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samharnold's review
3.0
The concept is smart notes is a game changer there is no other word for it especially as a writer.
However, this book lost me at various points throughout.
There are however some brilliant YouTube videos that help out with smart notes so the read wasn’t in vain as it introduced me to the concept.
However, this book lost me at various points throughout.
There are however some brilliant YouTube videos that help out with smart notes so the read wasn’t in vain as it introduced me to the concept.
filumeno's review against another edition
5.0
Impossible to review this book without leaving a note, so here it is.
Fantastic read, instant game-changer.
Fantastic read, instant game-changer.
weltenkreuzer's review against another edition
5.0
Gut zu lesender und inspirierender Einblick in das Zettelkasten-System Niklas Luhmanns und wie man es heutzutage für das Studium oder die eigene Arbeit nutzen kann.
anacarolinaeo's review against another edition
5.0
O MELHOR LIVRO DA VIDA INTEIRA.
todo mundo que lê, estuda, escreve ou pesquisa precisa ler. só isso.
todo mundo que lê, estuda, escreve ou pesquisa precisa ler. só isso.
kynan's review
3.0
TL;DR: Compelling content, poorly presented. I'd read the Cliff's Notes version if I were you. There are some interesting takeaways, but they can be more succinctly stated than they are in this book(let?). In fact, here:
- think about what you're reading, don't just consume it because you have to;
- take good notes while you read, these notes should be your impressions/thoughts of what you've just read, not verbatim "quotes";
- take time to compile, reference and index your initial notes (the should contain bibliographic references to enable you to track back to the original content);
- take time to associate your notes, find themes that you find compelling and see if there's anything interesting that hasn't been written about it, or whether these themes intersect in unexpected ways;
- don't multitask.
TL: I am very much not the target audience for this book. I read it because I'm a completionist idiot with poor research and prioritisation skills and I felt that I needed to read this before I embarked on using the note-taking application Obsidian, partly because I ran into the concept of "Zettelkasten", which a lot of people like to use Obsidian to implement, and a lot of whom reference this book.
Zettelkasten is German for "slip box", and refers to a method of "research" that built on the idea of the "Commonplace book (a concept which I also just recently discovered, despite having been a thing since the eighth century, or thereabouts). Basically, you have a box of indexed, err, index cards, on which you deposit the nuggets of knowledge gleaned from reading a larger work. Over time, your index cards develop an interesting set of intersections, as outlined by your personal insight and arrangement, and can lead you to manufacture "serendipitous"discoveries over time. How To Take Smart Notes specifically tells the story of the prolific German sociologist Niklas Luhmann, who's prodigious output is significantly attributed to his extensive Zettelkasten.
This book is a "How-to" guide on the subject of academic Zettlekasten use. I stress the word "academic" because it really is very specifically targeted at members of academia who need to write papers to survive. If you want to understand the concept of reading, comprehending, condensing and indexing other academic publications in order to find the threads of interest, this book provides an interesting overview of the topic.
However! It's incredibly repetitive and, quite frankly, seems to have been written in such a way as to most effectively flaunt the authors Zettlekasten usage. This is unfortunate, because I legitimately think that there are some really useful nuggets of truth embedded in the book and, to be fair, I think I understand the pedagogical intent of tying a story to the dry facts and intermittently repeating those same facts in order to instil them in the reader's mind. But that repeating expands what could probably be a 10 to 15 thousand word article into a 57 thousand word booklet, that is significantly harder to consume.
There are two chunks of knowledge that are imparted here:
- The Zettlekasten concept;
- The Getting Things Done concept (yes, [b:that one|1633|Getting Things Done The Art of Stress-Free Productivity|David Allen|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1312474060l/1633._SX50_.jpg|5759]).
It's mostly about understanding (not just reading) and externalising your storage to a trusted system. I have a couple of quotes (which Mr Ahrens would most assuredly tut at me for having made - "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") that I think indicate the more important concepts, and ones which resonate with my lived experience:
This has always annoyed me! If I don't write something down, I will forget it. If I write it down, I'll remember it forever, which is annoying, because having written it down, I don't need to remember it any more. That, however, is beside the point, the value here is that being able to write something down indicates that you have likely internalised it and are able to (at least in the immediate future) cogitate upon it and perhaps link it with other things that are in mind, which leads to the second point:
The brain does then come in for a (somewhat deserved) lambasting in the secondish portion of the book, along with an interesting aside into "the Zeigarnik effect", namely:
That's where the "trusted system" comes somewhat back into play, but there are a few other things to think about here including using the Zeigarnik effect specifically to induce cogitation, as well as more common GTD-oriented philosophies around multi-tasking being a terrible idea and humans being not the best planners nor the most objective of creatures.
Overall, I really find the ideas presented here interesting, and there is a good thread to the narrative, but it's academically dry, repetitive and prolonged, which makes consuming it much harder that it needs to be!
- think about what you're reading, don't just consume it because you have to;
- take good notes while you read, these notes should be your impressions/thoughts of what you've just read, not verbatim "quotes";
- take time to compile, reference and index your initial notes (the should contain bibliographic references to enable you to track back to the original content);
- take time to associate your notes, find themes that you find compelling and see if there's anything interesting that hasn't been written about it, or whether these themes intersect in unexpected ways;
- don't multitask.
TL: I am very much not the target audience for this book. I read it because I'm a completionist idiot with poor research and prioritisation skills and I felt that I needed to read this before I embarked on using the note-taking application Obsidian, partly because I ran into the concept of "Zettelkasten", which a lot of people like to use Obsidian to implement, and a lot of whom reference this book.
Zettelkasten is German for "slip box", and refers to a method of "research" that built on the idea of the "Commonplace book (a concept which I also just recently discovered, despite having been a thing since the eighth century, or thereabouts). Basically, you have a box of indexed, err, index cards, on which you deposit the nuggets of knowledge gleaned from reading a larger work. Over time, your index cards develop an interesting set of intersections, as outlined by your personal insight and arrangement, and can lead you to manufacture "serendipitous"discoveries over time. How To Take Smart Notes specifically tells the story of the prolific German sociologist Niklas Luhmann, who's prodigious output is significantly attributed to his extensive Zettelkasten.
This book is a "How-to" guide on the subject of academic Zettlekasten use. I stress the word "academic" because it really is very specifically targeted at members of academia who need to write papers to survive. If you want to understand the concept of reading, comprehending, condensing and indexing other academic publications in order to find the threads of interest, this book provides an interesting overview of the topic.
However! It's incredibly repetitive and, quite frankly, seems to have been written in such a way as to most effectively flaunt the authors Zettlekasten usage. This is unfortunate, because I legitimately think that there are some really useful nuggets of truth embedded in the book and, to be fair, I think I understand the pedagogical intent of tying a story to the dry facts and intermittently repeating those same facts in order to instil them in the reader's mind. But that repeating expands what could probably be a 10 to 15 thousand word article into a 57 thousand word booklet, that is significantly harder to consume.
There are two chunks of knowledge that are imparted here:
- The Zettlekasten concept;
- The Getting Things Done concept (yes, [b:that one|1633|Getting Things Done The Art of Stress-Free Productivity|David Allen|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1312474060l/1633._SX50_.jpg|5759]).
It's mostly about understanding (not just reading) and externalising your storage to a trusted system. I have a couple of quotes (which Mr Ahrens would most assuredly tut at me for having made - "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") that I think indicate the more important concepts, and ones which resonate with my lived experience:
If you want to learn something for the long run, you have to write it down. If you want to really understand something, you have to translate it into your own words. Thinking takes place as much on paper as in your own head.
This has always annoyed me! If I don't write something down, I will forget it. If I write it down, I'll remember it forever, which is annoying, because having written it down, I don't need to remember it any more. That, however, is beside the point, the value here is that being able to write something down indicates that you have likely internalised it and are able to (at least in the immediate future) cogitate upon it and perhaps link it with other things that are in mind, which leads to the second point:
Good tools do not add features and more options to what we already have, but help to reduce distractions from the main work, which here is thinking. The slip-box provides an external scaffold to think in and helps with those tasks our brains are not very good at, most of all objective storage of information.
The brain does then come in for a (somewhat deserved) lambasting in the secondish portion of the book, along with an interesting aside into "the Zeigarnik effect", namely:
Open tasks tend to occupy our short-term memory – until they are done.
That's where the "trusted system" comes somewhat back into play, but there are a few other things to think about here including using the Zeigarnik effect specifically to induce cogitation, as well as more common GTD-oriented philosophies around multi-tasking being a terrible idea and humans being not the best planners nor the most objective of creatures.
Overall, I really find the ideas presented here interesting, and there is a good thread to the narrative, but it's academically dry, repetitive and prolonged, which makes consuming it much harder that it needs to be!
raulb's review against another edition
3.0
- I picked up this book to improve my current note taking system based on reviews I had read over the internet, and especially because its premise is built upon something I have realized overtime turns out to be crucial. It has to be simple.
- I have yet to put it in practice so I can’t really say about the Zettelkasten method, but I found the book a bit too repetitive to my taste. I think their concepts and its benefits could have been summarized by quite a lot considering nothing that was mentioned struck me as something unreasonably complex.
- Next step is to incorporate those learnings into something actionable that could be adapted to my existing workflow.
- I have yet to put it in practice so I can’t really say about the Zettelkasten method, but I found the book a bit too repetitive to my taste. I think their concepts and its benefits could have been summarized by quite a lot considering nothing that was mentioned struck me as something unreasonably complex.
- Next step is to incorporate those learnings into something actionable that could be adapted to my existing workflow.
debyik's review against another edition
4.0
How to Take Smart Notes by Sonke Ahrens teaches the key to efficient writing by taking your notes and ideas and organizing them using the Slip-Box Method created by Niklas Luhmann.
This is an excellent book for students, non-fiction writers, and those in the research field. Using a tried and tested note-taking-technique, Sonke Ahrens teaches the reader the process so that you are able to implement this technique on your own.
The writing style does get a bit long-winded and repetitive at times which can be off-putting to some, but the information you get is worth it. I would’ve loved to have this information when I was in school, but honestly, at that time, it would’ve gone right over my head.
How to Take Smart Notes is not just about how to take notes but also gives you ideas on organizing them and the ability to utilize them in the future.
This is an excellent book for students, non-fiction writers, and those in the research field. Using a tried and tested note-taking-technique, Sonke Ahrens teaches the reader the process so that you are able to implement this technique on your own.
The writing style does get a bit long-winded and repetitive at times which can be off-putting to some, but the information you get is worth it. I would’ve loved to have this information when I was in school, but honestly, at that time, it would’ve gone right over my head.
How to Take Smart Notes is not just about how to take notes but also gives you ideas on organizing them and the ability to utilize them in the future.
librarytech4's review against another edition
4.0
This book does a fantastic job at explaining how to take notes for writing a book, an essay, or any type of research. The different methods he uses for this I can see as having great potential. I was hoping to get something out of this book for note taking in continuing education classes or when reading books to discuss, but he didn’t really go into that type of note taking. He mentioned at the very end of the book a method for cleaning up your ideas that I think could be helpful even outside of note taking and writing. He gave the idea to create a dump page where you can take ideas that don’t fit into what you are currently working on, but you don’t want to completely remove. This cleans up your ideas, yet allows you to still keep the ideas in writing. I can see this being helpful in project planning as well. This book was a great book even though I was not able to get what I was hoping for out of it. It has lots of great nuggets of wisdom.
steven_v's review
3.0
This book is a decent introduction to the concept of taking "smart notes" and using the "Zettelkasten" (box of cards) system which has become quite popular in some circles (partly due to this book). I found many sections informative. On the other hand, the book contains a ton of "salesmanship," that is, Ahrens trying to sell the reader on the "slip-box" method (i.e., Zettelkasten). The sales parts were rather tedious to get through, perhaps because I picked this book up *after* I had already decided I might want to try this method, so they were unnecessary for me. Unfortunately, Ahrens embeds his "commercial" tracts within the rest of the text, making it impossible to skip over the "slip-box ads" to get to the important part, which is how to actually implement the method. I'm also not entirely sure, because I had some info. about the method before reading this book, if I could have "grokked" the method just from the text of this book. I think so, but it's impossible to tell because I already knew what "literature notes" and "permanent notes" and "slip-boxes" were before starting. I'm not entirely convinced that this book, for all its salesmanship, would actually have sold me on the method *or* taught me properly how to do it, if I had read it first, with a clean slate, having never heard of zettlekasten.
That said, I think that if you have heard of it and have a bit of background, but don't know the details, Ahrens does provide a decent context for what zettelkasten are and how and why to use them. If you watch a few of the better YouTube videos about this first, and are intrigued, then this book is worth a read. But I'm not sure I would suggest it as the first introduction, mostly because it is too much an ad for zettelkasten and not enough of an instruction manual on how to set up the system and use it. In particular, there is almost no help on how to get the snowball rolling... the assumption in almost every section (with a couple of notable exceptions) is that you already have a slip-box full of content and are simply *adding* to it. How to get started with an empty box? There's not much instruction about that, and there are zero examples of doing it.
Two things irked me about this book: First, Ahrens is extremely wordy. If a sentence can be said in 10 words, he will use 20 instead. Second, Ahrens frequently lacks transitional phrases between paragraphs, giving his writing a choppy feel and a sense of jumping from topic to topic. The book is decidedly non-linear despite the superficial appearance of organization (into chapters). I could not help but wonder if this was a consequence of the zettlekasten method, which is a non-linear approach to note-taking, since he supposedly used this method to build up the early draft of the book.
However, if you can stand the bloated prose and Ahrens' tendency to jump around from topic to topic without transitions, there is a good amount of information here and this book does serve as a decent reference for the zettlekasten method. I'd say, if you're going to do zettlekasten or anything like it, you should probably have this book on your shelf.
That said, I think that if you have heard of it and have a bit of background, but don't know the details, Ahrens does provide a decent context for what zettelkasten are and how and why to use them. If you watch a few of the better YouTube videos about this first, and are intrigued, then this book is worth a read. But I'm not sure I would suggest it as the first introduction, mostly because it is too much an ad for zettelkasten and not enough of an instruction manual on how to set up the system and use it. In particular, there is almost no help on how to get the snowball rolling... the assumption in almost every section (with a couple of notable exceptions) is that you already have a slip-box full of content and are simply *adding* to it. How to get started with an empty box? There's not much instruction about that, and there are zero examples of doing it.
Two things irked me about this book: First, Ahrens is extremely wordy. If a sentence can be said in 10 words, he will use 20 instead. Second, Ahrens frequently lacks transitional phrases between paragraphs, giving his writing a choppy feel and a sense of jumping from topic to topic. The book is decidedly non-linear despite the superficial appearance of organization (into chapters). I could not help but wonder if this was a consequence of the zettlekasten method, which is a non-linear approach to note-taking, since he supposedly used this method to build up the early draft of the book.
However, if you can stand the bloated prose and Ahrens' tendency to jump around from topic to topic without transitions, there is a good amount of information here and this book does serve as a decent reference for the zettlekasten method. I'd say, if you're going to do zettlekasten or anything like it, you should probably have this book on your shelf.