How to Take Smart Notes

Highlighted Quotes

• Page 16: If we work in an environment that is flexible enough to accommodate our work rhythm, we don’t need to struggle with resistance.
• Page 16: 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
• Page 17: Intuitively, most people do not expect much from simple ideas.
• Page 20: We need a reliable and simple external structure to think in that compensates for the limitations of our brains.
• Page 22: Writing is, without dispute, the best facilitator for thinking, reading, learning, understanding and generating ideas we have.
• Page 22: You have to externalise your ideas, you have to write.
• Page 22: If we write, it is more likely that we understand what we read and remember what we learn and that our thoughts make sense.
• Page 22: Thinking, reading, learning, understanding and generating ideas is the main work of everyone who studies, does research or writes. If you write to improve all of these activities, you have a strong tailwind going for you. If you take your notes in a smart way, it will propel you forward.
• Page 22: Always have something at hand to write with to capture every idea that pops into your mind.
• Page 24: Do not brainstorm for a topic. Look into the slip-box instead to see where chains of notes have developed and ideas have been built up to clusters.
• Page 28: Good tools do not add features and more options to what we already have, but help to reduce distractions from the main work, which here is thinking.
• Page 32: Studying, done properly, is research,
• Page 34: An idea kept private is as good as one you never had.
• Page 34: There is no such thing as a history of unwritten ideas.
• Page 36: If you change your mind about the importance of writing, you will also change your mind about everything else.
• Page 36: Even if you decide never to write a single line of a manuscript, you will improve your reading, thinking and other intellectual skills just by doing everything as if nothing counts other than writing.
• Page 36: We tend to think that big transformations have to start with an equally big idea.
• Page 39: everything is streamlined towards one thing only: insight that can be published.
• Page 39: The slip-box is designed to present you with ideas you have already forgotten, allowing your brain to focus on thinking instead of remembering.
• Page 41: without a permanent reservoir of ideas, you will not be able to develop any major ideas over a longer period of time because you are restricting yourself either to the length of a single project or the capacity of your memory. Exceptional ideas need much more than that.
• Page 42: Permanent notes, on the other hand, are written in a way that can still be understood even when you have forgotten the context they are taken from.
• Page 42: That is why the threshold to write an idea down has to be as low as possible, but it is equally crucial to elaborate on them within a day or two.
• Page 47: Taking smart notes is the precondition to break with the linear order.
• Page 47: the problem of finding a topic is replaced by the problem of having too many topics to write about.
• Page 57: Usually, when we think about attention, we only think about focused attention – something that requires willpower to sustain.
• Page 62: Unfortunately, the most common way people organise their writing is by making plans.
• Page 62: Don’t make plans. Become an expert.
• Page 62: 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.
• Page 63: To become an expert, we need the freedom to make our own decisions and all the necessary mistakes that help us learn. Like bicycling, it can only be learned by doing.
• Page 64: Teachers tend to mistake the ability to follow (their) rules with the ability to make the right choices in real situations.
• Page 64: Experts, on the other hand, have internalised the necessary knowledge so they don’t have to actively remember rules or think consciously about their choices.
• Page 65: 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.
• Page 65: Real experts, Flyvbjerg writes unambiguously, don’t make plans
• Page 66: When we try to remember something, say items on a shopping list, we just keep repeating the items mentally, instead of storing them temporarily in some corner of our brains where we can pick them up later and think about something more interesting in the meantime.
• Page 67: we don’t actually have to finish tasks to convince our brains to stop thinking about them. All we have to do is to write them down in a way that convinces us that it will be taken care of.
• Page 68: The brain doesn’t distinguish between an actual finished task and one that is postponed by taking a note. By writing something down, we literally get it out of our heads.
• Page 72: To get a good paper written, you only have to rewrite a good draft; to get a good draft written, you only have to turn a series of notes into a continuous text. And as a series of notes is just the rearrangement of notes you already have in your slip-box, all you really have to do is have a pen in your hand when you read.
• Page 72: The slip-box is an idea generator that develops in lockstep with your own intellectual development.
• Page 72: Drawing from the slip-box to develop a draft is more like a dialogue than a mechanical act.
• Page 78: First, you basically fix your present understanding as the outcome instead of using it as the starting point, priming yourself for one-sided perception.
• Page 78: If insight becomes a threat to your academic or writing success, you are doing it wrong.
• Page 79: One of the most important habitual changes when starting to work with the slip-box is moving the attention from the individual project with our preconceived ideas towards the open connections within the slip-box.
• Page 83: “The principle is that you must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool,”
• Page 84: We have to choose between feeling smarter or becoming smarter. And while writing down an idea feels like a detour, extra time spent, not writing it down is the real waste of time, as it renders most of what we read as ineffectual.
• Page 87: “If learning is your goal, cramming is an irrational act”
• Page 88: What good readers can do is spot the limitations of a particular approach and see what is not mentioned in the text.
• Page 92: When we take permanent notes, it is much more a form of thinking within the medium of writing and in dialogue with the already existing notes within the slip-box than a protocol of preconceived ideas.
• Page 92: The brain, as Kahneman writes, is “a machine for jumping to conclusions” (Kahneman, 2013, 79). And a machine that is designed for jumping to conclusions is not the kind of machine you want to rely on when it comes to facts and rationality
• Page 92: it is not possible to think systematically without writing
• Page 96: forgetting actually facilitates long-term learning.
• Page 104: The fact that too much order can impede learning has become more and more known
• Page 105: “Every note is just an element in the network of references and back references in the system, from which it gains its quality.”
• Page 106: As an extension of our own memory, the slip-box is the medium we think in, not something we think about.
• Page 106: The note sequences are the clusters where order emerges from complexity. We extract information from different linear sources and mix it all up and shake it until new patterns emerge. Then, we form these patterns into new linear texts.
• Page 106: the references between the notes are much more important than the references from the index to a single note.
• Page 107: It can surprise and remind us of long-forgotten ideas and trigger new ones.
• Page 109: Assigning keywords is much more than just a bureaucratic act. It is a crucial part of the thinking process, which often leads to a deeper elaboration of the note itself and the connection to other notes.
• Page 112: The search for meaningful connections is a crucial part of the thinking process
• Page 113: A paradox can be a sign that we haven’t thought thoroughly enough about a problem or, conversely, that we exhausted the possibilities of a certain paradigm. Finally, oppositions help to shape ideas by providing contrast.
• Page 116: Munger writes: “Well, the first rule is that you can’t really know anything if you just remember isolated facts and try and bang ’em back. If the facts don’t hang together on a latticework of theory, you don’t have them in a usable form. You’ve got to have models in your head.
• Page 116: we build up a latticework of mental models instead of just remembering isolated facts and try and bang ’em back.
• Page 116: If we practice learning not as a pure accumulation of knowledge, but as an attempt to build up a latticework of theories and mental models to which information can stick, we enter a virtuous circle where learning facilitates learning.
• Page 118: all good ideas need time.
• Page 119: intuition is not the opposition to rationality and knowledge, it is rather the incorporated, practical side of our intellectual endeavours, the sedimented experience on which we build our conscious, explicit knowledge
• Page 119: Most often, innovation is not the result of a sudden moment of realization, anyway, but incremental steps toward improvement.
• Page 129: Without structure, we cannot differentiate, compare or experiment with ideas. Without restrictions, we would never be forced to make the decision on what is worth pursuing and what is not. Indifference is the worst environment for insight.
• Page 130: Testing students for memorised knowledge does not give much indication about their understanding, and the fact that someone came up with a lot of ideas during a brainstorming session does not give much indication about their quality.
• Page 131: The brain more easily remembers information that it encountered recently, which has emotions attached to it and is lively, concrete or specific. Ideally, it rhymes as well
• Page 131: More people in a brainstorming group usually come up with less good ideas and restrict themselves inadvertently to a narrower range of topics
• Page 132: It is the one decision in the beginning, to make writing the mean and the end of the whole intellectual endeavour, that changed the role of topic-finding completely.
• Page 135: The ability to change the direction of our work opportunistically is a form of control that is completely different from the attempt to control the circumstances by clinging to a plan.
• Page 135: It is not just about feeling in control, it is about setting up the work in a way that we really are in control. And the more control we have to steer our work towards what we consider interesting and relevant, the less willpower we have to put into getting things done.
• Page 136: Organizing the work so we can steer our projects in the most promising direction not only allows us to stay focused for longer, but also to have more fun – and that is a fact
• Page 136: It is vital to have a separate, project-specific place to sort your notes for a particular project.
• Page 143: The trick is not to try to break with old habits and also not to use willpower to force oneself to do something else, but to strategically build up new habits that have a chance to replace the old ones.