Interlink your new permanent notes with the existing ones. Then, go to your slip box and look at previous permanent notes. You can discard the fleeting notes once they have been turned into permanent notes. It’s an atomic process: one index card should correspond to one idea and one idea only. These are more detailed, and carefully written to capture your exact thought or idea. Once a day (ideally), go through the notes you created in the first two steps, and turn them into permanent notes. Always write these main points in your own words: don’t copy and paste and be very selective with quotes, which can sometimes hide our lack of understanding of a text. Whenever you read something interesting, take notes of the main points. The goal is just to remember them for a very short amount of time, until you can sit down and write a proper note. They can be very short-just one word for instance. Always have a notebook or a note taking app with you to capture these. These are all the ideas that pop into your mind. Here is the exact process he used to write his research papers. The index was an entry point to explore a particular theme. Each card has an identifier which allowed Luhmann to interlink the cards together, and there is an index of all topics covered in the slip box with the corresponding cards’ identifiers. The method is called the Zettelkasten, and despite its scary name-which means “slip box” or “card index” in German-it’s an incredibly simple and powerful way to take notes so you become more productive and more creative.ĭr Luhmann had two boxes with index cards: the first one where he put literature notes (when reading research papers), and the second one where he put his own thoughts and ideas. Sönke Ahrens shares the simple method used by German sociologist Dr Niklas Luhmann to publish more than 70 books and nearly 400 scholarly articles in his lifetime.
Smart notes book how to#
This is a problem you can ensure you will never face again if you learn how to take smart notes.
But what if you don’t know where to start? Looking at a blank page and struggling to find inspiration? Experts will tell you to brainstorm or do some more research.
While there are hundreds of thousands of books on the generic topic of writing, very few concerns themselves with note-taking-perhaps because it’s not considered an intellectually challenging task by many, or perhaps because many people don’t realise how bad they are at taking notes.
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