Notes on How to Take Smart Notes

Originally published on substack.

For a while now I have been trying to write book reviews for all the books I read, that has not been going well(I couldn’t muster the willpower to write them). This time I’m posting my notes on a book as is.

The way I was taking notes changed closer to the end of the book, initially I was writing idea snippets and later I was trying to write developed ideas. Some of the idea snippets I was able to expand into developed ideas, other snippets I dropped, since they either didn’t make sense or I realised I didn’t care to keep them, and the rest I kept as is, they make sense to me (for now), but I don’t care enough to expand them into developed ideas.

What follows are my notes from a note taking program. Text in double square braces(like [[common knowledge]]) and text prefixed by a hashtag(like #ontology) link to other notes I have, you don’t get to see them, sorry. Otherwise the format is a nested list, each level of initial indentation followed by a dash represents a new level of nesting, hopefully that’s somewhat readable.

Notes

• Ahrens, Sönke. How to Take Smart Notes: One Simple Technique to Boost Writing, Learning and Thinking: For Students, Academics and Nonfiction Book Writers. CreateSpace, 2017.
  • ISBN-13 -> 9781542866507
• Ideas
  • Writing is an essential tool for thinking. Brain is not a great tool for building ideas. When you think you have an idea, you only have a beginning of an idea. If you try to write down your idea for consumption by another person, you might find that you don’t really understand what your idea is, how it works, and why anyone would agree with it. Writing down ideas is a tool for finding flaws in these ideas.
  • If you read without writing, you skip the crucial step of building ideas based on the text, you don’t ensure understanding.
  • If you can’t write about something, means you are not interested in it, you don’t have questions you want to answer by writing. By extension, if you can’t write based on what you are reading, you are not interested in what you are reading.
  • Abandoning writing that isn’t carrying itself is a good idea. Procrastination and fear come from doing something you don’t want to do.
  • You can only write about things you care about, so if you read with a focus on writing, you read with a focus on things you care about.
  • It is useful to have a way of writing down idea snippets (temporary notes) whenever (and especially when reading) so as to keep yourself from forgetting them but also from distracting yourself from whatever it is you were doing. It is important to regularly convert idea snippets into developed ideas (permanent notes) or to drop them.
  • Idea snippets are not useful after some time, the context that made the idea snippet meaningful will be forgotten, and the note will become useless. Developed ideas that include the context necessary to understand them are best.
  • Unfinished tasks linger in the mind, occupying precious and severely limited mind-space. It is important to either finish tasks or checkpoint them such that you would actually return to complete them. If you checkpoint something but feel like you will not pick the task again, commit to dropping the task.
  • When writing a note, think about contextual retrieval. Will I stumble upon this note when I think about related ideas and concepts?
  • Questions for permanent note writing: why do I care? why is this true?
    • Compare [[Work Questions]].
  • Learning is the process of creating meaningful connections. Recalling meaningless data is hard. Recalling a fact is easier if you can recall the cause of the fact (or the consequence, or anything else related to the fact).
  • When writing long-form text it is important to separate wordsmithing from checking that what is written makes sense. Since you just wrote the text, the context is still fresh in you mind, and instead of seeing the text as someone else would see it, you see your own thoughts still embedded in your mind.
    • This idea is also prominent in Stephen King’s “On Writing”.
  • Don’t commit to conclusions, commit to exploring the idea space. If all evidence is pointing in the same direction, actively seeking out evidence pointing in the different direction and interrogating it can produce more questions and more insight.
  • You can learn faster, if you start by failing to answer a question.
    • Arnold, Kathleen M., and Kathleen B. McDermott. ‘Test-Potentiated Learning: Distinguishing between Direct and Indirect Effects of Tests.’ Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, vol. 39, no. 3, 2013, pp. 940–45. DOI.org (Crossref), https://doi.org/10.1037/a0029199.
      • The results indicate that unsuccessful retrieval attempts enhance the effectiveness of subsequent restudy, demonstrating that tests do potentiate subsequent learning.
  • Remembering that arteries have thicker walls than veins is hard by itself. Why would arterial walls be thick or thin? Heart pumps blood through arteries, so arteries must hold pressure. Holding pressure requires thick (or hard) walls.
    • This is a very memorable example, it maps well into common knowledge.
  • Naming, that is, pointing to something, is important for making connections. It is hard to connect two ideas if they are talking about the same concept (or concepts that are close to each other in concept-space) using different words.
    • Example of same (or close) concepts: [[common knowledge]] and [[common sense]]. #ontology
• Quotes
  • Introduction
    • Every task that is interesting, meaningful and well-defined will be done, because there is no conflict between long- and short-term interests.
    • The research on willpower or “ego depletion” is in a bit of turmoil at the moment. But it is safe to say that using willpower is a terrible strategy to get things done in the long run. For an overview: https://replicationindex.wordpress.com/2016/04/18/is-replicability-report-ego-depletionreplicability-report-of-165-ego-depletion-articles/
  • Chapter 1 -> Everything you need to know
    • Even hard work can be fun as long as it is aligned with our intrinsic goals and we feel in control. The problems arise when we set up our work in such an inflexible way that we can’t adjust it when things change and become arrested in a process that seems to develop a life of its own.
    • Studies on highly successful people have proven again and again that success is not the result of strong willpower and the ability to overcome resistance, but rather the result of smart working environments that avoid resistance in the first place (cf. Neal et al. 2012; Painter et al. 2002; Hearn et al. 1998).
    • We need a reliable and simple external structure to think in that compensates for the limitations of our brains.
  • Chapter 2 -> Everything you need to do
    • The idea is not to collect, but to develop ideas, arguments and discussions.
  • Chapter 5 -> Writing is the only thing that matters
    • It will change the way you read as well: You will become more focused on the most relevant aspects, knowing that you cannot write down everything. You will read in a more engaged way, because you cannot rephrase anything in your own words if you don’t understand what it is about.
  • Chapter 6 -> Simplicity is paramount
    • In which context will I want to stumble upon it again?
    • Instead of focusing on the in-between steps and trying to make a science out of underlining systems, reading techniques or excerpt writing, everything is streamlined towards one thing only: insight that can be published.
  • Chapter 7 -> Nobody ever starts from scratch
    • By focusing on what is interesting and keeping written track of your own intellectual development, topics, questions and arguments will emerge from the material without force.
    • the problem of finding a topic is replaced by the problem of having too many topics to write about.
    • Who can blame you for procrastinating if you find yourself stuck with a topic you decided on blindly and now have to stick with it as the deadline is approaching?
    • If your first chosen topic turns out to be not as interesting, you will just move on and your notes will cluster around something else.
  • Chapter 8 -> Let the work carry you forward
    • Sometimes we feel like our work is draining our energy and we can only move forward if we put more and more energy into it. But sometimes it is the opposite.
    • Creating satisfying, repeatable experiences with sports. It doesn’t matter what her clients are doing – running, walking, team sports, gym workouts or bicycling to work.
  • Chapter 9 -> Separate and interlocking tasks
    • If we proofread a manuscript and don’t manage to get enough distance from ourselves as authors, we will only see our thoughts, not the actual text.
    • While proofreading requires more focused attention, finding the right words during writing requires much more floating attention.
    • Don’t make plans. Become an expert.
    • Zeigarnik effect -> Open tasks tend to occupy our short-term memory – until they are done. That is why we get so easily distracted by thoughts of unfinished tasks, regardless of their importance.
    • All we have to do is to write them down in a way that convinces us that it will be taken care of. That’s right: The brain doesn’t distinguish between an actual finished task and one that is postponed by taking a note.
    • “Our results suggest that a broad assortment of actions make use of the same resource. Acts of self-control, responsible decision making, and active choice seem to interfere with other such acts that follow soon after. The implication is that some vital resource of the self becomes depleted by such acts of volition. To be sure, we assume that this resource is commonly replenished, although the factors that might hasten or delay the replenishment remain unknown, along with the precise nature of this resource.” (Baumeister et al., 1998, 1263f)
  • Chapter 10 -> Read for understanding
    • whenever a published fact, a new observation or thought came across me, which was opposed to my general results, to make a memorandum of it without fail and at once; for I had found by experience that such facts and thoughts were far more apt to escape from the memory than favorable ones.
    • And as soon we focus on the content of the slip-box, dis-confirming data becomes suddenly very attractive, because it opens up more possible connections and discussions within the slip-box, while mere confirming data does not.
    • When we try to answer a question before we know how to, we will later remember the answer better, even if our attempt failed (Arnold and McDermott 2013).
  • Chapter 11 -> Take smart notes
    • But the first question I asked myself when it came to writing the first permanent note for the slip-box was: What does this all mean for my own research and the questions I think about in my slip-box? This is just another way of asking: Why did the aspects I wrote down catch my interest?
    • Without a very thorough filter, our brains would constantly be flooded by memories, making it impossible to focus on anything in our surroundings.
    • But he didn’t realise that he was stripping the learning process from the very thing that is learning, which is making meaningful connections.
    • Stein et al. illustrate how commonsensical this is on the example of a biology novice who learns the difference between veins and arteries: “[he] may find it difficult at first to understand and remember that arteries have thick walls, are elastic, and do not have valves, whereas veins are less elastic, have thinner walls, and have valves” (ibid.). But by elaborating a little bit on this difference and asking the right questions, like “why?” the students can connect this knowledge with prior knowledge, like their understanding of pressure and the function of the heart. Just by making the connection to the common knowledge that the heart presses the blood into the arteries, they immediately know that these walls need to sustain more pressure, which means they need to be thicker than veins, in which the blood flows back to the heart with less pressure. And, of course, this makes valves necessary to keep the blood from flowing back. Once understood, the attributes and differences are almost impossible to disentangle from the knowledge of veins and arteries.
  • Chapter 12 -> Develop Ideas
    • The way people choose their keywords shows clearly if they think like an archivist or a writer. Do they wonder where to store a note or how to retrieve it?
    • If the facts don’t hang together on a latticework of theory, you don’t have them in a usable form.
    • A truly wise person is not someone who knows everything, but someone who is able to make sense of things by drawing from an extended resource of interpretation schemes. This stands in harsh contrast to the common but not-so-wise belief that we need to learn from experience. It is much better to learn from the experiences of others – especially when this experience is reflected on and turned into versatile “mental models” that can be used in different situations.
  • Chapter 13 -> Share your insight
    • Every time we read something, we make a decision on what is worth writing down and what is not.
  • Afterword
    • Learning, thinking and writing should not be about accumulating knowledge, but about becoming a different person with a different way of thinking. This is done by questioning one’s own thinking routines in the light of new experiences and facts.