How to Take Smart Notes: One Simple Technique to Boost Writing, Learning and Thinking – for Students, Academics and Nonfiction Book Writers

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.” (Baumeis

remember how much effort teachers still put into the attempt to make learning easier for their students by prearranging information, sorting it into modules, categories and themes. By doing that, they achieve the opposite of what they intend to do. They make it harder for the student to learn because they set everything up for reviewing, taking awa

psychologists used to tend to agree on a very specific number when it came to short-term memory: We can hold a maximum of seven things in our head at the same time, plus/minus two (Miller 1956).

The better you become in doing this, the quicker you can jot down notes, which are still helpful. Luhmann’s notes are very condensed (Schmidt 2015). With practice comes the ability to find the right words to express something in the best possible way, which means in a simple, but not simplified way. Not only will the readers of your text appreciate

Writing brief accounts on the main ideas of a text instead of collecting quotes.

The moment we stop making plans is the moment we start to learn. It is a matter of practice to become good at generating insight and write good texts by choosing and moving flexibly between the most important and promising tasks, judged by nothing else than the circumstances of the given situation. It is similar to the moment where we had the train

Each added bit of information, filtered only by our interest, is a contribution to our future understanding, thinking and writing. And the best ideas are usually the ones we haven’t anticipated anyway.

The classic role model would be Charles Darwin. He forced himself to write down (and therefore elaborate on) the arguments that were the most critical of his theories. “I had [...] during many years followed a golden rule, namely, that whenever a published fact, a new observation or thought came across me, which was opposed to my general results, t

The prevalence of linear and learner-centred approaches also lead to the common misunderstanding about the use of the slip-box as a tool that can be used without changing the work routines around it. It is then often used simply as an archive where you just take out what you put in earlier. This, of course, will lead to disappointment. If we are ju