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.

Make fleeting notes.

The second is what psychologists call the mere-exposure effect: doing something many times makes us believe we have become good at it – completely independent of our actual performance (Bornstein 1989). We unfortunately tend to confuse familiarity with skill.

Don’t wait until you have everything together. Rather, try ideas out and give yourself enough time to go back to reading and note-taking to improve your ideas, arguments and their structure.

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.

To achieve a critical mass, it is crucial to distinguish clearly between three types of notes: 1. Fleeting notes, which are only reminders of information, can be written in any kind of way and will end up in the trash within a day or two. 2. Permanent notes, which will never be thrown away and contain the necessary information in a permanently

1998). Instead of struggling with adverse dynamics, highly productive people deflect resistance, very much like judo champions. This is not just about having the right mindset, it is also about having the

Usually, when we think about attention, we only think about focused attention – something that requires willpower to sustain. This is not too surprising, because this is what most psychologists, philosophers and neuroscientists used to have in mind when they talked about attention (Bruya 2010, 5). Today, research differentiates between multiple

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