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A review by steven_v
How to Take Smart Notes. One Simple Technique to Boost Writing, Learning and Thinking by Sönke Ahrens
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.