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

Change is possible when the solution appears to be simple.

2. Make literature notes. Whenever you read something, make notes about the content. Write down what you don’t want to forget or think you might use in your own thinking or writing. Keep it very short, be extremely selective, and use your own words. Be extra selective with quotes – don’t copy them to skip the step of really understanding what they mea

Whenever we explore a new, unfamiliar subject, our notes will tend to be more extensive, but we shouldn’t get nervous about it, as this is the deliberate practice of understanding we cannot skip. Sometimes it is necessary to slowly work our way through a difficult text and sometimes it is enough to reduce a whole book to a single sentence.

The challenge of writing as well as learning is therefore not so much to learn, but to understand, as we will already have learned what we understand.

The beauty of this approach is that we co-evolve with our slip-boxes: we build the same connections in our heads while we deliberately develop them in our slip-box – and make it easier to remember the facts as they now have a latticework we can attach them to. If we practice learning not as a pure accumulation of knowledge, but as an attempt to bui

A good indication that a note has been left unprocessed too long is when you no longer understand what you meant or it appears banal. In the first case, you forgot what it was supposed to remind you of. In the second case, you forgot the context that gave it its meaning.

But like in professional chess, the intuition of professional academic and nonfiction writing can also only be gained by systematic exposure to feedback loops and experience, which means that success in academic writing depends to a great degree on the organization of its practical side. The workflow around the slip-box is not a prescription that t

Good keywords are usually not already mentioned as words in the note. Assume I have the note “A sudden increase of ad-hoc theories is for Kuhn a sign that a normal-science phase might be in crisis (Kuhn 1967, 96).” A fitting keyword might be “paradigm change,” but that phrase is not in the note and therefore would not be suggested by the program.

The best way to deal with complexity is to keep things as simple as possible and to follow a few basic principles.