How to Take Smart Notes: One Simple Technique to Boost Writing, Learning and Thinking

“Getting Things Done”

Good students also look beyond the obvious. They peek over the fences of their own disciplines – and once you have done that, you cannot go back and do what everyone else is doing, even if you now must deal with heterogeneous ideas that come without a manual on how they might fit together.

A good structure enables flow, the state in which you get so completely immersed in your work that you lose track of time and can just keep on going as the work becomes effortless (Csikszentmihalyi, 1975).

A good structure is something you can trust.

Writing is not what follows research, learning or studying, it is the medium of all this work.

Having a meaningful and well-defined task beats willpower every time.

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.

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.

3.1 The Toolbox We need four tools: • Something to write with and something to write on (pen and paper will do) • A reference management system (Zotero, Citavi or whatever works best for you) • The slip-box (paper or digital). • An editor (Word, LaTeX, Google Docs or whatever works best for you).