How To Take Smart Notes, by Sönke Ahrens, is a book about learning & self-development, disguised as a book about taking notes. He focuses a lot on improving the performance in the academic setting, understandable by the fact that Ahrens is a Lecturer in Philosophy of Education at the University of Duisburg-Essen, but the lessons are clearly translatable to the workplace. The book is a treasure chest of insight and one can spend a full year following all the references to other studies and books. The ideas I highlight below are just the ones that I found valuable and I skipped some concepts that I was already familiar with.
Writing is (mainly) a tool for thinking
Writing things down is not a logging function. We don’t write things down to journal our process. Writing is the process. We have to write to think.
Thinking is becoming more and more important as we are transition to a competence economy. The power lies in the hands of those who know how to solve unique problems. The productive people will be the ones who think clearly. And the tool of the trade for thinking is writing.
Good writing is note-taking
Writing does not start with the blank page. 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. It starts with note-taking.
Writing is just putting your notes in order and writing the connective tissue. The real challenge for good writing (and through extension good thinking) is what you do months and years before the blank page. If you turn your thoughts and discoveries into written notes and build up a treasure of smart and interconnected notes along the way, writing becomes a selection process.
But this reality is counter-intuitive for most people who don’t seem to connect the quality (or lack of) of our notes with the panic of the blank screen. Most think that writing can be linear, starting from the top of the page and typing until you are done. Unfortunately, writing and thinking are not linear. You can not plan for having an insight. You have to constantly jump back and forth between different tasks. What you need a stash of ideas you can pick from.
Niklas Luhmann’s Slip Box
Planning does not work for intellectual endeavors. Students may use planning to pass an exam but give up planning after it’s done. Why? It is not fun. We need a system. Learning in a way that generates real insight, is accumulative and sparks new ideas.
20th-century German sociologist Niklas Luhmann came up with such a system. He developed a revolutionary method to turn his reading into a productivity machine. He started taking notes on small pieces of paper. Each contained the main argument and a reference back to the main source. He also realized that one idea, one note was only as valuable as its context, which was not necessarily the context it was taken from. Instead of adding notes to existing categories or the respective texts, he invented new categories as he went along. In time he built a database of 90,000 notes, that he described as his secondary memory (zweitgedächtnis), alter ego, or reading memory (lesegedächtnis). He used it to write 60 books and transform sociology, a field he had no formal training in. His system is proof of the productive nature of note-taking.
The process:
Luhmann wrote down useful ideas from his reading on uniformly sized index cards.
The size was important as a forcing function. So he could have just one idea per card.
Each card had a unique reference number. The first card was number 1.
When a new card was added it was placed after an idea within the same context. So the 50th card can be placed after the 3rd and become 3a. And the branching could go on indefinitely.
The database was thus looking like a tree, not a list.
Cards are the container boxes for the mind
Containers revolutionized supply-chains. They represented a standardization of transportation that gave birth to the globalized economy we live in.
Standardized notes (like the one Luhmann collected in his Slip Box) are the shipping container of thinking. Instead of having different storage for different ideas, everything goes into the same place and is standardized in 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: the insight that can be transformed into written text.
Purposeful Reading
A key mindset to make a learning system work for you is to read (or consume) with purpose. Focusing on understanding makes you consume differently. Having a clear, tangible purpose when you attend a lecture, discussion or seminar will make you more engaged and sharpen your focus.
Think about the mindset of the students attending a lecture, discussion or seminar. Their purpose to pass an exam sharpens their focus and keeps them more engaged. The problem is that the topic is dictated by a curriculum, instead of personal interest. And the end-goal, passing an exam, is not the best incentive for life. It is why one has to read with the pencil in hand to make sure that the activity is not wasted.
Types of Notes
The traditional type of notes can be broken down into 3 categories:
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.
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 referenced system. This is the reservoir of ideas one could pull from.
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. This allows you to show something for at the end of the day.
The Art of Summarisation
Extracting the gist of a text or an idea and giving an account in writing is for academics what daily practice on the piano is for pianists: The more often we do it and the more focused we are, the more virtuous we become. The ability to spot patterns, to question the frames used and detect the distinctions made by others, is the precondition to thinking critically and looking behind the assertions of a text or a talk. Being able to re-frame questions, assertions and information are even more important than having extensive knowledge, because, without this ability, we wouldn’t be able to put our knowledge to use.
The quality of one’s reading depends in totality to the mental patterns he brings to the table. Without a toolbox of thinking tools, people will read every book like a novel. When the purpose is entertainment there is no growth. We have to choose between feeling smarter or becoming smarter. 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.
The Elaboration Method
The best-researched and most successful learning method. 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. Nothing more than connecting information to other information in a meaningful way.
Creativity & the Myth of Erika Moment
“Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn’t really do it, they just saw something.”
Many exciting stories from scientific history make us believe that great insight comes in a flash, an Erika moment.
But the reason why “geniuses” had these insights and not a random person on the street is that they already had spent a very long time thinking hard about the problems, tinkered with other possible solutions and tried countless other ways of looking at the problem. Our fascination with these stories clouds the fact that all good ideas need time. Even sudden breakthroughs are usually preceded by a long, intense process of preparation.
The power of abstractions
Studies on creativity with engineers show that the ability to find not only creative but functional and working solutions for technical problems is equal to the ability to make abstractions. The better an engineer is at abstracting from a specific problem, the better and more pragmatic his solutions will be – even for the very problem he abstracted from. Abstraction is also the key to analyze and compare concepts, to make analogies and to combine ideas; this is especially true when it comes to interdisciplinary work.
Brainstorming is for amateurs
The things you are supposed to find in your head by brainstorming usually don’t have their origins in there. Rather, they come from the outside: through reading, having discussions and listening to others, through all the things that could have been accompanied and often even would have been improved by writing.
Exergonic and endergonic work. The virtuous circle of work
Exergonic means you constantly need to add energy to keep the process going. In the second case, endergonic means the reaction once triggered, continues by itself and even releases energy. The dynamics of work are similar.
Sometimes we feel like our work is draining our energy and we can only move forward if we put more and more energy into it. But sometimes it is the opposite. Once we get into the workflow, it is as if the work itself gains momentum, pulling us along and sometimes even energizing us. Without a stash of ideas, we can pull from work will always be a pain. The more connected information we already have, the easier it is to create, because new information can dock to old information. Facts are not kept isolated nor learned in an isolated fashion, but hang together in a network of ideas.
The hermeneutic circle
The standard advice is to decide what to write about before you start writing. Nobody starts from scratch. In order to develop a good question to write about or find the best angle for an assignment, one must already have put some thought into a topic. To be able to decide on a topic, one must already have read quite a bit and certainly not just about one topic. And the decision to read something and not something else is obviously rooted in prior understanding, and that didn’t come out of thin air, either. Every intellectual endeavor starts from an already existing preconception, which then can be transformed during further inquires and can serve as a starting point for the following endeavors.
Flexible focus
It is not a relentless focus, but a flexible focus that connects top scientists and renowned artists. “Specifically, the problem-solving behavior of eminent scientists can alternate between extraordinary levels of focus on specific concepts and playful exploration of ideas. This suggests that successful problem solving may be a function of a flexible strategy application in relation to task demands.” The key to creativity in any field is being able to switch between a wide-open, playful mind and a narrow analytical frame.
This means planning hurts growth and development. Most professionals aim to be operators, following guidelines. But for the truly valuable tasks, there can be no universally applicable rule about which step has to be taken when. The aim should be to become an expert. And that does not happen linearly, it relies on experience and deliberate practice. Experts have good intuition. They can judge the situation correctly, the juniors just follow procedure.
Intuition
Gut feeling is not a mysterious force, but an incorporated history of experience. It is the sedimentation of deeply learned practice through numerous feedback loops on success or failure.
Chess players seem to think less than beginners. Rather, they see patterns and let themselves be guided by their experience from the past rather than attempt to calculate turns far into the future. Intuition is not the opposition to rationality and knowledge, it is rather the incorporated, practical side of our intellectual endeavors, the sedimented experience on which we build our conscious, explicit knowledge.
These notes are very similar to Luhmann approach. I recommend you read Tiago’s Forte more structured blog post if you want more. Or just read the book.
I am clearly passionate about the topic. I happen to work on a startup that is working on making this system of note-taking more accessible. Deepstash offers standardised notes from all the best online sources. They organise themselves by topic but you are free to assign them a personal context. If you are excited about the idea of a brain extension holding all the valuable ideas you stumble upon maybe you give it a try. It’s free.