How to take smart notes

Introduction

Writing plays such a central role in learning, studying, researching. Every intellectual endeavour starts with a note. The process of writing starts much, much earlier than that blank screen & that the actual writing down of the argument is the smallest part of its development.

This book aims to teach how to efficiently turn your thoughts and discoveries into convincing written pieces and build up a treasure of smart and interconnected notes along the way. You can use this pool of notes not only to make writing easier and more fun for yourself, but also to learn for the long run and generate new ideas. [[Build a system]]

Writing is not what follows research, studying or learning; it is the medium of all these works. That is why we rarely think about note taking, it happens like breathing, but are we sure we are breathing in right way?

We don’t experience any immediate negative feedback if we do it badly. But without an immediate experience of failure, there is also not much demand for help. And the publishing market working how it works, there is not much help in supply for this lack of demand either. It is the panic in front of the blank screen that brings students and academic writers to turn to the bookshelves full of self-help books on writing, a market publishers meet in droves by focusing on how to deal with this horse-has-already-left-the-barn [[ava poi aaru maasam aachu]] situation.

The right question is: What can we do differently in the weeks, months or even years before we face the blank page that will get us into the best possible position to write a great paper easily? This applies not just to writing but to almost any creative process. Taking organised notes would help to have the ideas floating around, which keeps you prepared when you have to stare at blank page.

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.

With that in mind, it is not surprising that the single most important indicator of academic success is not to be found in people’s heads, but in the way they do their everyday work.

What does make a significant difference along the whole intelligence spectrum is something else: how much self-discipline or self-control one uses to approach the tasks at hand

And nobody needs willpower to do something they wanted to do anyway. Every task that is interesting, meaningful and well-defined will be done, because there is no conflict between long- and short-term interests. Having a meaningful and well-defined task beats willpower every time. Not having willpower, but not having to use willpower indicates that you set yourself up for success. This is where the organisation of writing and note- taking comes into play.

Everything you need to know

Importance of System/Structure

I never force myself to do anything I don’t feel like. Whenever I am stuck, I do something else.

A good structure allows you to do that, to move seamlessly from one task to another – without threatening the whole arrangement or losing sight of the bigger picture.

A good structure enables flow, the state in which you get so completely immersed in your work that you lose track of time and can just keep on going as the work becomes effortless. Something like that does not happen by chance.

It is certainly not the lack of interesting topics, but rather the employment of problematic work routines that seems to take charge of us instead of allowing us to steer the process in the right direction.

A good, structured workflow puts us back in charge and increases our freedom to do the right thing at the right time.

How structure differs from plan

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.

It is a huge misunderstanding that the only alternative to planning is aimless messing around. The challenge is to structure one’s workflow in a way that insight and new ideas can become the driving forces that push us forward. We do not want to make ourselves dependent on a plan that is threatened by the unexpected, like a new idea, discovery – or insight.

Unfortunately, even universities try to turn students into planners. Sure, planning will get you through your exams if you stick to them and push through. But it will not make you an expert in the art of learning/writing/note-taking (there is research on that: cf. Chapter 1.3). Planners are also unlikely to continue with their studies after they finish their examinations. They are rather glad it is over. Experts, on the other hand, would not even consider voluntarily giving up what has already proved to be rewarding and fun: learning in a way that generates real insight, is accumulative and sparks new ideas. The fact that you invested in this book tells me that you would rather be an expert than a planner.

Usually good students are the one who struggles the most, because they care about finding right expression. Good students look beyond the obvious. Once they have seen whats beyond the obvious, they simply cant go back to what normal people do.

Knowledge is curse & Ignorance is bliss

Insight doesn’t come easy and that writing is not only for proclaiming opinions, but the main tool to achieve insight worth sharing.

Good solutions are Simple & Unexpected

Separting notes into stacks, piles and categories into separte folders; which might make it look less complex. but quickly become very complicated. Likeliehood of finding connections between these notes is less. so the trade-off is between usability and usefulness.

• KISS Occam's Razor
• Keep simple as possible

We only need to combine 2 well-known & porven ideas

1. Simple Slip Box
2. Workflow (Working/Reading/Learning Habits)

Insights from GTD - David Allen

GTD Techniques might work well for well defined objectives, not for the insightful writing or forming connections. Forming synapses in brian is important for Groking (Barbara Oakley) In GTD, everything needs to be taken care, otherwise the neglected bits will nag us until the unimportant tasks become urgent. 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.

Writing is a non-linear process. We need a note-taking system that is comprehensive as GTD, but one that is suitable for the open ended process of writing, learning & thinking.

The Slip-Box

Niklas Luhmann

After collecting notes for a while, he realised his note taking was not leading anywhere. So instead of adding notes to existing categories, he wrote them on small pieces of paper, put a number in the corner and collected them in one place: The slip-box

He realised that one idea, one note was only as valuable as its context, which was not necessarily the context it was taken from. So he started to think about how one idea could relate and contribute to different contexts. Just amassing notes in one place would not lead to anything other than a mass of notes. But he collected his notes in his slip-box in such a way that the collection became much more than the sum of its parts. His slip-box became his dialogue partner, main idea generator and productivity engine. It helped him to structure and develop his thoughts.

When he was asked if he missed anything in his life, he famously answered:

"If I want something, it’s more time. The only thing that really is a nuisance is the lack of time."

"I, of course, do not think everything by myself. It happens mainly within the slip-box"

But few gave the slip-box and the way he worked with it a closer look, dismissing his explanation as the modest understatement of a genius.

"I only do what is easy. I only write when I immediately know how to do it. If I falter for a moment, I put the matter aside and do something else."

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.

Why having options matters

The best way to maintain the feeling of being in control is to stay in control. And to stay in control, it's better to keep your options open during the writing process rather than limit yourself to your first idea. It is in the nature of writing, especially insight-oriented writing, that questions change, the material we work with turns out to be very different from the one imagined or that new ideas emerge, which might change our whole perspective on what we do. Only if the work is set up in a way that is flexible enough to allow these small and constant adjustments can we keep our interest, motivation and work aligned – which is the precondition to effortless or almost effortless work.

The more you read, the more you know, the more you have choices. Better choices.

The Slip-box manual

How does the slip-box, the heart of the system works

Luhmann had two slip-boxes:

1. A bibliographical one - contained the references and brief notes on the content of the literature, a
2. The main one - where he collected & generated his ideas, mainly in response to what he read.

The notes were written on index cards and stored in wooden boxes.

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.

The trick is that he did not organise his notes by topic, but in the rather abstract way of giving them fixed numbers.

We need a reliable and simple external structure to think in that compensates for the limitations of our brains.

Related thoughts

• Dunning-Kruger Effect - Poor students feels more succesful, because they dont experience much of self doubt
• Imposter Syndrome - the feeling that you are not really up to the job, even though, of all people, they are
• Systems thinking, Systems Design, Life OS

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Everything You Need to Do

The only thing left to do is to revise this rough draft and send it off. Make no mistake: there is still work to do and it is more than just finding some typos. Editing is work that needs focus. You have to rephrase some sentences, delete one or two redundancies and maybe add a couple of sentences or even passages to fill some holes left in the argument.

Nadula maane thene Ellaam pottukanum. How to take notes like guna with help of abirami, where abirami itself is guna.

Everybody is motivated when the finish line is within reach. No problem so far

Assemble notes and bring them into order, turn these notes into a draft, review it and you are done writing these notes is the main work. It will take enormous amounts of effort, time, patience and willpower, and you will probably break under the weight of this task. Just kidding. It is the easiest part of all.

Writing these notes is also not the main work. Thinking is. Reading is. Understanding and coming up with ideas is. And this is how it is supposed to be. The notes are just the tangible outcome of it.

no matter how internal processes are implemented, (you) need to understand the extent to which the mind is reliant upon external scaffolding." (2011, 270) If there is one thing the experts agree on, then it is this: You have to externalise your ideas, you have to write. Richard Feynman stresses it as much as Benjamin Franklin. If we write, it is more likely that we understand what we read, remember what we learn and that our thoughts make sense. And if we have to write anyway, why not use our writing to build up the resources for our future publications?

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.

Writing a paper step by step

1. Make fleeting notes.

Always have something at hand to write with to capture every idea that pops into your mind. Don’t worry too much about how you write it down or what you write it on. These are fleeting notes, mere reminders of what is in your head. They should not cause any distraction. Put them into one place, which you define as your inbox, and process them later. I usually have a simple notebook with me, but I am happy with napkins or receipts if nothing else is at hand. Sometimes I leave a voice record on my phone. If your thoughts are already sorted and you have the time, you can skip this step and write your idea directly down as a proper, permanent note for your slip-box.

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 mean. Keep these notes together with the bibliographic details in one place – your reference system.

3. Make permanent notes.

Now turn to your slip-box. Go through the notes you made in step one or two (ideally once a day and before you forget what you meant) and think about how they relate to what is relevant for your own research, thinking or interests. This can soon be done by looking into the slip-box – it only contains what interests you anyway. The idea is not to collect, but to develop ideas, arguments and discussions. Does the new information contradict, correct, support or add to what you already have (in the slip-box or on your mind)? Can you combine ideas to generate something new? What questions are triggered by them? your sources, make references and try to be as precise, clear and brief as possible. Throw away the fleeting notes from step one and put the literature notes from step two into your reference system. You can forget about them now. All that matters is going into the slip-box.

4. Now add your new permanent notes to the slip-box by:

1. Filing each one behind one or more related notes (with a program, you can put one note "behind" multiple notes; if you use pen and paper like Luhmann, you have to decide where it fits best and add manual links to the other notes). Look to which note the new one directly relates or, if it does not relate directly to any other note yet, just file it behind the last one.

2. Adding links to related notes.

3. Making sure you will be able to find this note later by either linking to it from your index or by making a link to it on a note that you use as an entry point to a discussion or topic and is itself linked to the index.

5. Develop your topics, questions and research projects bottom up from within the system.

See what is there, what is missing and what questions arise. Read more to challenge and strengthen your arguments and change and develop your arguments according to the new information you are learning about. Take more notes, develop ideas further and see where things will take you. Just follow your interest and always take the path that promises the most insight. Build upon what you have. Even if you don’t have anything in your slip-box yet, you never start from scratch – you already have ideas on your mind to be tested, opinions to be challenged and questions to be answered. 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. Don’t cling to an idea if another, more promising one gains momentum. The more you become interested in something, the more you will read and think about it, the more notes you will collect and the more likely it is that you will generate questions from it. It might be exactly what you were interested in from the beginning, but it is more likely that your interests will have changed – that is what insight does.

6. After a while, you will have developed ideas far enough to decide on a topic to write about.

Your topic is now based on what you have , not based on an unfounded idea about what the literature you are about to read might provide. Look through the connections and collect all the relevant notes on this topic (most of the relevant notes will already be in partial order), copy them onto your "desktop" [6] and bring them in order. Look for what is missing and what is redundant. Don’t wait until you have everything together. Rather, try ideas out and give yourself enough time to go back to reading and note-taking to improve your ideas, arguments and their structure.

7. Turn your notes into a rough draft.

Don’t simply copy your notes into a manuscript. Translate them into something coherent and embed them into the context of your argument while you build your argument out of the notes at the same time. Detect holes in your argument, fill them or change your argument.

8. Edit and proofread your manuscript.

Give yourself a pat on the shoulder and turn to the next manuscript.

Meno's Paradox

In truth, it is highly unlikely that every text you read will contain exactly the information you looked for and nothing else. Otherwise, you must have already known what was in there and wouldn’t have had reason to read it in the first place.

Nagulan's Comment on reading book

We constantly encounter interesting ideas along the way and only a fraction of them are useful for the particular paper we started reading it for. Why let them go to waste? Make a note and add it to your slip-box. It improves it. Every idea adds to what can become a critical mass that turns a mere collection of ideas into an idea-generator.

Imagine if we went through life learning only what we planned to learn or being explicitly taught. I doubt we would have even learned to speak. 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.

It is helpful then to be able to pick up on another idea now and go back to the earlier thought later. It is much more realistic to keep this flexibility and you don’t have to worry about starting all over.

Everything You Need to Have

Need of gravity defying pen in space and russians used pencils (De Bono, 1998, 141). The slip-box follows the Russian model: Focus on the essentials, don’t complicate things unnecessarily.

Most students collect and embrace over time a variety of learning and note-taking techniques, each promising to make something easier, but combined have the opposite effect. The whole workflow becomes complicated: There is the technique of underlining important sentences (sometimes in different colours or shapes), commenting in the margins of a text, writing excerpts, employing reading methods with acronyms like SQ3R [8] or SQ4R, [9]

which then quickly becomes a mess. As nothing really fits together, working within this arrangement becomes extremely complicated indeed and difficult to get anything done.

The Tool Box

That is pretty much it. To have an undistracted brain to think with and a reliable collection of notes to think in is pretty much all we need. Everything else is just clutter.

We need four tools:

• Something to write with and something to write on (pen and paper will do)
• A reference management system (the best programs are free)
• The slip-box (the best program is free)
• An editor (whatever works best for you: very good ones are free)

Keep in Mind:
Tools are only as good as your ability to work with them. 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.

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The Four underlying Principles

Writing is the only thing that matters

Writing mainly appears in the form of examination. In this understanding, the written work represents a preceded performance, namely learning, understanding and the ability to analyse other texts critically. By writing, students demonstrate what they have learned, show their ability to think critically and ability to develop ideas. This understanding is related to the idea that students prepare for independent research.

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. Studying, done properly, is research,

There is no such thing as private knowledge in academia. An idea kept private is as good as one you never had. And a fact no one can reproduce is no fact at all. Making something public always means to write it down so it can be read. There is no such thing as a history of unwritten ideas.

The professor is not there for the student and the student not for the professor. Both are only there for the truth. And truth is always a public matter.

Focusing on writing as if nothing else counts does not necessarily mean you should do everything else less well, but it certainly makes you do everything else differently

Having a clear, tangible purpose when you attend a lecture, discussion or seminar will make you more engaged and sharpen your focus. You will not waste your time with the attempt to figure out what you "should" learn. Rather, you will try to learn as efficiently as possible so you can quickly get to the point where actual open questions arise, as these are the only questions worth writing about. You quickly learn to distinguish good-sounding arguments from actual good ones, as you will have to think them through whenever you try to write them down and connect them with your previous knowledge. 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. By doing this, you will elaborate on the meaning, which will make it much more likely that you will remember it. You also have to think beyond the things you read, because you need to turn it into something new. And by doing everything with the clear purpose of writing about it, you will do what you do deliberately . Deliberate practice is the only serious way of becoming better at what we are doing (cf. Anders Ericsson, 2008). If you change your mind about the importance of writing, you will also change your mind about everything else. 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 .

How writing will change you for good

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. By doing this, you will elaborate on the meaning, which will make it much more likely that you will remember it. You also have to think beyond the things you read, because you need to turn it into something new. And by doing everything with the clear purpose of writing about it, you will do what you do deliberately. Deliberate practice is the only serious way of becoming better at what we are doing (cf. Anders Ericsson, 2008). If you change your mind about the importance of writing, you will also change your mind about everything else. 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.

Simplicity Is Paramount

We tend to think that big transformations have to start with an equally big idea. But more often than not, it is the simplicity of an idea that makes it so powerful

Many students and academic writers think like the early ship owners when it comes to note-taking. They handle their ideas and findings in the way it makes immediate sense: If they read an interesting sentence, they underline it. If they have a comment to make, they write it into the margins. If they have an idea, they write it into their notebook, and if an article seems important enough, they make the effort and write an excerpt. Working like this will leave you with a lot of different notes in many different places.

Writing, then, means to rely heavily on your brain to remember where and when these notes were written down.

A text must then be conceptualised independently from these notes, which explains why so many resort to brainstorming to arrange the resources afterwards according to this preconceived idea. In this textual infrastructure, this so-often-taught workflow, it indeed does not make much sense to rewrite these notes and put them into a box, only to take them out again later when a certain quote or reference is needed during writing and thinking.

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? Most students sort their material by topic or even by seminars and semester.

The slip-box is the shipping container of the academic world. Instead of having different storage for different ideas, everything goes into the same slip-box and is standardised into the same format everything is streamlined towards one thing only: insight that can be published. The biggest advantage compared to a top-down storage system organised by topics is that the slip-box becomes more and more valuable the more it grows, instead of getting messy and confusing

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

To achieve a critical mass, it is crucial to distinguish clearly between three types of notes:

1. Fleeting notes

which are only reminders of information, can be written in any kind of way and will end up in the trash within a day or two.

2. Permanent notes

which will never be thrown away and contain the necessary information in themselves in a permanently understandable way. They are always stored in the same way in the same place, either in the reference system or, written as if for print, in the slip-box.

3. Project notes

which are only relevant to one particular project. They are kept within a project-specific folder and can be discarded or archived after the project is finished

One of the major reasons for not getting much writing or publishing done lies in the confusion of these categories

3 Mistakes in Note Taking

A typical mistake is made by many diligent students who are adhering to the advice to keep a scientific journal. He always carries a notebook with him and often makes a few quick notes during a conversation. The advantage is obvious: No idea ever gets lost. The disadvantages are serious, though: As he treats every note as if it belongs to the "permanent" category, the notes will never build up a critical mass.

The second typical mistake is to collect notes only related to specific projects. On first sight, it makes much more sense. You decide on what you are going to write about and then collect everything that helps you to do that. The disadvantage is that you have to start all over after each project and cut off all other promising lines of thought. That means that everything you found, thought or encountered during the time of a project will be lost. But most importantly, 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.

The third typical mistake is, of course, to treat all notes as fleeting ones. You can easily spot this approach by the mess that comes with it, or rather by the cycle of slowly growing piles of material followed by the impulse for major clean-ps. Just collecting unprocessed fleeting notes inevitably leads to chaos. Even small amounts of unclear and unrelated notes lingering around your desk will soon induce the wish of starting from scratch.

Idea Sex

What all these category-confusing approaches have in common is that the benefit of note-taking decreases with the number of notes you keep. More notes will make it more difficult to retrieve the right ones and bring related ones together in a playful way. But it should be just the opposite: The more you learn and collect, the more beneficial your notes should become, the more ideas can mingle and give birth to new ones – and the easier it should be to write an intelligent text with less effort.

Let the notes have sex with each other and give birth to ideas

Fleeting notes are there for capturing ideas quickly while you are busy doing something else. When you are in a conversation, listing to a lecture, hear something noteworthy or an idea pops into your mind while you are running errands, a quick note is the best you can do without interrupting what you are in the middle of doing.

They will very soon become completely useless – unless you do something with them. If you already know that you will not go back to them, don’t take these kind of notes in the first place. Take proper notes instead. Fleeting notes are only useful if you review them within a day or so and turn them into proper notes you can use later.

Fleeting literature notes can make sense if you need an extra step to understand or grasp an idea, but they will not help you in the later stages of the writing process, as no underlined sentence will ever present itself when you need it in the development of an argument. These kinds of notes are just reminders of a thought, which you haven’t had the time to elaborate on yet.

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.

Most ideas will not stand the test of time, while others might become the seed for a major project. Unfortunately, they are not easy to distinguish right away. 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. 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.

In contrast to the fleeting notes, every permanent note for the slip-box is elaborated enough to have the potential to become part of or inspire a final written piece, but that can not be decided on up front as their relevance depends on future thinking and developments. 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.

The last type of note, the ones that are related to only one specific project, are kept together with other project-related notes in a project-specific folder. It doesn’t matter in which format these notes are as they are going to end up in the bin after the project is finished anyway (or in an archive – the bin for the indecisive).

Project-related notes can be

• comments in the manuscript
• collections of project-related literature
• outlines
• snippets of drafts
• reminders
• to-do lists
• and of course the draft itself.

When you close the folder for your current project in the evening and nothing is left on your desk other than pen and paper, you know that you have achieved a clear separation between fleeting, permanent and project-related notes.

Nobody Ever Starts From Scratch

To make your research more efficient, your first step should be to narrow the aspect you choose to focus on and also formulate an explicit question that your research and analysis will address. When you have chosen a topic that is right for you, having taken into consideration your personal interests and any necessary background knowledge that may be needed, assess the availability of sources.

• Make a decision on what to write about
• plan your research
• do your research
• write.

Interestingly enough, these road maps usually come with the concession that this is only an idealised plan and that in reality, it rarely works like that. This is certainly true. Writing can’t be that linear. In order to develop a good question to write about or find the best angle for an assignment, one must already have put some thought into a topic.

Run an AMA session among friends and ex colleagues , 1-3 questions they would like to get answer from me

Every intellectual endeavour starts from an already existing preconception, which then can be transformed during further inquires and can serve as a starting point for following endeavours. Basically, that is what Hans-Georg Gadamer called the hermeneutic circle (Gadamer 2004)

We have to read with a pen in hand, develop ideas on paper and build up an ever-growing pool of externalised thoughts. We will not be guided by a blindly made-up plan picked from our unreliable brains, but by our interest, curiosity and intuition, which is formed and informed by the actual work of reading, thinking, discussing, writing and developing ideas – and is something that continuously grows and reflects our knowledge and understanding externally.

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.

If we look into our slip-box to see where clusters have built up, we not only see possible topics, but topics we have already worked on – even if we were not able to see it up front. The idea that nobody ever starts from scratch suddenly becomes very concrete. If we take it seriously and work accordingly, we literally never have to start from scratch again.

As proper note-taking is rarely taught or discussed, it is no wonder that almost every guide on writing recommends to start with brainstorming . If you haven’t written along the way, the brain is indeed the only place to turn to.

The things you are supposed to find in your head by brainstorming usually don’t have their origins in there. Rather, they come from the outside: through reading, having discussions and listening to others, through all the things that could have been accompanied and often even would have been improved by writing.

I think. Having inspirations, pre-designed posters animations, choice of fonts and styles and colors is forom of smart note taking.

Taking smart notes is the precondition to break with the linear order. There is one reliable sign if you managed to structure your workflow according to the fact that writing is not a linear process, but a circular one: the problem of finding a topic is replaced by the problem of having too many topics to write about.

Having trouble finding the right topic is a symptom of the wrong attempt to rely heavily on the limitations of the brain, not the inevitable problematic starting point, as most study guides insinuate. If you on the other hand develop your thinking in writing, open questions will become clearly visible and give you an abundance of possible topics to elaborate further in writing.

When it finally comes to the decision on what to write about, you will already have made the decision – because you made it on every single step along the way, again and again every day, improving it gradually. Instead of spending your time worrying about finding the right topic, you will spend your time actually working on your already existing interests and doing what is necessary to make informed decisions – reading, thinking and writing. By doing the work, you can trust that interesting questions will emerge.

You might not know where you will end up (and you don’t need to), but you can’t force insight into a preconceived direction anyway. You minimise both the risk of losing interest in a topic you have once chosen ill-informed and the risk of having to start all over again.

Even though academic writing is not a linear process, that does not mean you should follow an anything-goes approach. On the contrary, a clear, reliable structure is paramount.

Let the Work Carry You Forward

An exergonic and an endergonic reaction. In the first case, you constantly need to add energy to keep the process going. In the second case, the reaction, once triggered, continues by itself and even releases energy

A good workflow can easily turn into a virtuous circle, where the positive experience motivates us to take on the next task with ease, which helps us to get better at what we are doing, which in return makes it more likely for us to enjoy the work, and so on.

Any attempts to trick ourselves into work with external rewards (like doing something nice after finishing a chapter) are only short-term solutions with no prospect of establishing a positive feedback loop. These are very fragile motivational constructions.

Feedback loops are not only crucial for the dynamics of motivation, but also the key element to any learning process. Nothing motivates us more than the experience of becoming better at what we do.

Most reliable predictor for long-term success is having a "growth mindset." Conversely, nothing is a bigger hindrance to personal growth than having a "fixed mindset." Those who fear and avoid feedback because it might damage their cherished positive self-image might feel better in the short term, but will quickly fall behind in actual performance.

The highly gifted and talented students, who receive a lot of praise, who are more in danger of developing a fixed mindset and getting stuck. Having been praised for what they are (talented and gifted) rather than for what they do, they tend to focus on keeping this impression intact, rather than exposing themselves to new challenges and the possibility of learning from failure. Embracing a growth mindset means to get pleasure out of changing for the better (which is mostly inwardly rewarding) instead of getting pleasure in being praised (which is outwardly rewarding). The orientation towards the latter makes one stick to safe, proven areas

To seek as many opportunities to learn as possible is the most reliable long-term growth strategy.

Fear of failure has the ugliest name of all phobias: Kakorrhaphiophobia.

Having a growth mindset is crucial, but only one side of the equation. Having a learning system in place that enables feedback loops in a practical way is equally important. Being open for feedback doesn’t help very much if the only feedback you can get comes once every few months for work you have already finished.

Following a circular approach, on the other hand, allows you to implement many feedback loops, which give you the chance to improve your work while you are working on it. It is not just about increasing the number of opportunities to learn, but also to be able to correct the mistakes we inevitably make. As the feedback loops are usually smaller than one big chunk of feedback at the end, they are also much less scary and easier to embrace.

Reading with a pen in the hand, for example, forces, us to think about what we read and check upon our understanding. It is the simplest test: 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.

How reading with pen makes you smarter

The ability to express understanding in one’s own words is a fundamental competency for everyone who writes – and only by doing it with the chance of realizing our lack of understanding can we become better at it. But the better we become, the easier and quicker we can make notes, which again increases the number of learning experiences. The same applies to the crucial ability to distinguish the important bits of a text from the less important ones: the better we become at it, the more effective our reading will become, the more we can read, the more we will learn. We will enter a beautiful, virtuous circle of competency. You cannot help but feel motivated by it.

Expressing our own thoughts in writing makes us realise if we really thought them through. The moment we try to combine them with previously written notes, the system will unambiguously show us contradictions, inconsistencies and repetitions. While these built-in feedback loops do not make redundant the feedback from your peers or supervisor, they are the only ones that are always available and can help us to improve a little bit, multiple times every single day. And the best thing about this is that while we learn and become better, our slip-box becomes more knowledgeable too. It grows and improves. And the more it grows, the more useful it becomes and the easier it will be for us to make new connections

How you can bully your self with permanent notes

The slip-box is not a collection of notes. Its usability grows with its size, not just linearly but exponentially. When we turn to the slip-box, its inner connectedness will not just provide us with isolated facts, but with lines of developed thoughts. Moreover, because of its inner complexity, a search thought the slip-box will confront us with related notes we did not look for. This is a very significant difference that becomes more and more relevant over time. The more content it contains, the more connections it can provide, and the easier it becomes to add new entries in a smart way and receive useful suggestions.

Tip: Generatea Ideas with Slipbox

If facts are not kept isolated nor learned in an isolated fashion, but hang together in a network of ideas, or "latticework of mental models" (Munger, 1994), it becomes easier to make sense of new information.

As we are the authors of all the notes, we learn in lockstep with the slip-box. This is another big difference from using an encyclopaedia like Wikipedia. We use the same mental models, theories and terms to organise our thoughts in our brains as in our slip-box. That the slip-box generates an excess of possibilities enables it to surprise and inspire us to generate new ideas and develop our theories further. It is not the slip-box or our brains alone, but the dynamic between them that makes working with it so productive.

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The Six Steps to Successful Writing

Separate and Interlocking Tasks

It is obvious that we are surrounded by more sources of distraction and less opportunities to train our attention spans.

Multitasking is not a good idea

When we think we multitask, what we really do is shift our attention quickly between two (or more) things. And every shift is a drain on our ability to shift and delays the moment we manage to get focused again. Trying to multitask fatigues us and decreases our ability to deal with more than one task 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.

Writing a paper involves much more than just typing on the keyboard. It also means reading, understanding, reflecting, getting ideas, making connections, distinguishing terms, finding the right words, structuring, organizing, editing, correcting and rewriting. All these are not just different tasks, but tasks requiring a different kind of attention. It is not only impossible to focus on more than one thing at a time, but also to have a different kind of attentionon more than one thing at a time.0

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi in the 1970s described "flow," the state in which being highly focused becomes effortless (Csikszentmihalyi, 1975),[18] other forms of attention, which are much less dependent on will and effort, attracted researchers’ interest.

The slip-box provides not only a clear structure to work in, but also forces us to shift our attention consciously as we can complete tasks in reasonable time before moving on to the next one. Together with the fact that every task is accompanied by writing, which in itself requires undistracted attention, the slip-box can become a haven for our restless minds.

Give Each Task the Right Kind of Attention

The slip-box provides not only a clear structure to work in, but also forces us to shift our attention consciously as we can complete tasks in reasonable time before moving on to the next one. Together with the fact that every task is accompanied by writing, which in itself requires undistracted attention, the slip-box can become a haven for our restless minds.

To be able to switch between the role of critic and the role of writer requires a clear separation between these two tasks, and that becomes easier with experience.

Letting the inner critic interfere with the author isn’t helpful.

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. Especially complex ideas are difficult to turn into a linear text in the head alone. If we try to please the critical reader instantly, our workflow would come to a standstill.

It is also easier to focus on finding the right words if we don’t have to think about the structure of the text at the same time, which is why a printed outline of the manuscript should be always in front of our eyes. We have to know what we don’t have to write about at the moment, because we know that we will take care of that in another part of our text.

It is important, though, to understand outlining not as the preparation of writing or even as planning, but as a separate task we need to return to throughout the writing process on a regular basis. We need a structure all the time, but as we work our way bottom-up, it is bound to change often. And whenever we need to update the structure, we need to take a step back, look at the big picture and change it accordingly.

Reading in itself can require very different kinds of attention, depending on the text. Some texts need to be read slowly and carefully, while others are only worth skimming. It would be ridiculous to adhere to a general formula and read every text in the same way, even though that is what many study guides or speed-reading courses try to convince us of. 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.

To master the art of writing, we need to be able to apply whatever kind of attention and focus is needed.

Oshin Vartanian compared and analysed the daily workflows of Nobel Prize winners and other eminent scientists and concluded that it is not a relentless focus, but flexible focus that distinguishes them. "Specifically, the problem-solving behavior of eminent scientists can alternate between extraordinary levels of focus on specific concepts and playful exploration of ideas. This suggests that successful problem solving may be a function of flexible strategy application in relation to task demands."

Flexible Productivity/consistency

"On one hand, those with wandering, defocused, childlike minds seem to be the most creative; on the other, it seems to be analysis and application that’s important. The answer to this conundrum is that creative people need both … The key to creativity is being able to switch between a wide-open, playful mind and a narrow analytical frame."

The mental flexibility to be extremely focused for one moment and playfully explore ideas in the next is just one side of the equation. To be flexible, we need an equally flexible work structure that doesn’t break down every time we depart from a preconceived plan.

Become an Expert Instead of a Planner

"(An) exclusive use of analytical rationality tends to impede further improvement in human performance because of analytical rationality’s slow reasoning and its emphasis on rules, principles, and universal solutions. Second, bodily involvement, speed, and an intimate knowledge of concrete cases in the form of good examples is a prerequisite for true expertise." (Flyvbjerg 2001, 15)

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 training wheels of our bikes taken off and started to learn cycling properly. We might have felt a bit insecure in the first moment, but at the same time, it became obvious that we would never have learned to bicycle if we left the training wheels on. The only thing we would have learned is to ride a bike with training wheels on.

Cycle, Writing Metaphor

Similarly, no one would ever learn the art of productive academic writing just by following plans or linear, multistep prescripts – one would learn only to follow plans or prescripts.

To be able 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 it. Most study guides and academic writing teachers are trying very hard to spare you from that experience by telling you what, when and how to write instead. But they are keeping you from learning the very thing academia and writing is all about: gaining insight and making it public.

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).

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. They have acquired enough experience in various situations to be able to rely on their intuition to know what to do in which kind of situation. Their decisions in complex situations are explicitly not made by long rational-analytical considerations, but rather come from the gut. Here, gut feeling is not a mysterious force, but an incorporated history of experience. It is the sedimentation of deeply learned practice through numerous feedback loops on success or failure.

Chess players seem to think less than beginners. Rather, they see patterns and let themselves be guided by their experience from the past rather than attempt to calculate turns far into the future.

The workflow around the slip-box is not a prescription that tells you what to do at what stage of writing. On the contrary: It gives you a structure of clearly separable tasks, which can be completed within reasonable time and provides you with instant feedback through interconnected writing tasks. It allows you to become better by giving you the opportunity for deliberate practice. The more experience you gain, the more you will be able to rely on your intuition to tell you what to do next. Instead of taking you "from intuition to professional writing strategies", as the title of a typical study guide promises, it is here all about becoming a professional by acquiring the skills and experience to judge situations correctly and intuitively so you can chuck misleading study guides for good.

Real experts, Flyvbjerg writes unambiguously, don’t make plans

Survivorship Bias?

Get Closure

We can hold a maximum of seven things in our head at the same time, plus/minus two (Miller 1956).

This is why it is so much easier to remember things we understand than things we don’t. It is not that we have to choose to focus either on learning or understanding. It is always about understanding – and if it is only for the sake of learning. 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.

Every step is accompanied by questions like: How does this fact fit into my idea of …? How can this phenomenon be explained by that theory? Are these two ideas contradictory or do they complement each other? Isn’t this argument similar to that one? Haven’t I heard this before? And above all: What does x mean for y? These questions not only increase our understanding, but facilitate learning as well. Once we make a meaningful connection to an idea or fact, it is difficult not to remember it when we think about what it is connected with.

Zeigarnik successfully reproduced what is now known as the 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. But thanks to Zeigarnik’s follow-up research, we also know that we don’t actually have to finish tasks to convince our brains to stop thinking about them.

The first step is to break down the amorphous task of "writing" into smaller pieces of different tasks that can be finished in one go. The second step is to make sure we always write down the outcome of our thinking, including possible connections to further inquiries. As the outcome of each task is written down and possible connections become visible, it is easy to pick up the work any time where we left it without having to keep it in mind all the time.

Importance of writing down goals, having a Life OS, having a PPV System

It also comes up in explicit reminders like "review this chapter and check for redundancies,"

All this enables us to later pick up a task exactly where we stopped without the need to "keep in mind" that there still was something to do. That is one of the main advantages of thinking in writing – everything is externalised anyway.

Letting thoughts linger without focusing on them gives our brains the opportunity to deal with problems in a different, often surprisingly productive way. While we have a walk or a shower or clean the house, the brain cannot help but play around with the last unsolved problem it came across. That is why we so often find the answer to a question in rather casual situations.

Reduce the Number of Decisions

For the longest time, willpower was seen more as a character trait than a resource. This has changed. Today, willpower is compared to muscles: a limited resource that depletes quickly and needs time to recover. Improvement through training is possible to a certain degree, but takes time and effort. 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." (Baumeister et al., 1998, 1253)

Ego Depletion ||| Akrasia - Lack of Will power & Antonym: Enkrateia - in power

The smartest way to deal with this kind of limitation is to cheat. Instead of forcing ourselves to do something we don’t feel like doing, we need to find a way to make us feel like doing what moves our project further along. Doing the work that need to be done without having to apply too much willpower requires a technique, a ruse.

It is safe to argue that a reliable and standardised working environment is less taxing on our attention, concentration and willpower, or, if you like, ego . It is well known that decision-making is one of the most tiring and wearying tasks, most organisational decisions can be made up front, once and for all, by deciding on one system. By always using the same notebook for making quick notes, always extracting the main ideas from a text in the same way and always turning them into the same kind of permanent notes, which are always dealt with in the same manner, the number of decisions during a work session can be greatly reduced. That leaves us with much more mental energy that we can direct towards more useful tasks,

Being able to finish a task in a timely manner and to pick up the work exactly where we left it has another enjoyable advantage that helps to restore our attention: We can have breaks without fear of losing the thread. Breaks are much more than just opportunities to recover. They are crucial for learning. They allow the brain to process information, move it into long-term memory and prepare it for new information

If we dont give ourselves break in between work sessions, be it out of eagerness or fear of forgetting what we were doing, it can have a detrimental effect on our efforts. To have a walk (Ratey, 2008) or even a nap supports learning and thinking.

Read for Understanding

Read With a Pen in Hand

I would advise you to read with a pen in your hand and enter in a little book short hints of what you feel that is common or that may be useful; for this will be the best method of imprinting such portcullis in your memory. - Benjamin Franklin

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.

If you understand what you read and translate it into the different context of your own thinking, materialised in the slip-box, you cannot help but transform the findings and thoughts of others into something that is new and your own. It works both ways: The series of notes in the slip-box develops into arguments, which are shaped by the theories, ideas and mental models you have in your head. And the theories, ideas and mental models in your head are also shaped by the things you read. They are constantly changing and challenged by the surprising connections with which the slip-box confronts you. The richer the slip-box becomes, the richer your own thinking becomes. The slip-box is an idea generator that develops in lockstep with your own intellectual development. Together, you can turn previously separated or even isolated facts into a critical mass of interconnected ideas.

The step from the slip-box to the final text is pretty straightforward. The content is already meaningful, thought through and in many parts already put into well-connected sequences. The notes only need to be put into a linear order. While the notes themselves are formulated so that they can be understood on their own, they are at the same time embedded in one or more contexts that enrich their meaning.

The outcome is never a copy of previous work, but always comes with surprises. There will always be something you couldn’t have anticipated. Obviously, the same applies to every single step before.

The idea is not to copy, but to have a meaningful dialogue with the texts we read.

When we extract ideas from the specific context of a text, we deal with ideas that serve a specific purpose in a particular context, support a specific argument, are part of a theory that isn’t ours or written in a language we wouldn’t use.

This is why we have to translate them into our own language to prepare them to be embedded into new contexts of our own thinking, the different context(s) within the slip-box. Translating means to give the truest possible account of the original work, using different words – it does not mean the freedom to make something fit. As well, the mere copying of quotes almost always changes their meaning by stripping them out of context, even though the words aren’t changed. This is a common beginner mistake, which can only lead to a patchwork of ideas, but never a coherent thought.

How extensive the literature notes should be really depends on the text and what we need it for. It also depends on our ability to be concise, the complexity of the text and how difficult it is to understand. As literature notes are also a tool for understanding and grasping the text, more elaborate notes make sense in more challenging cases, while in easier cases it might be sufficient to just jot down some keywords.

It is mainly a matter of having an extensive latticework of mental models or theories in our heads that enable us to identify and describe the main ideas quickly.

The only thing that matters is that these notes provide the best possible support for the next step, the writing of the actual slip-box notes. And what is most helpful is to reflect on the frame, the theoretical background, methodological approach or perspective of the text we read. That often means to reflect as much on what is not mentioned as what is mentioned.

Without a clear purpose for the notes, taking them will feel more like a chore than an important step within a bigger project.

Sometimes the only thing that is done is underlining sentences and making some comments in the margins of a book, which is almost like taking no notes at all. And more often than not, reading is not accompanied by taking notes, which is, in terms of writing, almost as valuable as not having read at all.

You are free to use whatever technique helps the most with understanding what you are reading and getting to useful notes – even if you use ten different colours for underlining and a SQ8R reading technique. But all of this would be just an extra step before you do the only step that really counts, which is to take the permanent note that will add value to the actual slip-box.

You need to take some form of literature note that captures your understanding of the text, so you have something in front of your eyes while you are making the slip-box note.

You can type a literature note directly into Zotero, where it will be stored with the bibliographic details. You might want to write them by hand, though. Different independent studies indicate that writing by hand facilitates understanding.

There is no secret to it and the explanation is pretty simple: Handwriting is slower and can’t be corrected as quickly as electronic notes. Because students can’t write fast enough to keep up with everything that is said in a lecture, they are forced to focus on the gist of what is being said, not the details.

Keep an Open Mind

If you decide to write your notes by hand, just keep them in one place and sort them alphabetically in the usual way: "SurnameYear". Then you can easily match them with the bibliographic details in your reference system. But whether you write them by hand or not, keep in mind that it is all about the essence, the understanding and preparation for the next step – the transferring of ideas into the context of your own lines of thoughts in the slip-box.

The very moment we decide on a hypothesis, our brains automatically go into search mode, scanning our surroundings for supporting data, which is neither a good way to learn nor research. Worse, we are usually not even aware of this confirmation bias (or myside bias) that surreptitiously meddles with our life.

Even the best scientists and thinkers are not free from it. What sets them apart is the mere fact that they are aware of the problem and do something about it.

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, 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. Owing to this habit, very few objections were raised against my views, which I had not at least noticed and attempted to answer. - Charles Darwin

Opposite views and opinions would fly away from memory easily than the opinions formed by confirmation bias. Take a note of challenging arguments and thoughts and understand.

This is a good (primarily mental) technique to deal with confirmation bias.

We are looking for ways to implement insight into our psychological limitations in an external system. We want to make the right decisions without too much mental effort.

With a good system, the mere necessities of the workflow will force us to act more virtuously without actually having to become more virtuous.

Confirmation bias is tackled here in two steps: First, by turning the whole writing process on its head, and secondly, by changing the incentives from finding confirming facts to an indiscriminate gathering of any relevant information regardless of what argument it will support.

First, you basically fix your present understanding, as the outcome instead of using it as the starting point, priming yourself for one-sided perception. Then you artificially create a conflict of interest between getting things done (finding support for your preconceived argument) and generating insight, turning any departure from your preconceived plan into a mutiny against the success of your own project. This is a good rule of thumb: If insight becomes a threat to your academic or writing success, you are doing it wrong.

Developing arguments and ideas bottom-up instead of top-down is the first and most important step to opening ourselves up for insight. We should be able to focus on the most insightful ideas we encounter and welcome the most surprising turns of events without jeopardizing our progress or, even better, because it brings our project forward.

Instead of having the hypothesis in mind all the time, we want to:

• Confirm that we have separated tasks and focus on understanding the text we read,
• Make sure we have given a true account of its content
• Find the relevance of it and make connections.

Only then do we take a step back to look at what developed, then make a decision on what conclusions are to be drawn from that.

The slip-box forces us to be selective in reading and note-taking, but the only criterion is the question of whether something adds to a discussion in the slip-box . The only thing that matters is that it connects or is open to connections .

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.

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. It becomes easier to seek out dis-confirming data with practice and can become quite addictive. The experience of how one piece of information can change the whole perspective on a certain problem is exciting.

Contradictions within the slip-box can be discussed on follow-up notes or even in the final paper. It is so much easier to develop an interesting text from a lively discussion with a lot of pros and cons than from a collection of one-sided notes and seemingly fitting quotes.

In fact, it is almost impossible to write anything interesting and worth publishing (and therefore motivating) if it is based on nothing else than an idea we were able to come up with up front before elaborating on the problem.

The slip-box is pretty agnostic about the content it is fed. It just prefers relevant notes. It is a fter reading and

Get the Gist

Collecting relevant data, connecting thoughts and discussing how they fit together that it is time to draw conclusions and develop a linear structure for the argument. The ability to distinguish relevant from less relevant information is another skill that can only be learned by doing.

Extracting the gist of a text or an idea and giving an account in writing is for academics what daily practice on the piano is for pianists: The more often we do it and the more focused we are, the more virtuous we become.

Without these tools and reference points, no professional reading or understanding would be possible. We would read every text in the same way: like a novel.

With the learned ability of spotting patterns, we can enter the circle of virtuosity: Reading becomes easier, we grasp the gist quicker, can read more in less time, and can more easily spot patterns and improve our understanding of them. And along the way, we increase our set of thinking tools, which will not only help with academic work, but with thinking and understanding in general.

Textbooks or secondary literature in general cannot take this off our hands, and students who solely rely on them have no chance of becoming "worldly wise."

"Nonage [immaturity] is the inability to use one’s own understanding without another’s guidance. This nonage is self-imposed if its cause lies not in lack of understanding but in indecision and lack of courage to use one’s own mind without another’s guidance. Dare to know! **Have the courage to use your own understanding** is therefore the motto of the Enlightenment." Immanuel Kant

"The problem with reading academic texts seems to be that we need not the short-term memory, but the long-term memory to develop reference points for distinguishing the important things from the less important, the new information from the mere repeated. But it is of course impossible to remember everything. That would be rote learning. To put it differently: One has to read extremely selectively and extract widespread and connected references. One has to be able to follow recurrences. But how to learn it if guidance is impossible? Probably the best method is to take notes – not excerpts, but condensed reformulated accounts of a text. Rewriting what was already written almost automatically trains one to shift the attention towards frames, patterns and categories in the observations, or the conditions/assumptions, which enable certain, but not other descriptions.

It makes sense to always ask the question: What is not meant, what is excluded if a certain claim is made?

Often, the text does not give an answer or a clear answer to this question. But then one has to resort to one’s own imagination.

The better you become in doing this, the quicker you can jot down notes, which are still helpful.

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 your ability to explain something clearly, those you talk to will benefit from this ability as well, as it is not limited to writing. It spills over into speaking and thinking

Learn to Read

The ability to spot patterns, to question the frames used and detect the distinctions made by others, is the precondition to thinking critically and looking behind the assertions of a text or a talk.

Being able to re-frame questions, assertions and information is even more important than having an extensive knowledge, because without this ability we wouldn’t be able to put our knowledge to use. The good news is that these skills can be learned. But it requires deliberate practice (Ericsson, Krampe, and Tesch-Römer 1993; Anders Ericsson 2008).

Taking smart notes is the deliberate practice of these skills. Mere reading, underlining sentences and hoping to remember the content is not.

If you can’t say it clearly, you don’t understand it yourself. John Searle

Richard Feynman once said that he could only determine whether he understood something if he could give an introductory lecture on it.Reading with a pen in your hand is the small-scale equivalent of a lecture.

We shouldn’t underestimate the advantages of writing. In oral presentations, we easily get away with unfounded claims. We can distract from argumentative gaps with confident gestures or drop a casual "you know what I mean" irrespective of whether we know what we meant.

The most important advantage of writing is that it helps us to confront ourselves when we do not understand something as well as we would like to believe.

The principle is that you must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool

Reading, especially rereading, can easily fool us into believing we understand a text. Rereading is especially dangerous because of the mere-exposure effect: The moment we become familiar with something, we start believing we also understand it.

If we don’t try to verify our understanding during our studies, we will happily enjoy the feeling of getting smarter and more knowledgeable while in reality staying as dumb as we were. This warm feeling disappears quickly when we try to explain what we read in our own words in writing. Suddenly, we see the problem. The attempt to rephrase an argument in our own words confronts us without mercy with all the gaps in our understanding. It certainly feels less good, but this struggle is the only chance we have to improve our understanding, to learn and move forward (cf. below). This, again, is deliberate practice.

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.

Understanding is not just a precondition to learning something. To a certain degree, learning is understanding.

We can only improve our learning if we test ourselves on our progress. Only the actual attempt to retrieve information will clearly show us if we have learned something or not.

Learning How to Learn - Barbara Oakely

We face here the same choice between methods that make us feel like we learned something and methods that truly do make us learn something. What really matters are the many small, implicit choices we have to make every day, and they are most often made unconsciously.

Learn by Reading

Learning itself requires deliberate practice, and I mean actual learning that helps us to increase our understanding of the world, not just the learning that makes us pass a test. practice is demanding; it requires effort.

A coach is not there to do the work, but to show us how to use our time and effort in the most effective way.

The one who does the work does the learning

Learning requires effort, because we have to think to understand and we need to actively retrieve old knowledge to convince our brains to connect it with new ideas as cues.

...It helps to 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 away the opportunity to build meaningful connections and to make sense of something by translating it into one’s own language.

It is like fast food: It is neither nutritious nor very enjoyable, it is just convenient

Isn't it the right way to build teaching material? to ease the cognitive load on students.

"Manipulations such as variation, spacing, introducing contextual interference, and using tests, rather than presentations, as learning events, all share the property that they appear during the learning process to impede learning, but they then often enhance learning as measured by post-training tests of retention and transfer. Conversely, manipulations such as keeping conditions constant and predictable and massing trials on a given task often appear to enhance the rate of learning during instruction or training, but then typically fail to support long-term retention and transfer" (Bjork, 2011, 8).

Admittedly, cramming does get information into your head for a short while – usually long enough to stay in there to pass a test. But cramming won’t help you learn.

If learning is your goal, cramming is an irrational act

Instead of reviewing a text, you could just as well play a round of ping-pong. In fact, chances are it would help you more because exercise helps to transfer information into long-term memory. Plus, exercise reduces stress, which is good, because stress floods our brains with hormones that suppress learning processes that the best-researched and most successful learning method is elaboration.

Elaboration means nothing other than really thinking about the meaning of what we read, how it could inform different questions and topics and how it could be combined with other knowledge.

"Writing for Learning" is the name of an "elaboration method". But there is a caveat. Even though elaboration works verifiably well for deep understanding, it might not be the best choice if you just want to learn isolated encyclopaedic facts

The slip-box takes care of storing facts and information. Thinking and understanding is what it can’t take off your shoulders, which is why it makes sense to focus on this part of the work. That it facilitates learning as well is a nice side effect.

Working with the slip-box, therefore, doesn’t mean storing information in there instead of in your head, i.e. not learning. On the contrary, it facilitates real, long-term learning. It just means not cramming isolated facts into your brain – something you probably wouldn’t want to do anyway. The objection that it takes too much time to take notes and sort them into the slip-box is therefore short-sighted.

Writing, taking notes and thinking about how ideas connect is exactly the kind of elaboration that is needed to learn. Not learning from what we read because we don’t take the time to elaborate on it is the real waste of time.

There is a clear division of labour between the brain and the slip-box: The slip-box takes care of details and references and is a long-term memory resource that keeps information objectively unaltered. That allows the brain to focus on the gist, the deeper understanding and the bigger picture, and frees it up to be creative. Both the brain and the slip-box can focus on what they are best at.

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Take Smart Notes

Experienced academic readers usually read a text with questions in mind and try to relate it to other possible approaches, while inexperienced readers tend to adopt the question of a text and the frames of the argument and take it as a given. What good readers can do is spot the limitations of a particular approach and see what is not mentioned in the text.

Scientific thinking is plainly impossible if we can’t manage to think beyond a given context and we only focus on the information as it is given to us. Writing brief accounts on the main ideas of a text instead of collecting quotes. Think hard about how they connect with other ideas from different contexts and could inform questions that are not already the questions of the author of the respective text.

Make a Career One Note at a Time

The sum of the slip-box content is worth much more than the sum of the notes. More notes mean more possible connections, more ideas, more synergy between different projects and therefore a much higher degree of productivity. Luhmann’s slip-box contains about 90,000 notes, which sounds like an incredibly large number.

Luhmann took 6 notes per day, May be I should do 3 notes per day

Think Outside the Brain

You could therefore measure your daily productivity by the number of notes written.

Taking literature notes is a form of deliberate practice as it gives us feedback on our understanding or lack of it, while the effort to put into our own words the gist of something is at the same time the best approach to understanding what we read.

Taking permanent notes of our own thoughts is a form of self-testing as well: do they still make sense in writing? Are we even able to get the thought on paper? Do we have the references, facts and supporting sources at hand? And at the same time, writing it is the best way to get our thoughts in order. Writing here, too, is not copying, but translating (from one context and from one medium into another). No written piece is ever a copy of a thought in our mind.

Only in the written form can an argument be looked at with a certain distance – literally. We need this distance to think about an argument – otherwise the argument itself would occupy the very mental resources we need for scrutinizing it.

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 – at least, you would want to counterbalance it. The need for external scaffolding. Real thinking requires some kind of externalization, especially in the form of writing.

“In any case, no matter how internal processes are implemented, insofar as thinkers are genuinely concerned with what enables human beings to perform the spectacular intellectual feats exhibited in science and other areas of systematic enquiry, as well as in the arts, they need to understand the extent to which the mind is reliant upon external scaffolding.”

“Somehow one has to mark differences, keep track of distinctions, either explicitly or implicitly in concepts,” because only if the connections are somehow fixed externally can they function as models or theories to give meaning and continuity for further thinking

“Scarcity: Why Having Too Little Means So Much” (2013) by Mullainathan and Shafir. They investigate how the experience of scarcity has cognitive effects and causes changes in decision-making processes. They help the reader understand why people with almost no time or money sometimes do things that don’t seem to make any sense to outside observers.

Is this convincing? What methods do they use? Which of the references are familiar?

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?

This immediately triggers further questions, which I can discuss on following notes, starting with: “Why?”

the answer to the question “why” has already triggered more follow-up questions, like: Isn’t this already discussed in theories of social inequality? If yes: Who discussed it? If not: Why not? And where do I turn to, to find answers to these questions?

By skimming through the slip-box, I might discover that these ideas could also be helpful for another topic I haven’t thought about.

Learn by not Trying

By explicitly writing down how something connects or leads to something else, we force ourselves to clarify and distinguish ideas from each other.

Selection is the very keel on which our mental ship is built.

To be able to remember everything and not having to resort to any external memory sounds great initially. But you might think differently if you are familiar with the story of a man who was really able to remember almost everything. The reporter Solomon Shereshevsky. It wasn’t just that Shereshevsky was able to remember so much, he had trouble forgetting anything. The important things got lost under a pile of irrelevant details that involuntarily came to his mind.

He had great trouble relating to literature or poetry. He could repeat a novel word by word, but the greater meaning would be lost on him. While Romeo and Juliet is for most of us a story of love and tragedy, for him it would be the story of “Two households, both alike in dignity,

It should be obvious that for academic thinking and writing, the gift of being able to remember everything is a serious liability.

Forgetting, then, would not be the loss of a memory, but the erection of a mental barrier between the conscious mind and our long-term memory. Psychologists call this mechanism active inhibition (cf. MacLeod, 2007). It is easy to understand what it is good for: Without a very thorough filter, our brains would constantly be flooded by memories, making it impossible to focus on anything in our surroundings.

We are very dependent on a subconscious mechanism that reliably inhibits almost every memory every moment except the very, very few that are truly helpful in a situation.

Shereshevsky might not have had an ability most of us do not posses, but lacked an ability we all posses: The ability to forget systematically – to inhibit most irrelevant information from being remembered. Above all, it made it almost impossible for him to think in abstract terms.

Distinguishing between two different measurements when it comes to memory: Storage strength and Retrieval strength (Bjork 2011).

Storage strength, the ability to store memories, only becomes greater over one’s lifetime.

Learning would be not so much about saving information, like on a hard disk, but about building connections and bridges between pieces of information to circumvent the inhibition mechanism in the right moment. It is about making sure that the right “cues” trigger the right memory, about how we can think strategically to remember the most useful information when we need it.

The learning strategies most students employ, we see that the vast majority of all learning still aims to improve “storage strength,” even though it cannot be improved. hence the derogative term “cramming:” the attempt to reinforce and solidify information in the brain by repetition. Using fancy words and describing it as a “strengthening of the connections between neurons” does not change the fact that this attempt is futile.

If we instead focus on “retrieval strength,” we instantly start to think strategically about what kind of cues should trigger the retrieval of a memory. we don’t want to have to rely on cues in the environment. This is not only impractical, but highly misleading:

What does help for true, useful learning is to connect a piece of information to as many meaningful contexts as possible, which is what we do when we connect our notes in the slip-box with other notes. Making these connections deliberately means building up a self-supporting network of interconnected ideas and facts that work reciprocally as cues for each other.

Memory artists instead attach meaning to information and connect it to already known networks of connections in a meaningful way. One piece of information can become the cue for another and strings or networks of cues can be built.

Memory techniques are the fix for a rather artificial situation.

Why in interview I am supposed to remember the API methods.. Some could be in muscle memory.. most of them not.

When it comes to academic writing, we don't have the need for this trick, as we can choose to build and think exclusively within meaningful contexts.

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 meaning of something is not always obvious and needs to be explored (elaborated). Elaboration is nothing more than connecting information to other information in a meaningful way. The first step of elaboration is to think enough about a piece of information so we are able to write about it. The second step is to think about what it means for other contexts as well.

“The results of several recent studies support the hypothesis that retention is facilitated by acquisition conditions that prompt people to elaborate information in a way that increases the distinctiveness of their memory representations.”

Why Flash Card works? Or outline based retreival works

Why asking why is good

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.

The slip-box forces us to ask numerous elaborating questions:

• What does it mean?
• How does it connect to … ?
• What is the difference between … ?
• What is it similar to?

That the slip-box is not sorted by topics is the precondition for actively building connections between notes. Connections can be made between heterogeneous notes – as long as the connection makes sense.

most information is given to us in our learning institutions. Most often, it comes in modular form, sorted by topic, separated by disciplines and generally isolated from other information. The slip-box is forcing us to do the exact opposite: To elaborate, to understand, to connect and therefore to learn seriously.

Adding Permanent Notes to the Slip-Box

The fact that too much order can impede learning has become more and more known (Carey 2014). Conversely, we know that the deliberate creation of variations and contrasts can facilitate learning.

This shows that elaborating on the differences and similarities of notes instead of sorting them by topic not only facilitates learning, but facilitates the ability to categorise and create sensible classifications!

The next step after writing the permanent notes is to add them to the slip-box.

1. Add a note to the slip-box either behind the note you directly refer to or, if you do not follow up on a specific note, just behind the last note in the slip-box. Number it consecutively. The Zettelkasten numbers the notes automatically. “New note” will just add a note with a new number. If you click “New note sequence,” the new note will be registered at the same time as the note that follows the note currently active on the screen. But you can always add notes “behind” other notes anytime later. Each note can follow multiple other notes and therefore be part of different note sequences.
2. Add links to other notes or links on other notes to your new note.
3. Make sure it can be found from the index; add an entry in the index if necessary or refer to it from a note that is connected to the index.
4. Build a Latticework of Mental Models

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Develop Ideas

Every note is just an element in the network of references and back references in the system, from which it gains its quality (Luhmann 1992)

Ideally, new notes are written with explicit reference to already existing notes. Obviously, this is not always possible, especially in the beginning when the slip-box is still in its infancy, but it will very soon become the first option most of the time. Then you can put the new note “behind” an existing, related note straight away.

An initial subsequence that attracts more and more follow-up notes can easily become a main topic with many subtopics over time

These note sequences are the backbone of text development. They combine the advantages of an abstract with a topic-related order.

Notes are only as valuable as the note and reference networks they are embedded in. a tool to think with, we don’t need to worry about completeness. We don’t need to write anything down just to bridge a gap in a note sequence. We only write if it helps us with our own thinking.

As an extension of our own memory, the slip-box is the medium we think in , not something we think about . 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.

Develop Topics

After adding a note to the slip-box, we need to make sure it can be found again. This is what the index is for.

The reason he was so economical with notes per keyword and why we too should be very selective lies in the way the slip-box is used. Because it should not be used as an archive, where we just take out what we put in, but as a system to think with, the references between the notes are much more important than the references from the index to a single note.

It can surprise and remind us of long-forgotten ideas and trigger new ones. This crucial element of surprise comes into play on the level of the interconnected notes, not when we are looking for particular entries in the index.

We can provide ourselves with a (temporarily valid) overview over a topic or subtopic just by making another note. If we then link from the index to such a note, we have a good entry point.

If the overview on this note ceases to correctly represent the state of a cluster or topic, or we decide it should be structured differently, we can write a new note with a better structure and update the respective link from the index. This is important: Every consideration on the structure of a topic is just another consideration on a note – bound to change and dependent on the development of our understanding.

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?

The archivist asks: Which keyword is the most fitting? A writer asks: In which circumstances will I want to stumble upon this note, even if I forget about it? It is a crucial difference.

"People are more likely to overestimate the likelihood of an event to happen if they are able to conceive it well and in detail than if it were abstract.”

If you are a political scientist and read this note as an answer to the question of why certain topics are discussed during an election and others not, or why it could be politically more sensible to promote easy-to-visualise solutions over solutions that really work.

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.

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.

Make Smart Connections

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.

file-box (Schmidt 2013, 173f; Schmidt 2015, 165f). Only the first and last are relevant for the digital Zettelkasten,

The first type of links are those on notes that are giving you the overview of a topic.

They don’t have to be written in one go as links can be added over time,

What we think is relevant for a topic and what is not depends on our current understanding and should be taken quite seriously: It defines an idea as much as the facts it is based on.

The most common form of reference is plain note-to-note links. They have no function other than indicating a relevant connection between two individual notes. By linking two related notes regardless of where they are within the slip-box or within different contexts, surprising new lines of thought can be established.

These links can help us to find surprising connections and similarities between seemingly unrelated topics.

Luhman was able to show how vastly different things like money, power, love, truth and justice can be seen as social inventions that solve structurally similar problems

The search for meaningful connections is a crucial part of the thinking process towards the finished manuscript.

Instead of figuratively searching our internal memory, we literally go through the file-box and look for connections. By dealing with actual notes, we are also less prone to imagine connections where there aren’t any, as we can see in black and white if something makes sense or not.

Compare, Correct and Differentiate

We build up an internal structure of the slip-box, which is shaped by our thinking. Slip-box will shape our thinking as well and help us to think in a more structured way. Our ideas will be rooted in a network of facts, thought-through ideas and verifiable references. It is like a well-informed but down-to-earth communication partner who keeps us grounded. If we try to feed it some lofty ideas, it will force us to check first: What is the reference? How does that connect to the facts and the ideas you already have?

If you use the slip-box for a while, you will inevitably make a sobering discovery: The great new idea you are about to add to the slip-box turns out to be already in there. Having the same thought twice or mistaking another person’s idea with our own is far from unusual.

If we forget about an idea and have it again, our brains get as excited as if we are having it the first time. Therefore, working with the slip-box is disillusioning, but at the same time it increases the chance that we actually move forward in our thinking towards uncharted territory, instead of just feeling like we are moving forward.

It is much easier to detect these small but crucial differences when we literally have our notes in front of our eyes, comparing them during our attempts to connect them.

The brain is very good at making associations and spotting patterns and similarities between seemingly different things and also very good in spotting differences between seemingly similar things, but it needs to have them presented objectively and externally.

Comparing notes also helps us to detect contradictions, paradoxes or oppositions – important facilitators for insight.

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. Albert Rothenberg suggests that the construction of oppositions is the most reliable way of generating new ideas

Maathi Yosi

Adding new notes to old notes and being forced to compare them leads not only to a constant improvement of one’s own work, but often discloses weaknesses in the texts we read.

The slip-box not only confronts us with dis-confirming information, but also helps with what is known as the feature-positive effect. This is the phenomenon in which we tend to overstate the importance of information that is (mentally) easily available to us and tilts our thinking towards the most recently acquired facts, not necessarily the most relevant ones. Without external help, we would not only take exclusively into account what we know, but what is on top of our heads.

Assemble a Toolbox for Thinking

Just by working with the slip-box, we retrieve old ideas and facts on an irregular basis and connect them with other bits of information Flashcards are much more effective than cramming or reviewing information within the context of a textbook, they also have a downside: The information on flashcards is neither elaborated on nor embedded in some form of context.

Each flashcard stays isolated instead of being connected with the network of theoretical frames, our experiences or our latticework of mental models. A scientific term or concept only becomes meaningful within the context of a theory – otherwise it would just be a word. Assemble a toolbox of useful mental models (Manktelow and Craik 2004) that could help with our daily challenges and make sense of the things we learn and encounter.

Charlie Munger, Warren Buffett’s partner and vice chairman of Berkshire Hathaway, stresses the importance of having a broad theoretical toolbox – not to be a good academic, but to have a good, pragmatic grip on reality. Powerful concepts in every discipline and to try to understand them so thoroughly that they become part of our thinking. The moment one starts to combine these mental models and attach one’s experiences to them, one cannot help but gain what he calls “worldly wisdom.” The importance is to have not just a few, but a broad range of mental models in your head. Otherwise, you risk becoming too attached to one or two and see only what fits them. You would become the man with a hammer who sees nails everywhere (cf. Maslow, 1966, 15).

“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. And you’ve got to array your experience, both vicarious and direct, on this latticework of models. You may have noticed students who just try to remember and pound back what is remembered. Well, they fail in school and in life . You’ve got to hang experience on a latticework of models in your head.”

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.

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.

We delegate the storage of knowledge to the slipbox and at the same time focus on the principles behind an idea while we write, add and connect notes, when we look for patterns and think beyond the most obvious interpretation of a note, when we try to make sense of something, combine different ideas and develop lines of thought, we do exactly that: we build up a “latticework of mental models” instead of just “remembering isolated facts and try and bang ’em back.”

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.

“By learning, retaining, and building on the retained basics, we are creating a rich web of associated information. The more we know, the more information (hooks) we have to connect new information to, the easier we can form long-term memories. […] Learning becomes fun. We have entered a virtuous circle of learning, and it seems as if our long-term memory capacity and speed are actually growing. On the other hand, if we fail to retain what we have learned, for example, by not using effective strategies, it becomes increasingly difficult to learn information that builds on earlier learning. More and more knowledge gaps become apparent. Since we can’t really connect new information to gaps, learning becomes an uphill battle that exhausts us and takes the fun out of learning. It seems as if we have reached the capacity limit of our brain and memory. Welcome to a vicious circle. Certainly, you would much rather be in a virtuous learning circle, so to remember what you have learned, you need to build effective long-term memory structures.” (Sachs 2013, 26) Helmut D.Sachs

1. Pay attention to what you want to remember.
2. Properly encode the information you want to keep.
3. Practice recall. (Ibid., 31)

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).

We retrieve information from the slip-box whenever we try to connect new notes with old notes. Just by doing this, we mix up contexts, shuffle notes and retrieve the information in irregular intervals. And along the way, we further elaborate on the information, which we always retrieve deliberately.

Use the Slip-Box as a Creativity Machine

Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn’t really do it, they just saw something. Steve Jobs

But the reason why Watson and Crick or Kekulé had these insights and not a random person on the street is that they already had spent a very long time thinking hard about the problems, tinkered with other possible solutions and tried countless other ways of looking at the problem. Our fascination with these stories clouds the fact that all good ideas need time. Even sudden breakthroughs are usually preceded by a long, intense process of preparation.

We need experience until we can “feel our way” around the problems and questions we deal with, even if these things are words, concepts and notes in a file system.

It is the intuition that comes from the intimate knowledge of a practice that can lead us to new insights. We might not be able to explicitly state why it is more promising to follow one idea instead of another, but being experienced, we somehow know – which is enough.

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 “slow hunch.” As a precondition to make use of this intuition, he emphasises the importance of experimental spaces where ideas can freely mingle

Most often, innovation is not the result of a sudden moment of realization, anyway, but incremental steps toward improvement. Even groundbreaking paradigm shifts are most often the consequence of many small moves in the right direction instead of one big idea.

The search for small differences is key. It is such an important skill to see differences between seemingly similar concepts, or connections between seemingly different ideas.

The neurobiologist James Zull points out that comparing is our natural form of perception, where our cognitive interpretation is in lockstep with our actual eye movements. Therefore, comparing should be understood quite literally.

Think Inside the Box

“Paying attention does not mean unrelenting attention on one focal point. Our brains evolved to notice details by shifting focus from one area to another, by repeatedly scanning the surroundings.

brain is more likely to notice details when it scans than when it focuses.”

“Creative people are better at recognizing relationships, making associations and connections and seeing things in an original way—seeing To be able to play with ideas, we first have to liberate them from their original context by means of abstraction and re-specification.

Abstraction should indeed not be the final goal of thinking, but it is a necessary in-between step to make heterogeneous ideas compatible. Only by abstraction and re-specification can we apply ideas in the singular and always different situations in reality. Even very personal, intimate experiences, like encounters with art, require abstraction. If the story of Romeo and Juliet touches us, it is certainly not because we are all members of one of two feuding families in Verona. We abstract from time and place, from the particular circumstances until we can meet the protagonists of this story on a general level where our own emotional life can resonate with what we see on stage.

Studies on creativity with engineers show that the ability to find not only creative, but functional and working solutions for technical problems is equal to the ability to make abstractions.

Abstraction is also the key to analyse and compare concepts, to make analogies and to combine ideas; this is especially true when it comes to interdisciplinary work

Here, it is the concrete standardization of notes in just one format that enables us to literally shuffle them around, to add one idea to multiple contexts and to compare and combine them in a creative way without losing sight of what they truly contain.

Creativity cannot be taught like a rule or approached like a plan. But we can make sure that our working environment allows us to be creative with ideas.

Our brains just love routines. We need therefore a bit of a ruse to break the power of thinking routines.

They emphasise the importance of feedback loops and the need to find ways to confront ourselves with our errors, mistakes and misunderstandings.

Ability to focus on the main ideas behind the details, to grasp the gist of something.

Make sure that you really see what you think you see and describe it as plainly and factually as possible. Our perception does not follow the order of seeing first and interpreting second. It does both at the same time: We always perceive something as something – our interpretation is instantaneous.

We need a trick to see what we don’t see. As we always immediately see a whole picture of something, everything else, including the reinterpretation of it or the detection of missing bits, is a step that follows .

The same is true when we read: We don’t see lines on a paper first, then realise that these are words, then use them to build sentences and finally decipher the meaning. We immediately read on the level of meaningful understanding. To really understand a text is therefore a constant revision of our first interpretation.

To be able to see what we see instead of what we expect to see is indeed a skill in itself, not like a character trait of being “open-minded.”

If we think we can “hold back” an interpretation, we are fooling ourselves.

The RAF fell for a common error in thinking called survivorship bias (Taleb 2005). The other planes didn’t make it back because they were hit where they should have had extra protection, like the fuel tank. The returning planes could only show what was less relevant.

It is very good to know what has already proven to not work if we try to come up with new ideas that do work.

Problems rarely get solved directly, anyway. Most often, the crucial step forward is to redefine the problem in such a way that an already existing solution can be employed.

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.

Economists developed hugely complicated products, but did not take into account the simple fact that price and value are not necessarily the same. There is a reason why Buffett is not only a great investor, but also a great teacher: He not only has a vast knowledge about everything related to business, he can also explain it all in simple terms.

Facilitate Creativity through Restrictions

Simple ideas can be tied together into consistent theories and build up enormous complexity.

By using the slip-box on a daily basis, we train these important intellectual skills deliberately: We check if what we understood from a text is really in the text by having our understanding in written form in front of our eyes. We learn to focus on the gist of an idea by restricting ourselves in terms of space. We can make it a habit to always think about what is missing when we write down our own ideas. And we can practice asking good questions when we sort our notes into the slip-box and connect them with other notes.

The restriction to one idea per note is also the precondition to recombine them freely later. Luhmann choose notes in the format A6. A good rule of thumb for working with the program is: Each note should fit onto the screen and there should be no need of scrolling.

“On page x, it says y,” and later stored with the reference in one place. Ideas and thoughts are captured on the slip-box notes and connected to other notes always in the same way in the same place. These standardizations make it possible that the technical side of note-taking can become automatic. Not having to think about the organisation is really good news for brains like ours – the few mental resources we have available, we need for thinking about the actual relevant questions: those concerning the contents.

Less choice can not only increase our productivity, but also our freedom and make it easier to be in the moment and enjoy it (Schwartz, 2007). Not having to make choices can unleash a lot of potential, which would otherwise be wasted on making these choices.

Thinking and creativity can flourish under restricted conditions and there are plenty of studies to back that claim.

The scientific revolution started with the standardization and controlling of experiments, which made them comparable and repeatable.

Think of poetry: It imposes restrictions in terms of rhythm, syllables or rhymes. Haikus give the poet very little room for formal variations, but that doesn’t mean they are equally limited in terms of poetic expressiveness. On the contrary: It is the strict formalism that allows them to transcend time and culture.

A clear structure allows us to explore the internal possibilities of something. Artist like Lucio Fontana to cut into the canvas instead of painting on it.

The biggest threat to creativity and scientific progress is therefore the opposite: a lack of structure and restrictions. 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.

One thing is for sure: the common idea that we should liberate ourselves from any restrictions and “open ourselves up” to be more creative is very misleading indeed

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Share Your Insight

Just look into your slip-box and see where clusters have been built up. These clusters are what caught your interest again and again, so you already know that you have found material to work with.

Now you can spread out these notes on your desktop or use the outliner of the Zettelkasten, outline your argument and construct a preliminary order of sections, chapters or paragraphs. This will make questions, which are not answered, obvious, and it will show the gaps in the argument that need to be filled and make visible which parts still need some work.

From Brainstorming to Slip-box-Storming

Instead of widening the perspective to find as many possible lines of thought to which an idea might contribute, it is now about narrowing the perspective, making a decision on one topic only and cutting out everything that does not directly contribute to the development of the text and support the main argument.

Remember the lesson: An idea or a fact is not worth more merely because it is easily available to you. Charles T. Munger

We don’t need to worry about the question of what to write about because we have answered the question already – many times on a daily basis. Every time we read something, we make a decision on what is worth writing down and what is not. Every time we make a permanent note, we also made a decision about the aspects of a text we regarded as relevant for our longer-term thinking and relevant for the development of our ideas. We constantly make explicit how ideas and information connect with each other and turn them into literal connections between our notes. By doing this, we develop visible clusters of ideas that are now ready to be turned into manuscripts.

The process is self-reinforcing. A visibly developed cluster attracts more ideas and provides more possible connections, which in return influence our choices on what to read and think further.

Topics grow bottom up and gain traction along the way. As soon as the slip-box has grown a bit, we can replace our thoughts on what is interesting and what we think is relevant with a pragmatic look into the slip-box, where we can plainly see what truly proved to be interesting and where we found material to work with.

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. It is now less about finding a topic to write about and more about working on the questions we generated by writing.

If we, on the other hand, let questions arise from the slip-box, we know that they are tried and tested among dozens or even hundreds of other possible questions. The vast majority of questions might have been answered quickly or disappeared as no notes were drawn to them, either because of a lack of interest or a lack of material. This is how evolution works: by trial and error, not planning.

Good questions are in the sweet spot of being relevant and interesting, not too easy to answer but possible to tackle with material that is available or at least within our reach. When it comes to finding good questions, it is therefore not enough to think about it. We have to do something with an idea before we know enough about it to make a good judgement. We have to work, write, connect, differentiate, complement and elaborate on questions – but this is what we do when we take smart notes.

From Top Down to Bottom Up

Starting with what we have also comes with another, unexpected advantage: We become more open to new ideas.

without intense elaboration on what we already know, we would have trouble seeing its limitations, what is missing or possibly wrong. Being intimately familiar with something enables us to be playful with it, to modify it, to spot new and different ideas without running the risk of merely repeating old ideas believing they are new.

familiarity makes it harder to come up with new ideas. We just didn’t know that most of the ideas we had are actually not that innovative. seeing old ways of thinking as thinking routines, puts it well when he writes that we cannot break with a certain way of thinking if we are not even aware that it is a certain way of thinking

Getting Things Done by Following Your Interests

That motivation is shown to be one of the most important indicators for successful students – next to the feeling of being in control of one’s own learning course. even highly intelligent students fail in their studies, it’s most often because they cease to see the meaning in what they were supposed to learn (cf. Balduf 2009), are unable to make a connection to their personal goals (Glynn et al. 2009) or lack the ability to control their own studies autonomously and on their own terms (Reeve and Jan, 2006; Reeve, 2009).

Nothing motivates us more than seeing a project we can identify with moving forward, and nothing is more demotivating than being stuck with a project that doesn’t seem to be worth doing. If we accompany every step of our work with the question, “What is interesting about this?” and everything we read with the question, “What is so relevant about this that it is worth noting down?” we do not just choose information according to our interest.

By elaborating on what we encounter, we also discover aspects we didn’t know anything about before and therefore develop our interests along the way. It would be quite sad if we did not change our interests during research.

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.

The ability to keep control over our work and change course if necessary is made possible by the fact that the big task of “writing a text” is broken down into small, concrete tasks, which allows us practically to do exactly what is needed at a certain time and take the next step from there. 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. Only then can work itself become the source of motivation, which is crucial to make it sustainable.

Applicable to Software development on having a reusable scalable architecture.

“When people experienced a sense of autonomy with regard to the choice, their energy for subsequent tasks was not diminished. An important question that deserved empirical attention concerns the potential for autonomous choice to vitalise or enhance self-regulatory strength for subsequent tasks. 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.”

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

Finishing and Review

A key point: Structure the text and keep it flexible.

we now need to bring our thoughts into a linear order. The key is to structure the draft visibly. By looking at the (always preliminary) structure, you can see if information will be mentioned in another part.

The problem in this stage is almost exactly the opposite of the “blank screen.” Instead of not knowing how to fill the pages, we have so much at hand that we have to curb our impulse to mention everything at the same time. The structure of an argument is part of it and therefore will change during the process of developing it

As soon as the structure not longer changes much, we can happily call it a “table of contents.” But even then, it helps to see it as a structural guideline and not a prescription. It is not unusual to change the order of chapters at the very end.

The slip-box is in some way what the chemical industry calls “verbund.” This is a setup in which the inevitable by-product of one production line becomes the resource for another, which again produces by-products that can be used in other processes and so on, until a network of production lines becomes so efficiently intertwined that there is no chance of an isolated factory competing with it anymore.

The process of reading and writing inevitably produces a lot of unintended by-products. Not all ideas can fit into the same article, and only a fraction of the information we encounter is useful for one particular project.

By taking smart notes, we collect en passant the material for our future writings in one place.

“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.”

Becoming an Expert by Giving up Planning

One inconvenient truth in the end: The planning skills of students are pathetic.

But there is one consolation: It has nothing to do with being a student. It has something to do with being human. Even the people who study this phenomenon, which is called the overconfidence bias, admit that they too fall for it.

Be generally sceptical about planning, especially if it is merely focused on the outcome, not on the actual work and the steps required to achieve a goal. It doesn’t help when athletes imagine themselves as winners of a race, but it makes a big difference if they imagine all the training that is necessary to be able to win. Having a more realistic idea in mind not only helps them to perform better, it also boosts their motivation (Singer et al. 2001).

This is not only true for athletes, but for any work that needs effort and endurance (Pham and Taylor 1999). Writing definitely belongs in this category.

We can only learn from our experiences if feedback follows shortly afterwards – and maybe more than once in a while.

Giving timely feedback enhances the expereince whether it is positive or negative.

Disassembling the big challenge of “writing a paper” into small, manageable tasks helps to set realistic goals that can be checked on a regular basis.

If we instead set out to write, say, three notes on a specific day, review one paragraph we wrote the day before or check all the literature we discovered in an article, we know exactly at the end of the day what we were able to accomplish and can adjust our expectations for the next day.

Law of Parkinson, every kind of work tends to fill the time we set aside for it, like air fills every corner of a room

in which our brains tend to stay occupied with a task until it is accomplished (or written down). If we have the finish line in sight, we tend to speed up, as everyone knows who has ever run a marathon. That means that the most important step is to get started.

The Actual Writing

But the biggest difference lies in the task you are facing to start with. It is much easier to get started if the next step is as feasible as “writing a note,” “collect what is interesting in this paper” or “turning this series of notes into a paragraph” than if we decide to spend the next days with a vague and ill-defined task like “keep working on that overdue paper.”

Have well defined small tasks.

that he wouldn’t be able to write a single sentence if he didn’t start by convincing himself he was only writing down some ideas for himself, and that maybe he could turn it into something publishable later. By the time he stopped writing, he was always surprised to find that the only thing left to do was revise the draft he already had.

“kill your darlings.” For every document I write, I have another called “xy-rest.doc,” and every single time I cut something, I copy it into the other document, convincing myself that I will later look through it and add it back where it might fit.

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Make It a Habit

Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them.

The most reliable predictor of our behaviour in the immediate future is – surprise, surprise – the intention to do it.

To put it differently, good intentions don’t last very long, usually.

We have the best chance to change our behaviour over the long term if we start with a realistic idea about the difficulties of behavioural change (Dean 2013). And that is not so easy, because the more we are used to doing something in a particular way, the more in control we feel about it, even though we are less in control of it.

When we perform an action repeatedly, its familiarity seems to bleed back into our judgments about that behavior. We end up feeling we have more control over precisely the behaviours that, in reality, we have the least control over.

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.

The goal here is to get into the habit of fetching pen and paper whenever we read something, to write down the most important and interesting aspects. If we manage to establish a routine in this first step, it becomes much easier to develop the urge to turn these findings into permanent notes and connect them with other notes in the slip-box.

That it is not just a tool to write more efficiently, but also a training device for serious long-term learning, should have been obvious to me, but wasn’t.

Some seemingly innovative ideas, like the “learner-centred” approach, often do more harm than good, as they still neglect the need for an external scaffolding to think in. It is not the learner who should be the focus of attention.

It allows the learner to let his or her own thinking become decentralised within a network of other ideas. 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.

If we are just storing information, there would be no need to use a slip-box. To reap its benefits, we need to change our working routines. And the basis for that is a deep understanding on how and why it works and how the different steps and tasks of writing fit together.

Another reason why this technique is still a hard sell is that most students only realise the need for a good system when they already struggling with their writing, typically towards the end of the university program. It would have helped much more if one started earlier – very much like saving for retirement.

It is also difficult to change behaviour in times of stress. The more pressure we feel, the more we tend to stick to our old routines – even when these routines caused the problems and the stress in the first place. This is known as the tunnel effect (Mullainathan and Shafir 2013). But Mullainathan and Shafir, who examined this phenomenon thoroughly, also found a way out of it: Change is possible when the solution appears to be simple.

The slip-box is as simple as it gets. Read with a pen in your hand, take smart notes and make connections between them. Ideas will come by themselves and your writing will develop from there. There is no need to start from scratch. Keep doing what you would do anyway: Read, think, write. Just take smart notes along the way.

“If you here require a practical rule of me, I will present you with this: Whenever you feel an impulse to perpetrate a piece of exceptionally fine writing, obey it—wholeheartedly—and delete it before sending your manuscript to press. Murder your darlings.” (Quiller-Couch 2006, 203)

Refactor your code

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Key Ideas

Introduction

What’s in it for me? Discover a note-taking technique that could revolutionize the way you think, write, and learn. A blank page. It’s a familiar and terrifying sight for anyone who has to write. Maybe you’re working on an essay, or embarking on your thesis, or writing your first nonfiction book. It’s a thrilling task – but also daunting. Where to begin? What to say? And even if you do make a solid start, how do you develop your argument into a compelling whole?

These are tough questions. And though there’s no simple answer to any of them, there is a method that can help you arrive at an answer.

You guessed it: smart notes.

In tldr; you’ll learn

• what a Zettelkasten is, and how to use one;
• the 3 types of notes you should be making; and
• why you shouldn’t trust your brain.

Smart notes can lead to great achievements.

Let’s get things started with a remarkable tale: the unlikely story of Niklas Luhmann.

Luhmann was a German man who, in the 1960s, worked in an administration office. His leisure-time passion was reading. As he read, he made notes on things that interested him – philosophy, organizational theory, sociology. He made these notes on small pieces of paper, which he then systematically numbered before filing them in a Zettelkasten, or slip-box.

Eventually, he put some of his thoughts into a paper and presented it to an influential German sociologist. Impressed, the sociologist invited Luhmann to become a professor of sociology at the University of Bielefeld.

The key message here is: Smart notes can lead to great achievements.

Now, Luhmann had neither a doctorate nor a sociology degree. But instead of declining the invitation, he got to work. He took sociology classes and put his thesis together in less than a year. In 1968, he became a sociology professor at Bielefeld – a position he held until his death.

So how on earth did he pull this off? We’ll get to that in a minute – but, before we do, we should mention Luhmann’s other accomplishments, which are even more impressive.

On taking up his position, he was asked to present what his research project would be. His reply: “My project: theory of society. Duration: 30 years. Costs: zero.” In 1997, 29 and a half years later, he completed the final two-volume chapter of his seminal work, The Society of Society. It changed the field of sociology.

By the time he’d completed his magnum opus, he’d published nearly 60 books and hundreds of articles. Still more material was published after his death.

Many people regarded Luhmann as a genius. But studies of his methods show that his success wasn’t the result of an inordinately vast intelligence. It was the result of smart working. Luhmann knew exactly how to use his notes, which allowed him to remain focused and in control.

So why isn’t everyone doing the same? Well, first, there’s been some confusion about his process; people have tried to employ it without fully understanding its workflow. Second, most of the information about this process was in German. And, finally, the idea underpinning the process is simple – and people often don’t expect impressive results from simple ideas.

What exactly was Luhmann’s process? Well, as he himself said: “I, of course, do not think everything by myself. It happens mainly within the slip-box.”

What’s a slip-box, and how does it work? We’ll explore that in the next blink.

Systematically make three types of notes to develop your ideas and arguments.

Now that you know about Luhmann and his prolific writing, it’s time to find out about his Zettelkasten – the slip-box – and how he took notes.

Luhmann had two slip-boxes. One was for collecting references and his notes on the contents of books. The other, his main slip-box, was for storing notes and ideas. His slip-boxes were made of wood, and he wrote his notes on index cards. You can emulate this analog system, or you can use programs that provide the same functionality with the benefit of portability.

So that's the process. But what about the precise workflow? What kind of notes should you be making, and how should you store them?

The key message here is: Systematically make three types of notes to develop your ideas and arguments.

• Fleeting notes
• Literature notes
• Permenant notes

The first kind of notes you should take are fleeting notes. Fleeting notes don’t go in a slip-box; they’re simply for capturing ideas and thoughts. You can take them in a notebook, on a scrap of paper, or wherever works for you. Keep these notes in one place so you can go through them later.

Then, there are literature notes – notes about what you read. While you’re reading, write down things you don’t want to forget along with reference details. Your notes should be short and in your own words. These go into your reference slip-box – the first of the two slip-boxes.

And then there are permanent notes. These will arise from your fleeting and literature notes, which you should go through regularly – preferably daily. As you review your notes, ask yourself what’s relevant to your own ideas, your research, and your interests. Remember that you’re not just collecting information; you’re seeking to develop your ideas and arguments. Ask how the information you’re recording adds to your existing notes. Does it contradict, correct, or support them? Do new ideas come to mind? Do any new questions arise?

Write one permanent note for each idea using full sentences in your own words. The aim is not to copy; it’s to create something new. Be as precise and concise as you can, and don’t forget to include your sources. You can throw away your fleeting notes after you’ve made permanent ones.

And here comes the slightly more complex part. File your new permanent notes in your slip-box behind one or more existing notes. With a paper system, you can choose which note it should go behind, and then add manual references or links to related notes. A digital system allows even greater flexibility.

The final element in the system is your index – keywords with a link to an entry point to particular subjects in your slip-box. Luhmann usually linked only one, or sometimes two, permanent notes.

With a slip-box, you’ll never have to face a truly blank page.

It’s all so simple, right? Well, not quite.

Luhmann didn’t file his notes by subject. Rather, he used an abstract numbering system. Each note had a unique identifier made up of numbers and letters. When he was adding a new note behind another, let’s say a note numbered 223, he’d number the new one 224. If 224 already existed, then the new one would instead be numbered 223a, and so on. If necessary, he alternated between numbers and letters, branching out as his thoughts required. If you use a digital program for your slip-box, of course, this time-consuming numbering process is more or less done automatically.

Luhmann then went through his slip-box and checked for other relevant notes to make further connections.

The key message here is: With a slip-box, you’ll never have to face a truly blank page.

How does this help you, exactly?

Well, let’s say you need to write a paper. Thanks to your notes, you don’t have to start with a blank sheet of paper. Your slip-box provides you with a ready-made argument, along with quotes, references, and great ideas. All you need to do is present this argument. A little rewording here, a little editing there, and you’ll be ready to submit it.

Getting to this point takes time, though. You’ll need to have built up your notes while you’re reading, thinking, and generating ideas and arguments. Externalizing your ideas by writing also helps you understand and remember what you’ve been reading.

So, if you’ve been populating your slip-box as we described in the previous blink, you can use the information you already have to develop your research. Ask yourself what’s missing, and then read more to fill in any gaps. Clusters of ideas and thoughts in your slip-box may help you decide what to write about.

Then, collect all your relevant notes and connections, and copy them to your desktop. If you’re using a paper-based system, remove the notes from your slip-box. You can then use all this information to create your first draft, ordering the information as necessary. It’s important at this stage to contextualize your notes and make them coherent. Ask yourself if there are any holes in your arguments. If there are, then you need to either fill them or change tack.

Finally, you can edit and proofread your paper. After that, you’re ready for the next one!

An elephant can only be eaten in bite-sized chunks.

Anthony Trollope, the nineteenth-century author, was both popular and productive. According to his autobiography, he wrote at least 250 words every 15 minutes from 5:30 a.m. until 8:30 a.m. This enabled him to complete 49 novels over 35 years. An enviable feat.

The thought of completing a dissertation or similarly long academic text can be quite daunting. Yet a regime of writing a page a day, with one day off each week seems manageable – and it’s a much less ambitious pace than Trollope’s. At that rate, a doctoral thesis would actually be completed within a year. Now, in reality, that rarely happens. Sadly enough, over half of doctoral theses remain unfinished.

Nonfiction and academic papers, of course, aren’t written in the same way that Trollope wrote his novels – there’s reading, research, and thinking to be done in addition to the writing itself. So perhaps measuring your progress on a page-per-day basis isn’t appropriate to the task. Perhaps a better metric is notes per day.

The key message here is: An elephant can only be eaten in bite-sized chunks.

From the time he started using his slip-box until the day he died, Luhmann added around 90,000 notes to it – that’s an average of six notes per day. If that still seems like too many to you, why not try just three? Even at that reduced rate, you’d still have a considerable number of notes and ideas in a short space of time. Think of it as an investment – the more notes you have, the greater the number of connections and ideas.

Writing your permanent notes also acts as a kind of self-test. Consider whether your thoughts still make sense when you write them down. Can you even express them in writing? Do you have all the facts and references you need at hand?

When you write down your thoughts, you also distance yourself from them, which allows you to think more critically about your arguments. Daniel Kahneman, the eminent psychologist, remarked that the brain is “a machine for jumping to conclusions” – it has a habit of filling in gaps and making connections and patterns that simply aren’t there. By writing, you externalize your thinking process. And this allows you to see facts and rationalize your thoughts more clearly.

Read with a pen in your hand.

Here’s a pearl of wisdom from Benjamin Franklin: read with a pen in hand. And, while reading, “enter in a little book short hints of what you feel that is common or that may be useful.” Luhmann certainly adopted this approach.

As he read, Luhmann always had pen and paper close at hand. In addition to noting key ideas from the book on his index cards, he’d jot down bibliographical details on the reverse of the cards. After finishing a book, he’d go back through these ideas and see what was relevant to his existing notes.

The key message here is: Read with a pen in your hand.

Your ideas and thoughts will develop as you read more. And your slip-box, as it begins to fill with permanent notes, will itself become a treasure trove of ideas. It’ll stimulate your thoughts, and you’ll be challenged by the connections it presents.

Consider the difference between this procedure and more traditional note-taking. Often, students take notes with no clear goal in mind. They copy swaths of text. They underline, they highlight. They scribble in the margins. Or they take no notes at all as they read. With a slip-box, the reason for your reading and note-taking is perfectly clear: to build on your previous notes and arguments.

While reading and note-taking, you also need to be aware of your confirmation bias. Make a conscious effort to not only seek out arguments that confirm your current views or what you know already. Take Charles Darwin, for example, who regularly wrote down arguments that challenged his theories. As a result, he rarely encountered objections to which he hadn’t already responded.

Luhmann kept his notes concise. Through habit and practice, he became an expert at keeping his notes simple but not simplified. The more you do this, the better you’ll become at it, too. And your note-taking will be reflected in your thinking and speaking as you become versed in explaining things with clarity.

But remember that when you’re writing your permanent notes, you’re doing so for someone who may have general knowledge in the field, but perhaps doesn’t know the specifics and the original context. And that person . . . is your future self.

Your slip-box enhances your learning through elaboration.

Think back to your school days. Did you ever cram before a test? Hastily rereading texts in the hope that some of it would stick might have enabled you to retain enough information to pass the test, but it didn’t help you learn anything in the long term.

Actually, if long-term retention was your goal, you might have been better off playing Ping-Pong. Exercise is an effective knowledge-retention aid, for two reasons. First, it helps you transfer information to your long-term memory. And, by reducing stress, it also reduces the hormones that suppress learning.

So, if you want to learn something, should you simply play more Ping-Pong? Maybe – but what’s actually key to improving your learning is elaboration.

The key message here is: Your slip-box enhances your learning through elaboration.

Elaboration is when you think about the meaning of what you're reading and how it relates to your own thoughts, ideas, and arguments. And – surprise, surprise – when you take smart notes and look for connections with your other smart notes, you are, in fact, elaborating. You automatically start to reflect deeply on what you’ve read. And this is what facilitates real learning.

Time-consuming? You bet. But think about what happens when you don’t elaborate on what you’ve read. You not only lose the opportunity to learn; you waste a great deal of time by reading without learning.

But what about all those other learning techniques – flash cards, for example? Aren’t they good for learning, too? Well, they’re certainly better than cramming. But without context or elaboration, they’re just not very effective.

With your slip-box, your learning is enhanced because as it evolves, you evolve, too. As you purposefully build connections between notes, you build those very same connections in your head. And that web of knowledge, theories, and ideas gives you hooks on which to hang the next piece of information or argument, and so on. Each time you access information from your slip-box to connect new notes, you elaborate connections further, which creates a virtuous circle of learning.

Once you develop your own Zettelkasten and learn how to use it effectively, you’ll be well on your way to achieving maximum productivity and remarkable success.

Final summary

The key message in these blinks is that:

Niklas Luhmann’s Zettelkasten, or slip-box, is an innovative way to externalize your thoughts and build up a reservoir of ideas, arguments, and information. Used correctly, it’ll become like a conversation partner and will ultimately make it easier for you to write academic papers, think more clearly, and improve both your long-term learning and understanding.

And here’s some more actionable advice:

Make smart notes part of your reading routine.

Next time you’re reading, keep a pen and paper handy. Write notes on any interesting concepts or passages. Make this simple first step a habit – it’ll encourage you to start taking permanent notes, and, as you start to build up your slip-box, to connect these with your other notes. Once you establish your new note-taking routine, it’ll become second nature.