Book Notes: How To Take Smart Notes (Sonke Ahrens) — Part III

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 third and the last part.]

PART II:
THE SIX STEPS TO SUCCESSFUL WRITING

9. Separate and Interlocking Tasks

• Give each task your undivided attention because you are surrounded by many sources of distractions and fewer opportunities to train your attention spans.
• Multitasking is not a great idea because it requires constant context-switching between different tasks which leads to a decrease in your productivity. e.g. if you talk about the task of writing, then that itself requires reading, understanding, reflecting, getting ideas, finding the right words, etc. all of which in turn require a different kind of attention. And, this makes it nearly impossible to maintain your productivity levels.
• The 2 reasons why people believe that multitasking is good and increases their productivity are as follows:
  - Lack of a control group to compare their productivity to.
  - Mere-exposure effect: The belief that repeatedly doing something makes you good at it.
• When one talks about attention, they usually tend to focus only on “focused attention” which requires willpower to sustain and can be sustained only for a few seconds. On the other hand, there is “sustained attention” which requires one to stay focused for a longer duration and is necessary to learn and understand something. Sustained attention has a greater threat from increased distractions.
• You can stay focused for longer durations if you train yourself to do so by avoiding multitasking, removing possible distractions, segregating different kinds of tasks as much as possible so they do not interfere with each other, and maintaining structure.
• Academic writing requires the whole spectrum of attention. The key is to employ the right amount of it at the right time. You should try to focus on one thing at a time, e.g. be an author at one time and be a critic at another instead of being both at the same time.
• The key to creativity is the flexibility to switch between a wide open and playful mind and a narrow analytical frame.

The moment we stop making plans is the moment we start to learn.

• To become an expert in academic writing, you need the freedom to make decisions and to make mistakes along the way that will help you learn. Experts don’t usually follow a set of rules, rather they follow their intuition and act accordingly as per the situation. Their decisions in complex situations do not come from analytical thinking but from their gut.

Here, 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.

• Short-term memory, like attention, is a limited resource and you need strategies to not waste it with thoughts that can be delegated to external systems.

We can hold a maximum of seven things in our head at the same time, plus/minus two (Miller 1956).

• It might seem like you can increase the number of things you can remember significantly by using memory techniques but in reality, what happens is that you tend to bundle up the things in a meaningful way and remember the bundles — up to about seven.
• You need not choose between learning and understanding. It is always about understanding. Things that you understand have meaningful connections either through rules, theories, narratives, pure logic, mental models, or explanations. And, slip-box is all about building these meaningful connections deliberately.
• Zeigarnik effect: Open tasks tend to occupy your short-term memory — until they are done. Zeigarnik’s follow-up research shows that you don’t need to finish the tasks to convince your brain to stop thinking about them. Even simply writing them down can do the same.
• Other than attention and short-term memory, the third limited resource is motivation or willpower. The motivation or willpower depletes quickly and needs time to recover and this phenomenon is often referred to as “ego depletion” — caused by a temporary reduction in willpower because of its use in a prior task. The smartest way to deal with this limitation is to cheat by applying a trick.
• It is well known that decision-making is a tiring task, hence it is wise to reduce the number of decisions to be made. In the case of slip-box, you can decide on one system so that most organizational decisions can be made upfront.
• It is important to note that taking breaks between work sessions is essential for the brain to recover and it even supports the process of learning and thinking without having detrimental effects on your efforts.

10. Read for Understanding

• You should read with a pen in hand because, according to different independent studies, writing by hand facilitates understanding because handwriting is slower which causes the listener or reader to focus more to understand the subject fully so that they can note down the gist of the entire thing. Verbatim notes can be taken without much thinking and hence it is difficult to retain them in your brain.
• While selectivity is the key to smart note-taking, you should be aware of the “confirmation bias” that inclines you towards people who all think alike, towards publications that confirm what you already know, and so on. Confirmation bias can be tackled in two steps — first, by turning the writing process on its head and secondly, by indiscriminately gathering any relevant information regardless of what argument it will support.

Collecting only one-sided ideas wouldn’t be very enriching. Yes, we have to be selective, but not in terms of pros and cons, but in terms of relevant or irrelevant.

• The ability to spot patterns, question the frames used, detect the distinctions made by others, and re-frame the questions, assertions, and information is more important than having extensive knowledge because without that ability it would be difficult to put your knowledge to use. These skills can be learned but with deliberate practice and not by mere reading, underlining sentences, and hoping to remember the content.

“If you can’t say it clearly, you don’t understand it yourself.” — John Searle

• Rereading can fool you into believing that you understand a text. This is the “mere-exposure” effect where the moment a person becomes familiar with something, they start believing that they also understand it and even tend to like it more.
• The attempt to rephrase an idea or argument into your own words challenges you to fill in the gaps in your understanding of the subject. And, this again comes with deliberate practice,
• Learning requires effort. What teachers usually do is prearrange information by sorting it into modules, categories, and themes in an attempt to make learning easier for the students. But, they end up achieving the opposite of what they want. They only end up making things convenient while depriving their students of the opportunity to develop the ability to build meaningful connections by translating things into their language.
• Cramming helps retain information in your head for some time, say until passing a test but it doesn’t help you learn.

“If leaning is your goal, cramming is an irrational act.” — Terry Doyle and Todd Zakrajsek

• Reading without learning is a sheer waste of time. Hence, reading and taking notes becomes essential for learning.

11. Take Smart Notes

• Scientific thinking is almost impossible if you only focus on the information as it is given to you rather than being able to think beyond a given context.
• Writing the gist of something is the best approach to understanding what you read.

Transferring ideas into the external memory also allows us to forget them. And even though it sounds paradoxical, forgetting actually facilitates long-term learning.

• The current state of education still focuses on preventing memories from getting lost, even though they probably can’t get lost. It is still about remembering isolated facts rather than building connections. This is known as “cramming” — the attempt to memorize things by repetition.

If we instead focus on the question of how to circumvent the inhibition mechanism, we instantly start to think strategically about what kind of cues should trigger the retrieval of a memory and how to increase the interconnectedness of information.

• You should not reply to cues in the environment because that is not only impractical but highly misleading as well.
• Understanding leads to learning and elaboration, which means connecting information to other information in a meaningful way, which can be a good way to understand things. The first step to elaboration is to think enough about a piece of information so that you can write about it and the second step is to think about what it means for other contexts as well.

If you focus your time and energy on learning without trying to understand, you will not only not understand, but also probably not learn.

• Take and add permanent notes to the slip-box while building a latticework of generalized ideas, facts, and mental models.

12. Develop Ideas

• As the slip-box is not meant to be an encyclopedia, you need not worry about filling in the gaps between the notes.

As an extension of our own memory, the slip-box is the medium we think in, not something we think about.

• You don’t need to focus exclusively on developing the index. You should remember that the organization of notes is in the network of references in the slip-box. All you need from the index are entry points.

The way people choose their keywords shows clearly if they think like an archivist or a writer. Do they wonder where to store a note or how to retrieve it? 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.

Good keywords are usually not already mentioned as words in the note.

• Assigning keywords is crucial because it often leads to a deeper elaboration of the note itself and the connection to other notes. Making smart connections is a crucial part of the development of thoughts.

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?

• You should be careful when you stumble upon old-forgotten ideas and not get too excited about them. You should know that the idea is old but there can still be a slight difference in that same old idea. You should try to detect differences between the old idea and the new one and develop on it.

Comparing notes also helps us to detect contradictions, paradoxes or oppositions — important facilitators for insight.

• When you realize you have two contradicting ideas that are equally true, you seem to have detected a problem that you need to solve. Oppositions help to shape ideas by providing contrast.
• The constant comparison of notes helps examine old notes in a new light or perspective.
• The flashcards are often more effective for reviewing information rather than cramming, but they do have a downside — they do not offer elaborate information and are not embedded in some form of context because they are kind of isolated.

A truly wise person is not someone who knows everything, but someone who is able to make sense of things by drawing from an extended resource of interpretation schemes. This stands in harsh contrast to the common but not-so-wise belief that we need to learn from experience. It is much better to learn from the experiences of others — especially when this experience is reflected on and turned into versatile “mental models” that can be used in different situations.

• Innovation is usually not a result of a sudden moment of realization rather it is a result of steady and incremental steps toward improvement.

Comparing, differentiating and connecting notes are the basis of good academic writing, but playing and tinkering with ideas is what leads to insight and exceptional texts.

The real enemy of independent thinking is not an external authority, but our own inertia.

• Before new information prompts your brain to think differently about something, your brain tends to modify your surroundings to fit a piece of information that suits your routine thinking. Therefore you need a trick or a technique to break this power of thinking routines. To do that you can try to make sure that you see what you think you see and try to describe it as plainly and factually as possible. This is usually a trait of experts.
• Facilitate creativity through restrictions: You should try to restrict the length of your notes, say your note should fit onto the screen and there should be no need for scrolling. If you do not have to think about organization then it is good for you because then you can focus your mental faculties towards more relevant questions.

13. Share Your Insight

• When you have a slip-box, you need not worry about finding a topic to write about. All you need is to identify where the clusters have been formed within the slip-box and you need to pick that topic up because clusters show that the topic has caught your attention the most. You can then try to fill in the gaps in the argument. Further, you need to narrow down your perspective, choose one topic that contributes to the development of the text, and support the main argument.
• From Brainstorming to Slip-box Storming: Brainstorming is one of the ways to find a good topic or idea. But, there are some caveats here. The brain tends to reflect on recent topics, which have emotions attached to it and tends not to reflect upon rather abstract, vague, or emotionally neutral ideas or topics. Having more people in a group brainstorming together is an even worse idea as studies show that it restricts them inadvertently to a narrower range of topics.

It is so much easier to see what worked than to predict what might work.

• Nothing motivates one more than seeing a project they identify with moving forward and vice versa. So, organize your work so that you can steer your projects in the most promising direction and that will not only allow you to stay focused for longer but you will also have more fun along the way.
• Finishing and review: A key point is to structure the text and keep it flexible. Another key point is to try working on different manuscripts at the same time. If you are stuck on one project you can continue working on the other for the time being. If you come across some idea that is not directly relevant to your current project, you can still use it for another project.
• Becoming an expert by giving up planning: You should generally be skeptical about planning, especially if it is merely focused on the outcome and not the process or steps required to achieve a goal. The other lesson is that you can learn from your experiences only if feedback follows shortly afterward — and maybe more than once in a while.
• You should also keep in mind that you might need to revise your first draft multiple times. And, you must learn to delete what has no function within an argument. This is indeed difficult but one of the ways you can accomplish this is by maintaining a separate document for each document you write where you dump all of the text you intend to delete. You will create this document to look back at it later but you will usually observe that will hardly happen.

14. Make It a Habit

Good intentions don’t last very long, usually.

• In the long run, researchers have struggled to find any measurable connection between your intentions and your actual behavior. There is one exception though: you will most certainly act according to your intention if you happen to intend to do exactly what you used to do before. One of the ways to overcome this is to not try to break up with old habits and not to use willpower to force yourself to do something else, but to strategically build up new habits that have a chance to replace the old ones. As soon as you develop a new routine, you can do what intuitively feels right, which requires no effort. e.g. watching others reading and underlining sentences without taking notes will be a painful sight.

Do check out the notes for Part — I: Introduction here and the notes for Part — II: The Four Underlying Principles here.

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