How to Take Smart Notes: One Simple Technique to Boost Writing, Learning and Thinking – for Students, Academics and Nonfiction Book Writers

✍️ Sönke Ahrens

Tags: sönke-ahrens , lang-en , personal-development

This is a very interesting book about note taking for writing with focus on academic papers. The book presents the Zettelkasten, a note taking and “idea management” method made famous by a researcher named Niklas Luhmann. The main takeaway message is that the notes are not sorted by specific ideas or topics. The key are the links and the referencing between the notes. Another important take home message is that the notes should be carefully crafted. The book mentions the difference between fleeting notes and permanent notes and it is very important that all the fleeting notes (which, by the way, includes underlined sentences) should be processed and turned into permanent notes as soon as possible.

The downsides of the book are: 1) it is too focused on academic writing, 2) although all the concepts are well explained, I think the book deserved a concrete example of a set of notes and how they are organized.