Learn More, Faster
Key points from How to Take Smart Notes, by Sonke Ahrens
There are many ways people are taught to get more from their reading. Some methods recommend highlighting, underlining key passages, or writing notes in the margins of books. Still others recommend keeping a “reading notebook”, where all of your thoughts about what you read are collected in one place.
The problem with all of these methods is that the highlights, underlines, or notes are isolated. If you merely highlight, underline, or copy text, you also face the problem that you may only think you understand it.
By rereading these notes, you experience the phenomenon of mere-exposure: Repeated viewing of something feels familiar, and causes us to believe we understand it. In fact, we may only recognize it as familiar, and have no understanding of it whatsoever.
To understand what you read, you need to take smart notes. You need to integrate what you read with what you already know, and allow insights to build and play off of one another.
The best way to do this is with a slip-box, or zettelkasten. You can create a physical one, but most people use a digital format. I use the open source software Joplin for mine.
How to use a zettelkasten
Each note in the zettelkasten represents one thought, written in your own words. They are cross-indexed and linked with other notes through direct links and content tags. This allows you to build arguments from the ground up, by seeing what thoughts are related, regardless of their source. When you reach a critical threshold, you can turn the notes into papers or articles.
The three types of notes
Notes are of three types: ▪️ Fleeting notes, which you jot down on whatever paper is handy, and put into an “in box”. They’re just so you don’t forget the thought. ▪️ Permanent notes, which contain your thought, fully fleshed out and written in proper grammar. ▪️ Literature notes, which summarize books and articles you read, and contain the complete citation information.
You can also make project-specific notes, which are archived when the project is done. These are a kind of the other three notes. Notes created during a project that may be relevant to future projects can remain in the main zettelkasten.
Project notes that have no future use (for example, a list of which notes were used to write an article) would clog up your future thinking. By archiving them, they are available for reference, if needed.
Creating notes and putting them into the system
Every day (ideally, but at least once a week), you take all the fleeting notes from your inbox and create permanent notes from them. Or, if they were simply to-do reminders, throw them out.
When you create a permanent note, you need to elaborate on the fleeting note. This elaboration is a key step of learning. It is as you attempt to explain the thought to yourself that you realize whether or not you truly understood it.
You can also ask the questions about how it relates to what you already know. Scientists who study learning refer to this as cuing. The more connections something has to things you already know, the more likely you are to be able to remember it.
By comparing and contrasting new thoughts and ideas with thoughts and ideas already in your zettelkasten, you explicitly make a note of them. This helps you to identify the novel and innovative areas for further exploration.
The act of revisiting existing notes to connect new notes with them also helps you to recall your thoughts regarding those previous notes. You can fill your mind with related thoughts, sparking further connections and revelations.
Additionally, even if you only care about learning and not about creating new work, this is helpful. The act of attempting to remember something, then getting feedback about how much of it we did or did not remember, strengthens our ability to recall it later.
Building work from the system
This is the system that Niklas Luhmann used to publish 58 books and hundreds of articles, many of which were innovative, unique cross-fertilizations from multiple fields.
Even this article that you are reading now came from my own zettelkasten. The basis of it was the literature note I wrote regarding Ahrens’ book. I then supplemented the pieces needed to turn it into a full article from permanent notes I created while reading the book.
If you’re writing a book review, I’d suggest doing the same thing. If you’re trying to create a new article, such as the one I wrote about social jet lag, you can look at all of the notes you have that share a tag. Copy the text of those notes to a word processing document, and move them around until they flow in an order that makes sense to you.
If there are any gaps in your document, you can look for supporting information, first in your zettelkasten, and then online.
It makes the writing much faster, more authoritative, and easier. And, when you’re able to explain the information in an article, you know you understand it, cementing your learning.
Conclusion
To maximize your learning from what you read, you need a good note taking system.
This system must allow you to elaborate your notes, to show that you understand what you read.
It must allow multiple connections to what you already know, a process called cuing, to facilitate recalling the information.
Finally, it must allow you to test your recall of information, by allowing you to see notes you have previously written. By comparing your memory of them to the content of the note, you get feedback of how much you remembered and how much you forgot. This improves your ability to remember more.
The zettelkasten system makes it easy to do all of these things.
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