Author: [[Sönke Ahrens]] Publication date: February 24, 2017 Tags: #book #practical #ToProcess *** - [[#About this book|About this book]] - [[#Note-taking as a system|Note-taking as a system]] - [[#Note-taking as a system#Why should you build a note-taking system?|Why should you build a note-taking system?]] - [[#Note-taking as a system#How to build a reliable note-taking system|How to build a reliable note-taking system]] - [[#The Art of Writing|The Art of Writing]] - [[#The Art of Writing#Why you should write a lot|Why you should write a lot]] - [[#The Art of Writing#How to write|How to write]] - [[#How to take very good notes|How to take very good notes]] - [[#Memory and the human brain|Memory and the human brain]] - [[#Memory and the human brain#How the brain works|How the brain works]] - [[#Memory and the human brain#On Memory|On Memory]] - [[#Memory and the human brain#Cognitive biases|Cognitive biases]] - [[#The Importance of curiosity|The Importance of curiosity]] - [[#On Society|On Society]] ## About this book *** This is a practical book. It offers a modern, note-based approach to thinking, writing and learning. It is structured by the author as follows: 1. Main argument: writing is the medium where all thinking happens 2. Luhmann's slip-box system 3. High-level principles for a great note-taking system 4. How a note-taking system can solve common problems with task management, learning, studying and so on ## Note-taking as a system *** ### Why should you build a note-taking system? **Systems beat willpower** (4-5) Relying on workflow, structure and systems instead of willpower is key to enable productivity. **Achieving great outcomes** (15) Great outcomes are not the product of great effort, but of great and flexible systems. **Capturing notes** (29) Capturing notes should be simple and frictionless. **Critical mass** (26) Enough notes will build into critical mass and generate more and more ideas on their own. **Habit building** (9) Smart note-taking should be approached as habit building. ### How to build a reliable note-taking system *** **Start from principles** (8) A good note-taking system is simple and principle-based. **Goal alignement** (38) Goal alignment is key to propel change forward and to unlock the full potential of any system. **Trust your system** (11) All parts of your note-taking system should work together seeminglessly and be 100% trustworthy. **Luhmann's slip-boxes** (17-18) Luhmann had two slip-boxes: 1. A bibliographical slip-box with references and brief contextual notes, 2. A main slip-box with brief notes, one per idea, to collect and mature his thoughts. **You only need three tools** (28-29) To implement Luhmann's system, you onlyy need three tools: 1. An inbox tand a way to collect new notes without friction, 2. A reference management, or bibliographical storage, 3. A permanent notes storage. **Indexing your notes** (19) Your note-taking system should include an index and a few notes serving as entry points to your topics of interest. **Using your entry points** (107-108) In your note-taking system, entry points from the index are not a macro classification or overview of your notes. They are notes by themselves, bound to evolve, to think and designed to help you retrieve information. **Shaping our mental models** (112) Frequently toying with our note-taking system in search for meaningful connections will over time structure it and shape our own mental models in the process. **How to find insight** (24) If you're using the slip-box system properly, insight will emerge from the bottom up. Whenever you have multiple curiosities at once, always pick the path of the most promising insight. ## The Art of Writing *** ### Why you should write a lot **Writing is the medium** (2) For knowledge workers especially, writing is the medium where the thinking happens. **Thought transforms itself** (46) Thought transforms itself over time as you're gaining new knowledge. **Knowledge worker activities** (21) As a knowledge worker, your main activities should be thinking, reading and ideating, which will gradually build up your notes stack. **Writing intention** (36) Always practice your intellectual skills with a writing intention in mind. **Idea lifecycle** (35) Reading a lot provides you with material to write with. Following your curiosity provides you with fresh ideas and new problems to solve. Writing a lot provides you with multiple occasions to get feedback on your ideas. **Share your ideas** (34) Ideas exist to be shared with the world. They don't have any value otherwise. ### How to write **Simplicity is power** (36) Much like systems, the simpler the idea, the most powerful it's likely to be. **Writing is a self-feeding process** (48) When taking smart notes, writing becomes a self-feeding process instead of a linear one and this process generates an abundance of ideas, arguments and new questions to fuel your curiosity. **Extract, compress, distill** (80-82) A great thinker/writer is able to extract the gist (essential) of a text, to compress it to its essence and to finally distill it in a simple, clear and concise fashion, with their own words. **Writing a paper** (25) When you want to write on something, collect all of your relevant notes for the subject you have in mind. Then, organize them to form an outline, make a first draft, edit and finish by proofreading your piece of content. **Compression and expansion cycle** (130) The writing act is an alternance between compression and expansion states. First we compress an author's thought into its gist. Then, we expand it within our note-taking system by making multiple connections. Next, we'll compress several notes into an outline. And finally we'll expand our outline into an intelligible output with our own argument. **Writing habit for fiction writers** (89-90) According to [[Anthony Trollope]], setting a writing habit with a clear goal and a timeframe every day is a good way for a fiction writer to propel their work forward. ## How to take very good notes *** **Taking a good note** (12) Good notes are centralized and rich in context. (18) A good note is brief, written with your own words and relevantly connected to as many other notes as possible. (94) When you encounter important pieces of insight, you should always explain in your notes why it is important to you. (155) Your notes should talk to each other and engage in rich dialog, like people having a real conversation. **Sort your notes by usability** (38) Instead of sorting your notes by categories, it makes more sense to sort them by usability. **Closing Loops** (68) When taking notes, always be mindful of including any leads toward further exploration or any required next steps as this unfinished business could either clutter your mind otherwise, or lead you to some extraordinary insight eventually. **Fleeting notes**: (22-23) Capture every idea on a temporary note. Each temporary note should be stored in some kind of inbox and deleted immediately after processing. **Literature notes:** (23) Notes about some content you've consumed. Take note on any interesting or exploitable content according to your own areas of interest. Your literature notes should be short, very selective and written in your own words. The place to store them is your reference system. **Permanent notes:** (23-24) You should review your fleeting and literature notes every other day or so and develop ideas from there. Your permanent notes could be ideas, questions, arguments and so on, basically any product of thought. These notes go into your main slip-box, behind related notes. Make sure to add any relevant links and to include one from your Index or from an entry point for one of your areas of interest. **Project notes:** (40) Notes with a limited lifetime, as they are only relevant to specific projects and will be archived after its completion. These notes should be stored in a folder dedicated to each project. ## Memory and the human brain *** ### How the brain works **Brain design** (20) Our brain is not designed to think very well on its own. **Multitasking doesn't exist:** (56-57) We simply switch quickly our attention from one task to another, which is highly inefficient. **Free up your brain power** (39) The slip-box is designed to produce high output while freeing up your brain power so that you can spend most of your time thinking. **Ego depletion** (69-71) Willpower (or ego) is a limited ressource that depletes over time, notably by self-control effort and decision making. To fight ego depletion, you should standardize your environment so that it minimizes the amount of decisions you have to make on a daily basis. Conversely, renewal activities such as taking breaks, naps or short walks will resplenish your ego/willpower. **Zeigarnik effect:** (68) A task clutters our mind until it's either completed or dumped into a trusted external system. **Opportunistic approach** (25) You should always work on multiple different ideas at once, with an opportunistic approach. ### On Memory **Remembering things** (67) To remember things, we need to understand them. And to understand things, we need to connect them with our existing knowledge. **Active inhibition:** (98) Our brain forces us to 'forget' memories. In reality, those memories are just cleaned of our mental space to avoid information overwhelm, but they are still stored within our brains. ### Cognitive biases **Confirmation bias:** (77) Human tendancy to look or people, arguments and so on that validate their already existing set of beliefs. **Feature-positive effect:** (114) We tend to trust information at hand or most recently ingested as the most relevant, isn't when this piece of information is not accurate, meaningful or actually relevant. ## The Importance of curiosity *** **Growth mindset:** (51-52) Constantly looking for learning opportunities and getting pleasure out of the process instead of focusing on the outcome only. Ths involves both a system rich in feedback loops and a mindset prone to receive constructive feedback while taking action over it. **Challenging your beliefs** (76) You should primarily seek out arguments going against your own beliefs. That is how you will encounter surprises, correct your thinking along the way and most importantly work your way toward insight. **Improvisation as a learning tool** (62) Improvisation and opportunistic prioritization are keys to trigger rich learning opportunities. **Expertise brings intuition** (63) Expertise comes through trial and error. It grants you strong and accurate intuition that makes you more effective and more productive than your peers. **Clusters of material** (105) Topics and subtopics living in your note-taking system will be dictated by organic clusturization of your notes, which themselves reflect your own curiosity and areas of interest. (48) Following your curiosity when picking new material to consume basically guarantees you'll accumulate clusters of material around your areas of interest and your most promising questions. ## On Society *** **Failure of the educational system** (85-86) By prearranging knowledge into simplified and organized chunks, teachers in standard school systems are depriving students from the opportunity to connect new information to their existing knowledge and to make sense of what they learn. In fact, the educational system prevents students from owning the knowledge, thus from learning in the long run. **Remembering vs Understanding** (100) Education focuses on remembering by repetition instead of creating meaningful connections allowing us to understand and then retrieve information easily. **Less is more** (127) Society usually showcases broad choices as a good thing, while less choices can in fact reduce our mental load and make us both happier and more productive.