Scan barcode
bovolon's review
5.0
I read this book twice. The first time I read it as a regular book, found it interesting, tried to implement some principles on Roam and later Obsidian, got disappointed since I'm not an academic... So, for me, a 3-star book.
Then I read David Kadavy’s Digital Zettelkasten, and by comparing it with this book the method finally clicked. So I came back to Taking Smart Notes, this time actually taking smart notes while reading it, and was surprised to find such a dense amount of ideas on its pages. Much more than note taking, the author has a lot to say about reading, learning, writing, thinking, biases, decision making… and much of it can be connected to other ideas on our own slipboxes.
My suggestion: read it once. Understand it. Learn to take smart notes. Then come back to it. You may be surprised by what you can find within, while applying the very principles discussed within. Highly recommended.
Then I read David Kadavy’s Digital Zettelkasten, and by comparing it with this book the method finally clicked. So I came back to Taking Smart Notes, this time actually taking smart notes while reading it, and was surprised to find such a dense amount of ideas on its pages. Much more than note taking, the author has a lot to say about reading, learning, writing, thinking, biases, decision making… and much of it can be connected to other ideas on our own slipboxes.
My suggestion: read it once. Understand it. Learn to take smart notes. Then come back to it. You may be surprised by what you can find within, while applying the very principles discussed within. Highly recommended.
drillvoice's review against another edition
5.0
Very well written, very strong thesis, well argued and very practical.
sacrebisous's review against another edition
informative
slow-paced
I'm a bit conflicted on this one, because while I do agree that this is a Pretty Essential introduction into personal knowledge management (PKM) and the Zettelkasten method in particular, I shrimply hate the way this book is written. It is extremely repetitive and just about every section includes some repetition of "regular note-taking sucks, but SMART NOTE-TAKING is perfect in every way!" The author spends way too much time trying to convince me of the method when what I'd prefer is for him to just explain how the Zettelkasten works in greater depth.
You're better off reading a summary of this bad boy because it's a pretty tedious book to get through. Also, you should supplement this with other Zettelkasten-related resources, because Ahrens gives a decent overview of the system but fails to explain how you can practically implement it and make sense of it for a non-academic essayist's use case.
You're better off reading a summary of this bad boy because it's a pretty tedious book to get through. Also, you should supplement this with other Zettelkasten-related resources, because Ahrens gives a decent overview of the system but fails to explain how you can practically implement it and make sense of it for a non-academic essayist's use case.
libroscdv's review against another edition
5.0
Es un libro realmente útil, pero la aplicación práctica y lo interesante está al principio. Hay muchas cosas que vienen después que son totalmente prescindibles.
Eso sí, el método Zettelkasten es muy potente.
Eso sí, el método Zettelkasten es muy potente.
naleagdeco's review against another edition
5.0
For all the Zettelkasten trends that have taken over the productivity nerd section of the Internet, this book is still the best resource to start with to understand the _principles_ behind the Zettelkasten method and not some person's particularly half-implementation of it that they pass off as the original thing without context. It's not that I don't think people will modify the system, I certainly do myself, it's just that nobody on the internet seems to explain why they made their changes and what the implications are when compared to the original system being advocated.
In general, Ahrens is able to explain the system he is advocating for in a clear way, and expresses why each part of the system does what it does. Very early on in the book he sketches an end-to-end outline of one's every day process, and then elaborations further down in the book can be anchored by that cyclic sequence. I very much appreciate this as I went back to reference his "writing a paper step by step" and lists of questions to elaborate on ideas with and lists of lists of questions to connect to/make other ideas with very often as I was figuring out how to adopt this system myself.
There are some things I do wish the author explained more clearly, however:
* I do wish there were some visual descriptions of a basic zettelkasten example. It wasn't clear to me from the book's description of ideas and connections how literature notes should be independent and atomic recapturings of ideas books that are linked serially because they are references back to the original source. I think watching Luhmann's ID system in practice would demonstrate this, as most digital versions of zettelkasten obscure this practice by assuming you know how to handle backlings and replacing these manually generated IDs with date/timestamps because it is easier for a computer to generate and it is assumed you understand the relationship between notes that the original ID was trying to create.
* I wish it was stated more explicitly that topics are not a tag to be linked to every related card but instead merely a card that contains no new insight in itself, but exists to be a hub from which a bunch of related chains of ideas can begin to be traversed from. This might be because I'm so used to tags and topics in conventional organizational systems, but the book's description was not enough for me to break my long-held assumptions of how every other system does tags and categories.
* A practical demo would really highlight how important it is to properly process a piece of literature; it is so easy to take on face value that I should be writing a note for every interesting phrase in a book when it ultimately makes far more sense to collapse these notes into a single note per actual ID (most book authors repeat their ideas in different forms across their work and it's sometimes hard to realize that as you are reading it and learning the ideas. In this digital era it is really important to understand what it means to lay your literature cards out and scan them for the purposes of simplifying them into an effective summary of a book's ideas.
My main criticisms of the book are that it is too much of a polemic against existing academic systems. I very much understand why that would motivate the author, but a lot of the paragraphs about imposter syndrome and describing the perverse incentives of the existing system took a very gleeful malevolent tone that was not matched by a positive opposite for the zettelkasten system itself. It's a relatively minor point, and maybe actual academic students will find some catharsis in it (I definitely am guilty of all the things Ahrens said students are plagued by), but it was a bunch of time spent on the reasons why things are done wrong in an us vs. them narrative instead of focusing on how to do things right.
In general, Ahrens is able to explain the system he is advocating for in a clear way, and expresses why each part of the system does what it does. Very early on in the book he sketches an end-to-end outline of one's every day process, and then elaborations further down in the book can be anchored by that cyclic sequence. I very much appreciate this as I went back to reference his "writing a paper step by step" and lists of questions to elaborate on ideas with and lists of lists of questions to connect to/make other ideas with very often as I was figuring out how to adopt this system myself.
There are some things I do wish the author explained more clearly, however:
* I do wish there were some visual descriptions of a basic zettelkasten example. It wasn't clear to me from the book's description of ideas and connections how literature notes should be independent and atomic recapturings of ideas books that are linked serially because they are references back to the original source. I think watching Luhmann's ID system in practice would demonstrate this, as most digital versions of zettelkasten obscure this practice by assuming you know how to handle backlings and replacing these manually generated IDs with date/timestamps because it is easier for a computer to generate and it is assumed you understand the relationship between notes that the original ID was trying to create.
* I wish it was stated more explicitly that topics are not a tag to be linked to every related card but instead merely a card that contains no new insight in itself, but exists to be a hub from which a bunch of related chains of ideas can begin to be traversed from. This might be because I'm so used to tags and topics in conventional organizational systems, but the book's description was not enough for me to break my long-held assumptions of how every other system does tags and categories.
* A practical demo would really highlight how important it is to properly process a piece of literature; it is so easy to take on face value that I should be writing a note for every interesting phrase in a book when it ultimately makes far more sense to collapse these notes into a single note per actual ID (most book authors repeat their ideas in different forms across their work and it's sometimes hard to realize that as you are reading it and learning the ideas. In this digital era it is really important to understand what it means to lay your literature cards out and scan them for the purposes of simplifying them into an effective summary of a book's ideas.
My main criticisms of the book are that it is too much of a polemic against existing academic systems. I very much understand why that would motivate the author, but a lot of the paragraphs about imposter syndrome and describing the perverse incentives of the existing system took a very gleeful malevolent tone that was not matched by a positive opposite for the zettelkasten system itself. It's a relatively minor point, and maybe actual academic students will find some catharsis in it (I definitely am guilty of all the things Ahrens said students are plagued by), but it was a bunch of time spent on the reasons why things are done wrong in an us vs. them narrative instead of focusing on how to do things right.
stephenmeansme's review
1.0
The perfect negative review of this book would start by introducing it, HOW TO TAKE SMART NOTES, and contextualize it as being about the Zettelkasten, or "slip-box," method of note-taking. In fact, not merely "note-taking" as the common Anglophone school usage might have it, but a system of knowledge-gardening habits that centers the production of lots and lots of note items.
The review would then digress, for paragraphs and paragraphs unto whole ass chapters, about the theory of book reviews, about how somebody studied book reviews and found that most people only read the first and last sentences (cf. Bullshytte 2024), and only occasion would this digression touch back on HOW TO TAKE SMART NOTES.
But I have only so much energy for clever Goodreads review games, so that's enough of that.
HTTSN is ultimately a tedious exercise in enduring Ahrens' citations of psychology and learning-theory studies. And you know, I wouldn't have had so much of a problem with it if he bothered to give a bit more detail about the results. It would help to know the effect size, for example, or the base rates, or whatever. I am not going to chase down the dozens of reference papers just to confirm that they're saying what Ahrens claims.
As to the Zettelkasten method, I don't think this book really convinced me that it's "How to Take Smart Notes" - in fact, it gave me a more jaundiced view of the "Personal Knowledge Management" scene. You see, they might talk about Zettelkasten as this special technique of this guy Luhmann, except it wasn't unique to Luhmann, he was just a weird nerd with a bespoke inter-note reference scheme and a whole fuckton of notes. It's not even clear that he was an especially influential or insightful social scientist, for all the notes he took and all the books and articles he produced out of them.
Long on pop-psych justifications and short on technique, I can't give more than 1.5 stars, rounded down.
The review would then digress, for paragraphs and paragraphs unto whole ass chapters, about the theory of book reviews, about how somebody studied book reviews and found that most people only read the first and last sentences (cf. Bullshytte 2024), and only occasion would this digression touch back on HOW TO TAKE SMART NOTES.
But I have only so much energy for clever Goodreads review games, so that's enough of that.
HTTSN is ultimately a tedious exercise in enduring Ahrens' citations of psychology and learning-theory studies. And you know, I wouldn't have had so much of a problem with it if he bothered to give a bit more detail about the results. It would help to know the effect size, for example, or the base rates, or whatever. I am not going to chase down the dozens of reference papers just to confirm that they're saying what Ahrens claims.
As to the Zettelkasten method, I don't think this book really convinced me that it's "How to Take Smart Notes" - in fact, it gave me a more jaundiced view of the "Personal Knowledge Management" scene. You see, they might talk about Zettelkasten as this special technique of this guy Luhmann, except it wasn't unique to Luhmann, he was just a weird nerd with a bespoke inter-note reference scheme and a whole fuckton of notes. It's not even clear that he was an especially influential or insightful social scientist, for all the notes he took and all the books and articles he produced out of them.
Long on pop-psych justifications and short on technique, I can't give more than 1.5 stars, rounded down.
diego_duguo's review against another edition
3.0
Jæja, bókinni tókst að láta mig vilja prufa "The slip box" aðferðina. Hef annars ekki mikið annað um þessa bók að segja.