How to Take Smart Notes

General summary

It presents the Zettelkasten, a writing system for note-taking created by Niklas Luhmann, a prolific german sociologist of the 20th century among other occupations.

- It gives you instructions on how to organize your noteking by separating it in:

1. literature notes: notes on the book, article or whatever you're reading about its general content, relevant tags and key notes.
2. permanent notes: the actual notes, emphasis in writing it in notes or 'blocks' instead of long pages writing so you can use the same 'block' on other writing, thus being a prolific writer.
3. reference notes: usage of tags and 'indexes' serves as organization for all your notes on the Zettelkasten.
4. fleeting notes: momentary notes, it can have any kind of utility as longs as it serves to make your thoughts/writing clear. it can be discarded or be some kind of skeleton to your permanent notes, you shouldn't leave it for more than 2 days, if you didn't use it it might be not that important for your work.

- It also presents the software to use it (personally recommend Obsidian or Logseq) or some indications to recreate it non-digitally.

- Apart from that it gives you

1. some sort brief (?) biography of Luhmann and why the Zettelkasten wasn't used before (it was a mystery before this book, outside a tiny bunch of german academics).
2. some thougths by the writer about writing, thinking and that sort.

My Review

Personally, I've read this book fully it back on 2020, it has around 176 pages and I think all of that could be nicely summarized on 40 pages at most. But the reason it receives my 4 stars instead of less is because this book was my foundation of thinking and writing, it has helped me to think more on categories and patternlike and think of note-taking as progresively instead of any other linear process nonsense for writing.

It changed the way I think about writing and boosted exponentially my cognitive processes: a. thinking clearly b. problem solving and c. methodology. This is due to my experience of almost 3 years writing though and not the book alone: I've been taking notes with the Zettelkasten foundation since 2020 June until this day and made a full writing system that was born out of the Zettelkasten and general influence from the tools for thought community.

A rec would be don't be too rigid with your note-taking system, your writings reflects your thoughts, by writing more everything will be clearer to you even though everything might not be 'clean' or pretty at the start.

This book is good, but not as good as the people in the Tools for Thought space make it seem, especially when I already know a lot about the topic of zettlekasten, this book added very little to what I already know, but nonetheless I do not regret reading it.

dnr

Key point: information storage is not the same skill as information retrieval.

“Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested”

This book definitely fell into the last category, at least for me: I had to read a few paragraphs, put it down, let it sink, and only then pick it up again... rinse and repeat.

The method described in the book is extremely interesting: trying to sum it up in my own words, it's about creating, over time, a web of notes (thoughts or references) that grows organically according to one's interests, feeding itself in doing so. These notes enable learning and thinking processes, storing thoughts so that they aren't lost, connecting them to other thoughts, and enabling one to review, contrast, or improve them over time.

The book is explicitly targeting “students, academics, and nonfiction book writers”: being none of those, I struggled to relate with some parts of it (which is why I didn't feel like giving it 5 stars).

It doesn't answer the title question. I have searched online about the implementation of the system but I still have questions. The last part where the author offer his services in coaching sessions seems to be the real way to get the answers.
I do like the theory behind it, but the execution of the book itself is bad.

Je suis embêté au moment d'écrire la critique de ce livre.

D'un côté, il présente de très bons concepts qui me seront probablement très utiles.

D'un autre côté, l'auteur a tendance à se répéter et la structure du livre manque de clarté. En prenant des notes comme le livre le préconise, je me suis rendu compte que certaines idées apparaissaient à plusieurs reprises dans des chapitres qui n'avaient rien à voir les uns avec les autres et que certaines parties étaient dépourvues d'idées nouvelles.

Cela m'a rendu la lecture un peu frustrante : de très bonnes idées dont je pressens tout le potentiel, mais dans une structure difficile à suivre. Heureusement que j'ai pris des notes pour digérer tout cela :-)

A great book that will teach you how to retain the maximum amount of information on what you read. It teaches also a lot about how our brains work and how we can use it at its full potential to memorize, reuse and connect informations in a powerful way.

I just wish I had read this book sooner.

I got a lot out of this book, but how to take smart notes wasn't one of them. I know what they are and how they work, but there were no examples of how to take them and I'm still not really sure how to start.

Pretty interesting ideas shared in this book. definitely took away some ideas on how to better take notes in my career, but I feel the book focused too much on taking notes for academic publishing. I'd give it a read though, it opens your mind to building an external brain mapping which might help everyone.

My only complaint is the title. This books is meant for everyone and everyone should read it, whether you're a student, book writer or not. Perhaps those groups of people will find it the most useful, I certainly wish I has read this before university. But I truly do believe that almost anyone will find the slip box useful in an extremely significant way.

I really can't explain how much I like this book but I like it in this unexplainable way because it gives you such a helpful and useful system for organising raw knowledge. Before this book I had never even considered that this is something that should be organised, even though in GTD terms it definitely has represented an open loop in my mind for a very long time.

All I can say is: the sooner you read this book the better. The more books and articles and youtube videos you realised you could have watched with a slip box will depress you all the more after you finish Smart Notes.

The arguments for having a slip box really do seem sound, and after reading the book I can't think of an alternative.

A merely ok overview of the now trendy Zettelkasten system. Really short book, but I couldn't find it in me to finish it. Author quotes a lot of loosely related science, so I guess he's putting his notes to some use.

I am giving this book 5 stars not because I liked it, but because it has significantly improved my scholarship — at least, in the last few days since I started reading it. We'll see if it continues!

The crux of the book is “write down insights you have, as you're having them, and then regularly reconcile these into a single place, and track insights you have while writing THOSE down. Rinse and repeat.” It's been a very helpful framework for thinking about big thoughts; rather than trying to keep it all jumbled up in your head, or rather than trying to serialize it into a coherent piece of prose, just write down the idea. You can shape it later. It's an excellent tool for decomposing hard problems that require lots of moving machinery to get your mind around. When you're actively searching for, and reveling in insights, learning becomes fun, and spending time doing scholarship becomes the norm. Life pro tip.

The only other good thing I'll say about this book is that it's short. I got through it in two sittings. Really and truly, the only content here is that thing I said above. Have ideas and write them down. The rest of this book is a bunch of bad pop-sci that is sorta tangentially related. I get the impression that Ahrens was Taking Smart Notes on all of the bad pop-sci books he read, and couldn't help but write about them here as filler. The useful part of this book could be a blog post, but you can't sell a blog post!

Unrelatedly, I feel like I've read all the same bad pop-sci books as Ahrens. I'm not sure if this a failure on his part, or on mine :(

I'll begrudgingly recommend this as an excellent book I've read this year, if just for its information content, and not for the book itself. Feel free to skip any paragraph whose first sentence doesn't mention a slip-box; you won't miss much.

I recently read the book How to Take Smart Notes by Sönke Ahrens. It explores the note-taking method of a famous German sociologist Niklas Luhmann, who published a *huge* amount of work in his lifetime (70 books and 400+ articles) - and it was quite possibly due to the efficient way he took notes.

Although the book was primarily aimed at students and academics who have to write papers, I still gleaned some really good lessons from it that I think are applicable to developers, especially those who write blog posts about what they learn.

Write notes in your own words

When studying and making notes, a common approach is to copy down definitions of things straight from the textbook or learning resource that you are using. If you’re attending a lecture or listening to a course online, and are a super-fast typist, you might even be able to directly quote what your instructor is saying straight into your notes.

The problem that comes with writing notes this way is that you’ve been able to skip the work of actually understanding the content. If you go back and re-read your notes a couple of times, this will create the illusion of understanding (as you will be able to recall bits of it in your memory) but saying it in your own words takes a bit more thought and brainpower to do.

When writing your notes, it is important that you do the work upfront of understanding the meaning, by making sure they’re written in your own words. This will save you the hassle of trying to understand it later.

Where writing notes can turn into a problem

You probably will have some sort of notebook (whether it’s paper-based or digital) where you jot down all your notes. If you’re organised, you may even have some sort of tagging system too! Keeping notes is good practice, but problems can arise depending on what you do with the notes after you’ve written them.

Over time as you learn and note down new things, your collection of notes will grow bigger and bigger. It can start to be a bit overwhelming, especially if your notes are disjointed and all over the place without much clear organisation. If you’re looking through your notes for a new topic to blog about, it may be hard to find something worth blogging about.

Even worse - you may have documented the solution to a particularly gnarly problem you solved at work (which would make for some great blog content!) but after coming back to it later you’re finding it hard to turn it into a blog. What made solving this problem so difficult, exactly? Why did we need to solve it in the first place?

When you quickly jot down notes, you’ll probably skip writing down all of the details, because in that moment, you can remember all of it just fine. But when you come back to these notes later, you may have completely forgotten the context in which they were written, and thus these notes will lose some of their value.

Understanding and writing down your notes gets you two thirds of the way there. But there's a third thing you need to do to write truly effective notes. Step three involves something called a **slip-box**.

What is the slip-box (or Zettelkasten) method?

Soon after you’ve jotted down your notes you need to rewrite your notes into “permanent notes” that will live in your slip-box.

A slip-box, also known as a “card index” or “zettelkasten” in German, is where Niklas Luhmann would store all of his permanent notes on index cards. Today, you can also accomplish the same sort of thing thanks to using various software, some even specifically made for Zettelkasten.

Each of these notes shouldn’t be excessively long - Luhmann kept things succinct by only using one side of each index card. But at the same time, he made sure that the notes themselves were written properly with full sentences, and were able to be understood without any additional context.

As he created more notes, he would find links to other notes he had created, and with a numbering/lettering system would denote certain notes as “sub notes” of other notes. If a note was related to two separate notes, it might be made a sub note of one, and the linkage to the other note would be noted on the index card itself.

The act of writing these notes (properly) and finding the connections between them and other notes isn’t easy. It’s a lot harder than just jotting down notes in a notebook and calling it a day. But by doing this expensive brainpower up front, you’re essentially building up a library of interconnected knowledge from the ground-up.

As you build up your knowledge library and find the relations between bits of knowledge, the real beauty of this system is that it will organically let you find topics to write about - they essentially will have written themselves because you will have done the work upfront of explaining it in your own words, and connecting it to other notes in your slip-box.

Implementing the slip-box method as a developer

Prior to reading this book, my collection of notes was messily stored in Dropbox Paper without much categorisation, and missing lots of context. In some cases, it was just a link to an article or some documentation with a "TIL" written underneath it.

I've taken a little look around at what's available to store and write my notes in, and for now I've settled on Notion. I've started to make the effort to convert some of my "messy" notes into "proper" ones, and I'm finding that I'm actually skipping the act of putting the permanent notes into a slip-box and going straight to creating blog draft out of this content. So I can't yet comment on the effectiveness of properly using a slip-box but for me at least it is providing some results!

If I do find this approach useful in the long term, I'll be sure to write up a post detailing my experiences. In the meantime, I'd love to hear about your note-taking experiences - what does and doesn't work for you?

Thanks for reading!

As far as I can tell, Ahrens‘ Book makes Luhmann's slip-box (Zettelkasten) tangible the most.

Intended for academia, Ahrens provides insights for any style of writing, long-form and short-form, fiction and non-fiction.