Book Notes: How To Take Smart Notes (Sonke Ahrens) — Part I
This book helped me develop my own “slip-box” and use it for the intelligent organization of ideas and notes in my daily life.
📙 About The Book
Title: How To Take Smart Notes: One Simple Technique To Boost Writing, Learning And Thinking
Author: Sonke Ahrens
🚀 Book Highlights
You might want to check out the book highlights and key ideas here.
🗒 Summary + Notes
[Note: This book has its chapters divided into three parts — Introduction, The Four Underlying Principles, and The Six Steps To Successful Writing. To keep the article length reasonable, the notes have been divided into three parts. This is the first part.]
PART I:
INTRODUCTION
1. Everything You Need To Know
Good solutions are simple and unexpected and you need not complicate things or reorganize everything. You can start working smartly from where you are.
The Slip Box is Niklas Luhman’s idea and way of taking notes and ideas.
2. Everything You Need To Do
Some of the important points to note are as follows:
- Make fleeting notes
The fleeting notes are merely an account of what comes to the head. These need not be too organized. - Make literature notes
Take literature notes whenever you read something and want to remember it and reuse it later. Write it in your own words, keep it brief, and be extremely selective. - Make permanent notes
Make permanent notes using the fleeting and literature notes taking into account their relevance to your work and how you can combine those ideas to generate something new.
Write exactly one note for each idea. Write as if you were writing for someone else using full sentences and trying to be as precise and brief as possible. - Add permanent notes to the Slip-box
Now, add the permanent notes to the Slip Box and organize them such that you have all relevant links and backlinks in place. - Develop your topics, questions, and projects bottom-up
Instead of brainstorming, look into the slip-box to see where the chain of notes has developed and ideas have been built into clusters. Start developing your arguments along those lines because that is probably the idea that you are most inclined to. - Bring what you have now in order
Now that you have enough ideas to write about a topic, look through all the notes that you have on the subject now and bring them in order. Filter out redundant ones and look for gaps. You need not wait until you have everything in order, instead go on reading and taking notes to improve your ideas and their structure. - Translate your notes
Turn your notes into a rough draft while avoiding direct copying and translating them into something that is in the context of your argument. - Edit and proofread
Edit and proofread your draft.
3. Everything You Need To Have
You need four tools:
- Tool to write with and on
Something to write with, like a pen, and something to write on, like a paper. - A reference management system
To collect references and the notes you take during reading. (e.g. (from the book) Zotero). You should consider giving notes a title and keeping them in alphabetical order. - The slip-box
A wooden box if you are using pen and paper to take your notes otherwise in the case of a computer, try to use software that has the capability of maintaining backlinks (e.g. (from the book) Obsidian). - An editor
A text editor like Word, LibreOffice, etc.
4. A Few Things To Keep In Mind
Getting the tools is just one thing and using them efficiently is another. To make the most out of the tools you choose, you need to put thought into what suits you and is easy for you to handle. You should not opt for a tool simply because many “tried them out”. You should instead focus on your ability to work with them.
Do check out the notes for Part — II: The Four Underlying Principles here and the notes for Part — III: The Six Steps To Successful Writing here.
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