How to Take Smart Notes

Text in black are quotes; text in green are my notes. I sometimes write in Spanish.

• Getting something that is already written into another written piece is incomparably easier than assembling everything in your mind and then trying to retrieve it from there. #

  • Lee, toma notas, piensa y transcribe de un contexto a otro, con tus propias palabras.

• The quality of a paper and the ease with which it is written depends more than anything on what you have done in writing before you even made a decision on the topic. #

  • Uno piensa, por lo que le han enseñado en la escuela, que lo primero que hay que hacer al momento de escribir un ensayo es elegir un tema. Pero en realidad es mucho más fácil empezar si se tienen primero notas e ideas de lo que se lee, y, con una cantidad crítica de notas, poder obtener conexiones entre ellas para decidir sobre qué escribir.

• Having a clear structure to work in is completely different from making plans about something. If you make a plan, you impose a structure on yourself; it makes you inflexible. To keep going according to plan, you have to push yourself and employ willpower. This is not only demotivating, but also unsuitable for an open-ended process like research, thinking or studying in general, where we have to adjust our next steps with every new insight, understanding or achievement – which we ideally have on a regular basis and not just as an exception. #

• Having read more does not automatically mean having more ideas. Especially in the beginning, it means having fewer ideas to work with, because you know that others have already thought of most of them. #

• 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. #

• 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 #

• Intuitively, most people do not expect much from simple ideas. They rather assume that impressive results must have equally impressively complicated means. #

• Whenever he read something, he would write the bibliographic information on one side of a card and make brief notes about the content on the other side (Schmidt 2013, 170). These notes would end up in the bibliographic slip-box. #

• 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. #

• Writing is, without dispute, the best facilitator for thinking, reading, learning, understanding and generating ideas we have. Notes build up while you think, read, understand and generate ideas, because you have to have a pen in your hand if you want to think, read, understand and generate ideas properly anyway. #

• If we try to use a tool without putting any thought into the way we work with it, even the best tool would not be of much help. The slip-box, for example, would most likely be used as an archive for notes – or worse: a graveyard for thoughts (cf. Hollier 2005, 40 on Mallarmé’s index cards). #

• Studying does not prepare students for independent research. It is independent research. Nobody starts from scratch and everybody is already able to think for themselves. #

• In the old system, the question is: Under which topic do I store this note? In the new system, the question is: In which context will I want to stumble upon it again? #

• The slip-box is designed to present you with ideas you have already forgotten, allowing your brain to focus on thinking instead of remembering. #

• The second typical mistake is to collect notes only related to specific projects. #

• The third typical mistake is, of course, to treat all notes as fleeting ones. #

• Fleeting notes are only useful if you review them within a day or so and turn them into proper notes you can use later. #

• 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. #

  • La estrategia ganadora es más bien tomar la nota, y anotar la idea en tus propias palabras tan pronto como sea posible. Con este nuevo proceso ya no pierdes el contexto de la nota porque pasó mucho tiempo entre que la guardaste y tradujiste la idea.

• The notes are no longer reminders of thoughts or ideas, but contain the actual thought or idea in written form. This is a crucial difference. #

  • Es muy común tratar a las notas que hacemos cuando leemos como un recordatorio de una idea. "Volveré a ella en un futuro", nos decimos.

• If we take it seriously and work accordingly, we literally never have to start from scratch again. #

• We tend to think we understand what we read – until we try to rewrite it in our own words. By doing this, we not only get a better sense of our ability to understand, but also increase our ability to clearly and concisely express our understanding – which in return helps to grasp ideas more quickly. #

• 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. #

  • Cuando vemos a una persona seguido, naturalmente nos simpatiza más que una persona a la que vemos no tan seguido. Y la principal razón es porque nos exponemos más a esa persona que al resto.
  • Algo similar pasa con otras acciones que tomamos. Podríamos pensar que somos buenos para algo solo por el hecho de hacerlo seguido, cuando en realidad puede que no tenga nada que ver.

• If the critic constantly and prematurely interferes whenever a sentence isn’t perfect yet, we would never get anything on paper. We need to get our thoughts on paper first and improve them there, where we can look at them. #

• It is not a sign of professionalism to master one technique and stick to it no matter what, but to be flexible and adjust one’s reading to whatever speed or approach a text requires. #

• According to the Dreyfuses, the correct application of teachable rules enables you to become a competent “performer” (which corresponds to a “3” on their five-grade expert scale), but it won’t make you a “master” (level 4) and certainly won’t turn you into an “expert” (level 5). #

• Things we understand are connected, either through rules, theories, narratives, pure logic, mental models or explanations. And deliberately building these kinds of meaningful connections is what the slip-box is all about. #

• So if you are writing by hand, you are forced to think about what you hear (or read) – otherwise you wouldn’t be able to grasp the underlying principle, the idea, the structure of an argument. Handwriting makes pure copying impossible, but instead facilitates the translation of what is said (or written) into one’s own words. #

  • ¿Por qué la ciencia sugiere que retienes más y mejor información cuando haces notas a mano que en una computadora? Simple, cuando haces notas en una computadora puedes escribir más rápido y sin ver, y esto te permite practicamente copiar lo que estás escuchando o leyendo. En cambio, a mano, tienes el tiempo más limitado y cuesta más trabajo anotar más cantidad de texto. Entonces tienes que pensar y analizar lo escuchado/escrito y plasmarlo con tus propias palabras.

• Developing arguments and ideas bottom-up instead of top-down is the first and most important step to opening ourselves up for insight. #

• Physicist and Nobel Prize winner Richard Feynman once said that he could only determine whether he understood something if he could give an introductory lecture on it. #

• The mere-exposure effect would fool us here, too: Seeing something we have seen before causes the same emotional reaction as if we had been able to retrieve the information from our memory. Rereading, therefore, makes us feel we have learned what we read: “I know that already!” #

• 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). #

• we are much better off accepting as early as possible that an overview of the slip-box is as impossible as having an overview of our own thinking while we are thinking. As an extension of our own memory, the slip-box is the medium we think in, not something we think about. #

• Keywords should always be assigned with an eye towards the topics you are working on or interested in, never by looking at the note in isolation. This is also why this process cannot be automated or delegated to a machine or program – it requires thinking. #

• We learn something not only when we connect it to prior knowledge and try to understand its broader implications (elaboration), but also when we try to retrieve it at different times (spacing) in different contexts (variation), ideally with the help of chance (contextual interference) and with a deliberate effort (retrieval). #

• But 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 (cf. Ahrens 2014). #

• Another seemingly banal tip relates to a distinguishing feature of extraordinary thinkers: Taking simple ideas seriously. Consider, for example, the idea of buying stocks low and selling them high. I am sure everyone can grasp that idea. But grasping an idea is not the same as understanding it. If you go and buy stocks on that “insight,” all you can do is to hope that a stock goes up after you buy it, which makes this knowledge about as useful as the tip on the next colour to choose on a roulette table. The next level of understanding is reached when you realise what you buy if you buy a stock: a part of a company. Nobody would sign a contract for a house and believe it is the contract he owns now. But many people treat a stock exactly like this. They don’t really think about what they get for the price they pay: they just assume they made a good deal when the price is lower than the day before. But the only thing Warren Buffett thinks about it is the relationship between price and value – he doesn’t even look at the price from yesterday. He understands that simple is not the same as easy, and that the worst thing you can do is to make a simple task unnecessarily complicated. A stock is a share in a company. The price is set by the market, which means by supply and demand, which touches on the rationality of market participants as well as the question of valuation, which means you have to understand something about the business you are considering investing in, including competition, competitive advantages, technological developments, etc. #

• Everything that is rather abstract, vague, emotionally neutral or does not even sound good is far down on its list of priorities – not exactly the best criteria for an intellectual endeavour. #

• What, for example, are the conditions that will lead autonomous choice to enhance people’s motivation for new tasks? We suggest that among the factors that are likely to affect whether choice will be vitalizing is the nature of the options being provided to the person. If a person is offered choice among options that he or she does not value, that are trivial or irrelevant, the choice is unlikely to be vitalizing and may be depleting, even if there is no subtle pressure toward a particular option. On the other hand, having autonomous choice among options that do have personal value may indeed be quite energizing.” (Moller, 2006, 1034) 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 (Gilbert 2006).[39] #

• Remember: Luhmann’s answer to the question of how one person could be so productive was that he never forced himself to do anything and only did what came easily to him. “When I am stuck for one moment, I leave it and do something else.” When he was asked what else he did when he was stuck, his answer was: “Well, writing other books. I always work on different manuscripts at the same time. With this method, to work on different things simultaneously, I never encounter any mental blockages.” (Luhmann, Baecker, and Stanitzek 1987, 125–55) It is like martial arts: If you encounter resistance or an opposing force, you should not push against it, but redirect it towards another productive goal. #

  • Un tip para evitar estancarse en un proyecto o escrito: trabaja en múltiples proyectos al mismo tiempo. Si uno se está complicando o por alguna razón te sientes atorado, continúa en otro. Así no te sentirás tan bloqueado en un solo proyecto. Es como en las artes marciales, si encuentras resistencia, no pelees contra ella, úsala en tu favor.