightful writing. (Location 250)

We usually start with rather vague ideas that are bound to change until they become clearer in the course of our research (Location 251)

Writing that aims at insight must therefore be organised in a much more open manner. (Location 252)

Writing is not a linear process. We constantly have to jump back and forth between different tasks. (Location 258)

It wouldn’t make any sense to micromanage ourselves on that level. Zooming out to the bigger picture does not really help, either, because then we have next steps like “writing a page.” (Location 259)

One has to navigate mostly by sight. (Location 261)

What we can take from Allen as an important insight is that the secret to a successful organization lies in the holistic perspective. Everything needs to be taken care of, otherwise the neglected bits will nag us until the unimportant tasks become urgent. (Location 263)

Only if they are embedded in a well-conceived working process can the tools play out their strengths. (Location 265)

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. (Location 269)

reading and following his diverse interests in philosophy, organizational theory and sociology. (Location 278)

Luhmann realised his note-taking was not leading anywhere. So he turned note-taking on its head. (Location 282)

Instead of adding notes to existing categories or the respective texts, he wrote them all on small pieces of paper, put a number in the corner and collected them in one place: the slip-box. (Location 283)

He realised that one idea, one note was only as valuable as its context, which was not necessarily the context it was taken from. (Location 285)

how one idea could relate and contribute to different contexts. (Location 286)

Just amassing notes in one place would not lead to anything other than a mass of notes. (Location 287)

the collection became much more than the sum of its parts. His slip-box became his dialogue partner, main idea generator and productivity engine. (Location 288)

he put some of these thoughts together into a manuscript and handed it over to Helmut Schelsky, one of the most influential sociologists in Germany. (Location 290)

suggested that he should become a professor of sociology (Location 292)

He turned to his slip-box and with its help he put together a doctoral thesis and the habilitation thesis in less than a year – while taking classes in sociology. (Location 297)

The chapters were published individually, each book discussing one social system. (Location 307)

He constantly generated more ideas than he was able to write down. His texts read as if he is trying to squeeze as much insight and as many ideas as possible into one publication. (Location 313)

Five warm meals a week of course do not explain the production of roughly 60 influential books and countless articles. (Location 320)

Luhmann’s workflow, (Location 321)

“I, of course, do not think everything by myself. It happens mainly within the slip-box” (Location 324)

But few gave the slip-box and the way he worked with it a closer look, dismissing his explanation as the modest understatement of a genius. (Location 325)

He not only stressed that he never forced himself to do something he didn’t feel like, he even said: “I only do what is easy. I only write when I immediately know how to do it. If I falter for a moment, I put the matter aside and do something else.” (Location 328)

great outcome requires great effort that we tend not to believe that a simple change in our work routines could not only make us more productive, (Location 332)

Even hard work can be fun as long as it is aligned with our intrinsic goals and we feel in control. (Location 335)

The problems arise when we set up our work in such an inflexible way that we can’t adjust it when things change and become arrested in a process that seems to develop a life of its own. (Location 335)

The best way to maintain the feeling of being in control is to stay in control. And to stay in control, it's better to keep your options open during the writing process rather than limit yourself to your first idea. (Location 337)

stay in control of the process because the structure of his work allowed him to do this. (Location 343)

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). (Location 345)

Instead of struggling with adverse dynamics, highly productive people deflect resistance, very much like judo champions. This is not just about having the right mindset, it is also about having the right workflow. (Location 347)

So why is not everybody using a slip-box and working effortlessly towards success? (Location 355)

some crucial misunderstandings prevailed about how Luhmann actually worked, which led to disappointing results for many who tried to emulate the system. (Location 358)

neglect of the actual workflow in which it is embedded. (Location 360)

Intuitively, most people do not expect much from simple ideas. They rather assume that impressive results must have equally impressively complicated means. (Location 366)

Luhmann had two slip-boxes: (Location 377)

bibliographical one, which contained the references and brief notes on the content of the literature, (Location 378)

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. (Location 378)

Whenever he read something, he would write the bibliographic information on one side of a card and make brief notes about the content on the other side (Schmidt 2013, 170). These notes would end up in the bibliographic slip-box. (Location 380)

he would look at his brief notes and think about their relevance for his own thinking and writing. He then would turn to the main slip-box and write his ideas, comments and thoughts on new pieces of paper, using only one for each idea and restricting himself to one side of the paper, to make it easier to read them later without having to take them out of the box. (Location 382)

but made a transition from one context to another. It was very much like a translation where you use different words that fit a different context, but strive to keep the original meaning as truthfully as possible. (Location 392)

can be a much more adequate description of this chapter’s content than any quote from the text itself (Location 394)

The trick is that he did not organise his notes by topic, but in the rather abstract way of giving them fixed numbers. (Location 396)

The numbers bore no meaning (Location 396)

he added it directly behind the previous note. If the existing note had the number 22, the new note would become note number 23. If 23 already existed, he named the new note 22a. By alternating numbers and letters, with some slashes and commas in between, (Location 398)

By adding these links between notes, Luhmann was able to add the same note to different contexts. (Location 406)

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 409)

And the best way to understand this is to understand a little bit about the way we think, learn and develop ideas. And if I were forced to boil it down to a single bullet point, it would be this: (Location 415)

We need a reliable and simple external structure to think in that compensates for the limitations of our brains. But first, let me guide you through the process of writing a paper with the slip-box. (Location 416)

"The right question is: What can we do differently in the week, months, or even years before we face a blank page that will get us into the best possible position to write a great paper easily?

Good productive writing is based on good note-taking.

"quality of a paper and the ease with which it is written depends more than anything on what you have done in writing before you've even made a decision on the topic."

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

"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" - David Allen, Getting Things Done

we do not have this kind of control over ourselves. Self-discipline or self-control is not that easy to achieve with willpower alone. Willpower is, as far as we know today, a limited resource that depletes quickly

self-control and self-discipline have much more to do with our environment than with ourselves (cf. Thaler, 2015, ch. 2) - and the environment can be changed. Nobody needs willpower not to eat a chocolate bar when there isn't one around. 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 shortterm interests. 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. This is where the organisation of writing and note-taking comes into play.

so he could honestly say: "I never force myself to do anything I don't feel like. Whenever I am stuck, I do something else." A good structure allows you to do that, to move seamlessly from one task to another – without threatening the whole arrangement or losing sight of the bigger picture.

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 idea.

"If you make a plan, you impose a structure on yourself; it makes you inflexible. To keep going according to plan, you have to push yourself and employ willpower. This is not only demotivating, but also unsuitable for an open-ended process like research, thinking or studying in general, where we have to adjust our next steps with every new insight, understanding or achievement - which we ideally have on a regular basis and not just as an exception. Even though planning is often at odds with the very idea of research and learning, it is the mantra of most study guides and self-help books on academic writing.

How do you plan for insight, which, by definition, cannot be anticipated? 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. We do not want to make ourselves dependent on a plan that is threatened by the unexpected, like a new idea, discovery - or insight.

A Good Research System: Keep track of (and organize) the ever increasing pool of information, which also allows us to combine different ideas in an intelligent way; with the aim of generating new ideas.

key being connection making.

Most people try to reduce complexity by separating what they have into smaller stacks, piles or separate folders. They sort their notes by topics and sub-topics, which makes it look less complex, but quickly becomes very complicated. Plus, it reduces the likelihood of building and finding surprising connections between the notes themselves, which means a trade-off between its usability and usefulness.

Writing is not a linear process. We constantly have to jump back and forth between different tasks. It wouldn't make any sense to micromanage ourselves on that level. Zooming out to the bigger picture does not really help, either, because then we have next steps like "writing a page."