How To Take Smart Notes –– Sonke Ahrens

#book  #notes  #PKM  

Summary:

Turning one's thoughts into writing isn't just useful for writers, but anyone who wants to improve their thinking and learning.

The core idea of Smart Notes is that purely extracting highlights is a waste of time. Instead of simply highlighting passages, the Smart Notes system encourages us to manually create notes of the ideas we get as we read. We want to create notes that are relevant to contexts important to us, not just related to the book we read.

"Notes should no longer be reminders of thoughts or ideas, but should contain the actual thought or idea in written form." A note is only as valuable as its context - its network of associations, relationships and connections to other information.

"Permanent notes are to be written in a way that can still be understood even when you have forgotten the context they are taken from. "

"The goal here is to get into the habit of fetching a pen and paper whenever we read something, to write down the most important and interesting aspects. If we manage to establish a routine in the first step, it becomes easier to develop the urge to turn these findings into permanent notes and connect them with other notes. It is not so difficult to get used to thinking within an external memory of notes, as the advantages become obvious quite quickly. As soon as we have developed a new routine, we can do what intuitively feels right, which requires no effort. Watching others reading books and doing nothing other than underlining some sentences or making unsystematic notes that will end up nowhere will soon be a painful sight."

Take physical notes as you read. When we have to write our notes by hand, we are a bit more thoughtful with them and are forced to put things in our own words.

Have a way of recording bibliographical sources as you read.

Upload your notes. There are two kinds of notes to upload: references (the highlights from the book that we want to extract) and ideas (the thoughts we have while reading a particular paragraph). The important question here is: how can I make this idea detailed enough to stand on its own, without the context of the book or the associated highlight? We want each of these ideas to be fully formed thoughts that we can reference in a bunch of different areas later.

File your notes. We want to file information in the context we want to rediscover it in, not the context that we found it in.

Use and organize your notes. Since we're constantly capturing the ideas that we are getting from different sources and organizing them in their most important contexts, we can quickly develop ideas for new articles, books, scripts, whatever it is we create from our ideas.

[[Tiago Forte]]'s principles:

  • Writing is not the outcome of thinking; it is the medium in which thinking takes place
  • Do your work as if writing is the only thing that matters
  • Nobody ever starts from scratch
  • Our tools and techniques are only as valuable as the workflow
  • Standardization enables creativity
  • Our work only gets better when exposed to high-quality feedback
  • Work on multiple, simultaneous projects
  • Organize your notes by context, not by topic
  • Always follow the most interesting path
  • Save contradictory ideas

Highlights:

  • 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.
  • [As compared to a high IQ or academic success,] 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 tasks at hand.
  • [[motivation]] "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 anyway."
  • 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.
  • Good students wrestle with their sentences because the care about finding the right expression. It takes them longer to find a good idea to write about because they know from experience that the first idea is rarely that great, and good questions do not fall into their laps. They spend more time in the library to get a better overview of the literature, which leads to more reading, which means they have to juggle more information. Having read more does not automatically mean having more ideas. Especially in the beginning, it means having fewer ideas to work with, because you know that others have already thought of most of them.
  • This very much resembles the way we use hyperlinks. But, they are quite different and it would be rather misleading to think of it as a personal Wikipedia or a database on paper.
  • Whenever you read something, make notes about the content. Write down what you don't want to forget or think you might use in your own thinking or writing.
  • Unfortunately, most students collect and embrace over time a variety of learning and note taking techniques, each promising to maker something easier, but combined have the opposite effect.
  • To have an undistracted brain to think with and a reliable collection of notes to think in is pretty much all we need. Everything else is pretty much clutter.
  • There is no such thing as private knowledge in academia. An idea kept private is as good as one you never had. And a fact no one can reproduce is no fact at all. Making something public always means to write it down so it can be read. There is no such thing as a history of unwritten ideas.
  • If writing is the medium of research and studying nothing else than research, then there is no reason not to work as if nothing else counts than writing.
  • In the old system, the question is: Under which topic do I store this note? In the new system, the question is: In which context will I want to stumble upon it again?
    • Other questions while reading: Is this convincing? What methods are used? Which of the references are familiar?
    • Most importantly, why? Why did the aspects I wrote down catch my interests? Or why is this worth knowing?
  • The slip box is designed to present you with ideas you have already forgotten, allowing your brain to focus on thinking instead of remembering.
  • It can only play out it's strengths when we aim for a critical mass, which depends not only on the number of notes, but also their quality and the way they're handled.
  • Permanent notes are to be written in a way that can still be understood even when you have forgotten the context they are taken from.
  • Notes should no longer be reminders of thoughts or ideas, but should contain the actual thought or idea in written form.
  • Every intellectual endeavor starts from an already existing preconception, which then can be transformed during further inquiries and can serve as a starting point for following endeavors.
  • The problem of finding a topic is replaced by the problem of having too many topics to write about. Having trouble finding the right topic is a symptom of the wrong attempt to rely heavily on the limitations of the brain, not the inevitable problematic starting point, as most study guides insinuate.
  • Only if the work itself becomes rewarding can the dynamic of [[motivation]] and reward become sustainable and propel the whole process forward.
  • Yes, our ability to learn isolated facts is indeed limited and probably decreases with age. But if facts are not kept isolated nor learned in am isolated fashion, but hanging together in a network of ideas or "latticework of mental models", it becomes easier to make sense of new information.
  • Trying to multitask fatigues us and decreases our ability to deal with more than one task.
  • "On one hand, those with wandering, defocused, childlike minds seem to be the most creative; on the other, it seems to be analysis and application that's important. The answer to the conundrum is that creative people need both - the key to creativity is being able to switch between a wide-open, playfful mind and a narrow analytical frame."
  • The widespread praise for planning rests on the misconception that a process like writing an academic text, which is highly dependent on cognition and thinking, can rely on conscious decision making alone. But academic writing is an art, as well, which means it is something we can become better at with experience and deliberate practice.
  • But they are keeping you from learning the very thing academia and writing is all about: gaining insight and making it public.
  • Things we understand are connected, either through rules, theories, narratives, pure logic mental models or explanations. And deliberately building these kinds of meaningful connections is what the slip-box is all about.
  • Letting thoughts linger without focusing on them gives our brains the opportunity to deal with problems in a different, often surprisingly productive way.
  • Willpower is compared to muscles: a limited resource that depletes and needs time to recover. Improvement through training is possible to a certain degree, but takes time and effort. The phenomenon is usually discussed under the term "ego depletion": "We use the term ego depletion to refer to a temporary reduction in the self's capacity or willingness to engage in volitional action (including controlling the environment, controlling the self, making choices, and initiating action) caused by prior exercise of volition."
  • The idea is not to copy, but the have a meaningful dialogue with the texts we read.
  • What is most helpful is to reflect on the frame, the theoretical background, methodological approach or perspective of the text we read. That often means to reflect as much on what is not mentioned as what is mentioned.
  • It is so much easier to develop an interesting text from a lively discussion with a lot of pros and cons than from a collection of one-sided notes and seemingly fitting quotes. In fact, it is almost impossible to write anything interesting and worth publishing (and therefore motivating) if it is based on nothing else than an idea we were able to come up with up front before elaborating on the problem.
  • [[Kant]]: "“Nonage [immaturity] is the inability to use one’s own understanding without another’s guidance. This nonage is self-imposed if its cause lies not in lack of understanding but in indecision and lack of courage to use one’s own mind without another’s guidance. Dare to know! (Sapere aude.) ‘Have the courage to use your own understanding,’ is therefore the motto of the Enlightenment.”
  • Rereading is especially dangerous because of the [[mere exposure effect]]: The moment we become familiar with something, we start believing we also understand it. On top of that, we also tend to like it more.
    • The more we are used to doing something in a particular way, the more in control we feel about it, even though we are less in control of it, also due to the same effect. [[The More We Know, The Less We Know]]
  • Transferring ideas into the external memory also allows us to forget them. And even though it sounds paradoxical, forgetting actually facilitates longterm learning.
  • Forgetting, then, would not be the loss of a memory, but the erection of a mental barrier between the conscious mind and our long term memory. Psychologists call this mechanism [[active inhibition]]
  • Obviously, we don’t want to have to rely on cues in the environment. This is not only impractical, but highly misleading: If we test ourselves repeatedly in the same context and environment in which we have learned something, it would make us overconfident in terms of learning success, because we would not be able to discount the environmental cues that probably won’t exist in the context in which we want to remember what we learned.
    • Mnemonic devices and memory tactics are sort of an in-between - associating meaningless things to trigger memory, which is why they may work short term
  • Two different measurements when it comes to memory: Storage strength and retrieval strength.
  • They speculate that storage strength, the ability to store memories, only becomes greater over one’s lifetime. We add more and more information to our long-term memory. Just by looking at the physical capacity of our brains, we can see that we could indeed probably store a lifetime and a bit of detailed experiences in it.
  • Useful learning is to connect a piece of information to as many meaningful contexts as possible, which is what we do when we connect our notes in the slip-box with other notes. Making these connections deliberately means building up a self-supporting network of interconnected ideas and facts that work reciprocally as cues for each other.
  • 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?
  • Elaboration is nothing more than connecting information to other information in a meaningful way. The first step of elaboration is to think enough about a piece of information so we are able to write about it. The second step is to think about what it means for other contexts as well.
    • I wish I had known this information in high school for learning things and making real life connections. Not just for the sake of my tests. I often asked my teachers "how" i should study in hopes for an answer like this only to get more useless information.
  • As an extension of our own memory, the slip-box is the medium we think in, not something we think about.
  • 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.
  • Having the same thought twice or mistaking another person’s idea with our own is far from unusual. Unfortunately, most people never notice this humbling fact because they have no system that confronts them with already thought thoughts.
    • Working with the slip-box is disillusioning, but at the same time it increases the chance that we actually move forward in our thinking towards uncharted territory, instead of just feeling like we are moving forward.
  • The brain is very good at making associations and spotting patterns and similarities between seemingly different things and also very good in spotting differences between seemingly similar things, but it needs to have them presented objectively and externally.
  • A paradox can be a sign that we haven’t thought thoroughly enough about a problem or, conversely, that we exhausted the possibilities of a certain paradigm.
  • The [[feature-positive effect]]
    • This is the phenomenon in which we tend to overstate the importance of information that is (mentally) easily available to us and tilts our thinking towards the most recently acquired facts, not necessarily the most relevant ones. Without external help, we would not only take exclusively into account what we already know, but what is on top of our heads.
  • [[Psychology of Misjudgments - Charlie Munger]]
    • He advocates looking out for the most powerful concepts in every discipline and to try to understand them so thoroughly that they become part of our thinking.
    • The importance is to have not just a few, but a broad range of mental models in your head. Otherwise, you risk becoming too attached to one or two and see only what fits them.
    • The moment one starts to combine these mental models and attach one's experiences to them, one cannot help gain what he calls "worldly wisdom"
  • Helmut D. Sachs
    • [[The More We Know, The Less We Know]]“By learning, retaining, and building on the retained basics, we are creating a rich web of associated information, the more information (hooks) we have to connect new information to, the easier we can form long-term memories. […] Learning becomes fun. We have entered a virtuous circle of learning, and it seems as if our long-term memory capacity and speed are actually growing."
  • [[Steve Jobs]]
    • “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.”
  • Being experienced with a problem and intimately familiar with the tools and devices we work with, ideally to the point of virtuosity, is the precondition for discovering their inherent possibilities, writes Ludwik Fleck.
  • Intuition is not the opposition to rationality and knowledge, it is rather the incorporated, practical side of our intellectual endeavours, the sedimented experience on which we build our conscious, explicit knowledge.
    • [[Steven Johnson]], who wrote an insightful book about how people in science and in general come up with genuine new ideas, calls it the “[[slow hunch]].” As a precondition to make use of this intuition, he emphasizes the importance of experimental spaces where ideas can freely mingle. A laboratory with open-minded colleagues can be such a space, much as intellectuals and artists freely discussed ideas in the cafés of old Paris.
  • Even groundbreaking paradigm shifts are most often the consequence of many small moves in the right direction instead of one big idea. This is why the search for small differences is key. It is such an important skill to see differences between seemingly similar concepts, or connections between seemingly different ideas.
  • Comparing, differentiating and connecting notes are the basis of good academic writing, but playing and tinkering with ideas is what leads to insight and experimental texts .
  • [[Abstraction]]
    • The be able to play with ideas, we first have to librate them from their original context by means of abstraction and re-specification.
    • Only by abstraction and re-specification can we apply ideas in the singular and always different situations in reality.
    • 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.
  • The real enemy of independent thinking is not an external authority but our own inertia.the ability to generate new ideas has more to do with breaking with old habits of thinking than with coming up with as many new ideas as possible
  • To be able to see what we see instead of what we expect to see is indeed a skill in itself, not like a character trait of being "open-minded".
  • [[Suvivorship Bias]] - [[Nassim Taleb]]
  • The first question should always be directed towards the question itself: What kind of answer can you expect from asking a question this way? What is missing?
  • Simple ideas can be tied together into consistent theories and build up enormous complexity. This just doesn't work with complicated ideas.
    • By using the slip-box on a daily basis, we train these important intellectual skills deliberately: We check if what we understood from a text is really the text by having our understanding in written form in front of our eyes.
    • We learn to focus on the gist of an idea by restricting ourselves in terms of space. We can make it a habit to always think about what is missing when we write down our own ideas. And we can practice asking good questions when we sort out our notes into the slip-box and connect them with other notes.
  • This kind of self-imposed restriction is counterintuitive in a culture where more choice is usually regarded as a good thing and more tools to choose from seen as better than having less at hand. But not having to make decisions can be quite liberating.
  • A clear structure allows us to explore the internal possibilities of something. Even the act of breaking with convention depends on it.
  • Without structure, we cannot differentiate, compare or experiment with ideas. Without restrictions, we would never be forced to make the decision on what is worth pursuing and what is not. Indifference is the worst environment for insight.
  • The process is self-reinforcing. A visibly developed cluster attracts more ideas and provides more possible connections, which in return influence our choices on what to read and think further.
    • They become signposts for our daily work and orient us to what is worth thinking about. Topics grow bottom up and gain traction along the way.
    • As soon as the slip-box has grown a bit, we can replace our thoughts on what is interesting and what we think is relevant with a pragmatic look into the slip-box, where we can plainly see what truly proved to be interesting and where we found material to work it.
  • We just didn't know that most of the ideas we had are actually not that innovative. but while the belief in our own ingenuity decreases with expertise, we become more able to actually make a genuine contribution.
  • The ability to keep control over our work and change course if necessary is made possible by the fact that the big task of "writing a text" is broken down into small, concrete tasks, which allow us practically to do exactly what is needed at a certain time and take the next step from there.
    • It is not just about feeling in control, it is about setting up the work in a way that we really are in control. And the more control we have to steer our work towards what we consider interesting and relevant, the less willpower we have to put into getting things done. Only then can work itself become the source of [[motivation]], which is crucial to make it sustainable.
  • [[Overconfidence Bias]] [[Daniel Kahneman]]
  • The goal here is to get into the habit of fetching a pen and paper whenever we read something, to write down the most important and interesting aspects. If we manage to establish a routine in the first step, it becomes easier to develop the urge to turn these findings into permanent notes and connect them with other notes. It is not so difficult to get used to thinking within an external memory of notes, as the advantages become obvious quite quickly. As soon as we have developed a new routine, we can do what intuitively feels right, which requires no effort. Watching others reading books and doing nothing other than underlining some sentences or making unsystematic notes that will end up nowhere will soon be a painful sight.

  • Interesting References:

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