How to take smart notes

Highlights

Page 109

Willpower is, as far as we know today,1 a limited resource that depletes quickly and is also not that much up for improvement over the long term

Note: I don’t think this is correct

Page 116

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.

Page 123

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.

Page 218

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.

Page 224

And this is the other insight of Allen: 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.

Page 302

So why is not everybody using a slip-box and working effortlessly towards success? Is it because it is too complicated? Certainly not. It is rather surprisingly simple. The reasons are much more mundane: 1. Until very recently, when the first results from the research on the file system were published, some crucial misunderstandings prevailed about how Luhmann actually worked, which led to disappointing results for many who tried to emulate the system. The main misunderstanding stems from an isolated focus on the slip-box and a neglect of the actual workflow in which it is embedded. 2. Almost everything that is published about this system was only accessible in German and was almost exclusively discussed within a small group of devoted sociologists who specialised in Luhmann’s theory of social systems – hardly the kind of critical mass that would draw much attention. 3. The third and maybe the most important reason is the very fact that it is simple. Intuitively, most people do not expect much from simple ideas. They rather assume that impressive results must have equally impressively complicated means.

Page 327

He usually wrote his notes with an eye towards already existing notes in the slip-box. And while the notes on the literature were brief, he wrote them with great care, not much different from his style in the final manuscript: in full sentences and with explicit references to the literature from which he drew his material. More often than not, a new note would directly follow up on another note and would become part of a longer chain of notes. He then would add references to notes somewhere else in the slip-box, some of which were nearby, others in completely different areas and contexts. Some were directly related and read more like comments, others contained not-so-obvious connections. Rarely would a note stay in isolation. He did not just copy ideas or quotes from the texts he read, 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.

Page 378

Now, that’s all well and good, you might say, but what about writing these notes? Obviously, it is easy to write a paper if the main part of the writing is already done and only needs to be turned into a linear text. But isn’t that a little bit like saying: If you are short of money, just take what you need out of your piggy bank? Everyone can make things look easy by leaving out the main part. So, where is the genie for that? Granted, writing these notes is the main work. It will take enormous amounts of effort, time, patience and willpower, and you will probably break under the weight of this task. Just kidding. It is the easiest part of all. Writing these notes is also not the main work. Thinking is. Reading is. Understanding and coming up with ideas is. And this is how it is supposed to be. The notes are just the tangible outcome of it. All you have to do is to have a pen in your hand while you are doing what you are doing anyway (or a keyboard under your fingers). Writing notes accompanies the main work and, done right, it helps with it.

Page 414

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. Throw away the fleeting notes from step one and put the literature notes from step two into your reference system. You can forget about them now. All that matters is going into the slip-box.

Note: I’m already doing the first two. And sort of doing these with the TILs. Just need to expand.

Page 459

Imagine if we went through life learning only what we planned to learn or were explicitly taught. I doubt we would have even learned to speak. Each added bit of information, filtered only by our interest, is a contribution to our future understanding, thinking and writing. And the best ideas are usually the ones we haven’t anticipated anyway.

Page 650

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.

Page 691

It is important to reflect on the purpose of these different types of notes. 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. That might even apply to reading, if you want to focus on a text without interrupting your reading flow. Then you might want to just underline sentences or write short comments in the margins. It is important to understand, though, that underlining sentences or writing comments in the margins are also just fleeting notes and do nothing to elaborate on a text. They will very soon become completely useless – unless you do something with them. If you already know that you will not go back to them, don’t take these kind of notes in the first place. Take proper notes instead. Fleeting notes are only useful if you review them within a day or so and turn them into proper notes you can use later. Fleeting literature notes can make sense if you need an extra step to understand or grasp an idea, but they will not help you in the later stages of the writing process, as no underlined sentence will ever present itself when you need it in the development of an argument. These kinds of notes are just reminders of a thought, which you haven’t had the time to elaborate on yet. 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.

Note: I’m beginning to understand

Page 715

As it is not possible to foresee the development of the slip-box, the fate of the notes is nothing to worry about. In contrast to the fleeting notes, every permanent note for the slip-box is elaborated enough to have the potential to become part of or inspire a final written piece, but that cannot be decided on up front as their relevance depends on future thinking and developments. The notes are no longer reminders of thoughts or ideas, but contain the actual thought or idea in written form. This is a crucial difference.

Note: I guess where it’s confusing for me is that I’m not thinking about everything in terms of publication. Programming TILs can’t be published, but are still helpful. Actually, are they helpful? Will they spark new ideas?

Page 752

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 endeavour starts from an 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). And even though the hermeneutic circle is regularly taught in university, writing at the same time continues to be taught as if we could start from scratch and move forward in a straight line – as if it were possible to pull a good question out of thin air and wait with the reading until the literature research is done.

Note: My writing usually rattles in my head for a long time before I write

Page 820

Any attempts to trick ourselves into work with external rewards (like doing something nice after finishing a chapter) are only short-term solutions with no prospect of establishing a positive feedback loop. These are very fragile motivational constructions. Only if the work itself becomes rewarding can the dynamic of motivation and reward become self-sustainable and propel the whole process forward (DePasque and Tricomi, 2015).

Page 222

The very moment we decide on a hypothesis, our brains automatically go into search mode, scanning our surroundings for supporting data, which is neither a good way to learn nor research. Worse, we are usually not even aware of this confirmation bias (or myside bias24) that surreptitiously meddles with our life. Somehow, we just seem to happen to be surrounded by people who all think alike. (Not on purpose, of course. We just spend our time with people we like. And why do we like them? Correct: Because they think like us.) We just seem to happen to read the publications that tend to confirm what we already know. (Not on purpose, of course. We just try to stick with good, intelligent texts. And what makes us think these texts are good and intelligent? Correct: because they make sense to us.) We look around and just cut out disconfirming facts without even noticing what we don’t see,

Page 244

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. First, you basically fix your present understanding as the outcome instead of using it as the starting point, priming yourself for one-sided perception. Then you artificially create a conflict of interest between getting things done (finding support for your preconceived argument) and generating insight, turning any departure from your preconceived plan into a mutiny against the success of your own project. This is a good rule of thumb: If insight becomes a threat to your academic or writing success, you are doing it wrong.

Page 311

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 is even more important than having an extensive knowledge, because without this ability, we wouldn’t be able to put our knowledge to use. The good news is that these skills can be learned. But it requires deliberate practice (Ericsson, Krampe, and Tesch-Römer 1993; Anders Ericsson 2008). Taking smart notes is the deliberate practice of these skills. Mere reading, underlining sentences and hoping to remember the content is not.

Page 332

While it is obvious that familiarity is not understanding, we have no chance of knowing whether we understand something or just believe we understand something until we test ourselves in some form. If we don’t try to verify our understanding during our studies, we will happily enjoy the feeling of getting smarter and more knowledgeable while in reality staying as dumb as we were. This warm feeling disappears quickly when we try to explain what we read in our own words in writing. Suddenly, we see the problem. The attempt to rephrase an argument in our own words confronts us without mercy with all the gaps in our understanding. It certainly feels less good, but this struggle is the only chance we have to improve our understanding, to learn and move forward (cf. below). This, again, is deliberate practice. Now we are faced with a clear choice: 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.

Page 342

Only the actual attempt to retrieve information will clearly show us if we have learned something or not. The mere-exposure effect would fool us here, too: Seeing something we have seen before causes the same emotional reaction as if we had been able to retrieve the information from our memory. Rereading, therefore, makes us feel we have learned what we read: “I know that already!” Our brains are terrible teachers in this regard. We face here the same choice between methods that make us feel like we learned something and methods that truly do make us learn something.

Page 431

Academic or nonfiction texts are not written like this because in addition to the writing, there is the reading, the research, the thinking and the tinkering with ideas.

Note: Man hasn’t heard of GRRM

Page 466

As we write notes with an eye towards existing notes, we take more into account than the information that is already available in our internal memory. That is extremely important, because the internal memory retrieves information not in a rational or logical way, but according to psycho-logical rules. The brain also doesn’t store information neurally and objectively. We reinvent and rewrite our memory every time we try to retrieve information. The brain works with rules of thumb and makes things look as if they fit, even if they don’t. It remembers events that never happened, connects unrelated episodes to convincing narratives and completes incomplete images. It cannot help but see patterns and meaning everywhere, even in the most random things

Page 570

Shereshevsky was still capable of inhibiting information, but even being much less fine-tuned can have serious consequences. Being too often overwhelmed by memories, associations and synesthetic experiences made it difficult for him to stay in a job and enjoy many of the things we highly value. Above all, it made it almost impossible for him to think in abstract terms.

Note: This is not the case with von Neumann

Page 582

This is far from self-evident. If we look at the current state of education, especially the learning strategies most students employ, we see that the vast majority of all learning still aims to prevent memories from getting lost, even though it probably can’t get lost. It is still mostly about remembering isolated facts and not so much about building connections. This is what learning psychologists have rightfully given the derogative term “cramming”: the attempt to reinforce and solidify information in the brain by repetition. It is basically hammering facts into the brain as if they were carvings on an ancient stone tablet. Using fancy words and describing it as a “strengthening of the connections between neurons” does not change the futility of the attempt.

Page 601

Mistaking learning with cramming is still very much ingrained in our educational culture. When Hermann Ebbinghaus, the godfather of learning theory, tried to understand the basics of learning and measuring learning progress, he deliberately used meaningless bits of information like random letter combinations and made sure they bore no accidental meaning. From his understanding, meaning would distract from the actual learning process. But he didn’t realise that he was stripping the learning process from the very thing that is learning, which is making meaningful connections.

Page 611

The trick, of course, is not to learn like Ebbinghaus thought we would learn: by banging the information into our heads. Memory artists instead attach meaning to information and connect it to already known networks of connections in a meaningful way. One piece of information can become the cue for another and strings or networks of cues can be built. Those kinds of memory techniques are great in case you need to learn information that bears no meaning in itself or has no logical or meaningful connection to other things you already know. But why would you want to learn something like that – except when you happen to be a memory artist? Memory techniques are the fix for a rather artificial situation. When it comes to academic writing, we don’t have the need for this trick, as we can choose to build and think exclusively within meaningful contexts. Abstract information like bibliographic references can be stored externally – there is no benefit in knowing them by heart. Everything else better bear meaning.

Page 644

Writing notes and sorting them into the slip-box is nothing other than an attempt to understand the wider meaning of something. The slip-box forces us to ask numerous elaborating questions: What does it mean? How does it connect to … ? What is the difference between … ? What is it similar to? 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. This is the best antidote to the impeding way most information is given to us in our learning institutions. Most often, it comes in modular form, sorted by topic, separated by disciplines and generally isolated from other information. The slip-box is forcing us to do the exact opposite: To elaborate, to understand, to connect and therefore to learn seriously.

Page 694

it should not be used as an archive, where we just take out what we put in, but as a system to think with, the references between the notes are much more important than the references from the index to a single note. Focusing exclusively on the index would basically mean that we always know upfront what we are looking for – we would have to have a fully developed plan in our heads. But liberating our brains from the task of organizing the notes is the main reason we use the slip-box in the first place.

Page 734

Keywords should always be assigned with an eye towards the topics you are working on or interested in, never by looking at the note in isolation. This is also why this process cannot be automated or delegated to a machine or program – it requires thinking.

Page 748

1. The first type of links are those on notes that are giving you the overview of a topic. These are notes directly referred to from the index and usually used as an entry point into a topic that has already developed to such a degree that an overview is needed or at least becomes helpful. On a note like this, you can collect links to other relevant notes to this topic or question, preferably with a short indication of what to find on these notes (one or two words or a short sentence is sufficient). This kind of note helps to structure thoughts and can be seen as an in-between step towards the development of a manuscript. Above all, they help orientate oneself within the slip-box. You will know when you need to write one. Luhmann collected up to 25 links to other notes on these kind of entry notes. They don’t have to be written in one go as links can be added over time, which again shows how topics can grow organically. What we think is relevant for a topic and what is not depends on our current understanding and should be taken quite seriously: It defines an idea as much as the facts it is based on. What we regard as being relevant for a topic and how we structure it will change over time. This change might lead to another note with a different, more adequate topic structure, which then can be seen as a comment on the previous note. Thankfully, it won’t make all the other notes redundant. As mentioned before: All we have to do is to change the entry in the index to this new note and/or indicate on the old note that we now consider a new structure more fitting.

Page 768

4. The most common form of reference is plain note-to-note links. They have no function other than indicating a relevant connection between two individual notes. By linking two related notes regardless of where they are within the slip-box or within different contexts, surprising new lines of thought can be established. These note-to-note links are like the “weak links” (Granovetter 1973) of social relationships we have with acquaintances: even though they are usually not the ones we turn to first, they often can offer new and different perspectives.

Page 863

His recommendations for learning read almost like instructions for the slip-box: 1. Pay attention to what you want to remember. 2. Properly encode the information you want to keep. (This includes thinking about suitable cues.) 3. Practice recall. (Ibid., 31) We learn something not only when we connect it to prior knowledge and try to understand its broader implications (elaboration), but also when we try to retrieve it at different times (spacing) in different contexts (variation), ideally with the help of chance (contextual interference) and with a deliberate effort (retrieval).

Page 922

Even very personal, intimate experiences, like encounters with art, require abstraction. If the story of Romeo and Juliet touches us, it is certainly not because we are all members of one of two feuding families in Verona. We abstract from time and place, from the particular circumstances until we can meet the protagonists of this story on a general level where our own emotional life can resonate with what we see on stage.

Page 243

To praise Mao while still giving himself room to depart from some of his policies, Deng said, “Without [Mao’s] outstanding leadership, [we] would still not have triumphed even today… . Chairman Mao was not infallible or free from shortcomings … at an appropriate time they should be summed up and lessons should be drawn from them … however, there is no need to do so hastily.” He repeated his view that Mao had committed errors, that he himself had made errors, and that any leader who tries to accomplish things makes errors. Deng expressed the prevailing view at high levels that China’s two huge disasters, the Great Leap and the Cultural Revolution, were caused by a system that allows one person to dominate without any input from other voices. China therefore needed to develop a legal system so that a single individual, no matter how able, will not dominate. If laws are initially imperfect and incomplete, they can be made fair and just, step by step, over time.

Note: xi jinping disagrees

Page 696

“What!” they asked, “are we to make our servants sit down on the sofa and offer them tea?” And I answered them; “Why not, sometimes at least?” Every one laughed. Their question was frivolous and my answer was not clear; but the thought in it was to some extent right.

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