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A review by kynan
How to Take Smart Notes: One Simple Technique to Boost Writing, Learning and Thinking by Sönke Ahrens
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!