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A review by naleagdeco
How to Take Smart Notes: One Simple Technique to Boost Writing, Learning and Thinking – for Students, Academics and Nonfiction Book Writers by Sönke Ahrens
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.