![]() ![]() “When it comes to writing, everything, from research to proofreading, is closely connected. A simple, repeatable process that ensures a long-term habit is maintained.Ensure that ideas include useful references to 3rd party sources (e.g.Ensure that stored ideas are accessible for future use.Facilitate connections, discovery and synthesis between different ideas.Effective storage of thoughts and ideas. ![]() It frees your mind to focus on the synthesis of ideas and the underlying argument.Ī good system should provide the following: Having a useful note-taking system relieves you of the burden of needing to hold information and facts in your head. Workflow is an important aspect of writing and note-taking (often overlooked or neglected when it comes to instruction/learning).Ī useful workflow should facilitate movement between tasks. Some might argue that the practical passages are too short and that the book lacks enough concrete examples.Ĭons: There are several sections of the book which turn into citation-soup where Ahrens refers to numerous academic studies in rapid succession. Pros: Ahrens effectively moves between practical and theoretical dimensions of the system. There may be more succinct introductions to zettelkasten online, but you’ll be hard pressed to find a more persuasive advocate than Ahrens. ![]() Fortunately, Ahrens’ book requires a smaller investment: it’s both short and accessible. But be warned: to reap the benefits of the method requires a significant investment in time and effort. If you’ve ever been stymied by “writer’s block,” zettelkasten might be your antidote. Since Ahrens views thinking as writing, it's effectively a writing system as well. On the face of it, How to Take Smart Notes is a book about taking notes (thrilling topic for most people, I’m sure!), but really it’s about a specific approach to thinking-a kind of thinking that occurs both externally on paper and internally in the mind. At this point, the author assures us, it is a relatively straight-forward process to transition from notes to draft manuscript to publication. Over time, the practice should result in dense network of interlinked ideas. The goal is to create a level of atomicity and abstraction that encourages connection and exploration with other ideas recorded in the note-taking system. Keywords, cross-references and index notes (notes that serve as entry-points to clusters of related ideas) can be used to link notes that are related by topic, category or idea. Instead, notes are commingled in a single repository with your other notes. Permanent notes are not organized via a top-down approach (such storing notes in category-specific silos). A key feature of the system is that permanent notes are limited to a single idea per index card. These temporary notes are carefully considered: if the temporary note is deemed sufficiently interesting it is rewritten-with future utility and retrieval in mind-and archived in the zettelkasten as a permanent note (temporary notes that don’t warrant saving are discarded). First, the practitioner generates temporary notes while thinking, learning, and reading. Ahrens describes the process in detail in Chapter 2. The zettelkasten method is relatively straight-forward. Zettelkasten is designed for the capture, processing, and publication of ideas. Zettelkasten shares some qualities of the GTD methodology (particularly where it comes to offloading or freeing up mental capacity by recording important information), but the target audience for the book is the academic researcher, doctoral student and non-fiction writer. Mind you, the zettelkasten is not a productivity system in the way that David Allen’s Getting Things Done system is. It provides a way of saving ideas by writing them down as notes, creating connections between those ideas, and using your accumulated notes to write productively (articles, dissertations, books, etc.). Zettelkasten is a simple but powerful way of recording, organizing and generating insights from what we read and learn. How to Take Smart Notes by Sönke Ahrens (2017) is a book that lays out the rationale and the methods behind the zettelkasten note-taking system (also referred to as the “slip box” method). ![]()
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