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

I recently completed my PhD in the social sciences and wish that I had been able to read this book at the beginning of my graduate career. It's far more than a mere how-to on note-taking. It's effectively an evidence-based reflection on thinking and learning as a materially based practice that would be useful for everyone who is engaged in making knowledge in some way.The author draws on a variety of research dealing with attention, learning, cognition, etc. to make an argument for the "slip box" note-taking system (or "Zettelkasten" as made famous by prolific sociologist Niklas Luhmann). I tend to think of these types of books as "self-help" for academics, but in the best way. Reading this book opened my eyes to the habits and practices that will best help me reflect and digest the reading I do, and productively summarize and apply it to my research and writing. This process has already helped me to read more effectively, by focusing on what in the given text is relevant to what I already know or am puzzling about. I'm deeply convinced by this iterative and generative process of knowledge-production.If you're an academic or other knowledge worker who struggles with how to usefully organize and engage with the massive amounts of information that we all accumulate, this is the book for you. If you feel that the notes you take on things often get lost (in your organizing system) or become incomprehensible after time has passed, this book is for you. If you are interested in methods and practices for streamlining and optimizing your knowledge work (GTD-followers, I'm looking at you), buy this book! ;)

This is a book about MUCH more than a way to take smart notes. Oh, sure, you’ll learn all about a super cool (and super simple) system for taking notes. But that is covered in the first 20% of the book. The rest of the book is about deep and critical topics related to smart note taking, like thinking well, reading well, the writing process and even how to set up habits of success. I almost didn’t read it because it looked too basic. I’m so glad I did.

I've always wanted to write a book. I can never remember what books I've read. This book solved the problem! It lays out a simple process for how to pull information from one book and apply it to the thoughts/ ideas of another. I read and underline and write notes in the margin, but then I never come back to them. In fact, it turns out that the only way I can tell if I've read a book is to look inside and see if I made notes in it. Then I know that I've read it and put it down. This book lays out a simple process of how to take notes. I find now that when I'm reading, I'm going through a mental inventory of thoughts/ ideas from other books and my own that cause me to pause and reflect and interact with books in a way I never had before reading this one. Understanding how to take notes and getting into the habit of doing it has unleashed this new superpower within me that sees and believes that I can write a book.

This book presents several key ideas and techniques for improving one's workflow as a writer. It's based on the methods of sociologist Niklas Luhmann, who in the 1960s created a huge Wiki-like database of index cards. I learned about his "Zettelkasten" (slip-box) method years ago, but there was very little information on it in English. Lately that is changing. Fortunately, the method works even better with computers, and there is a variety of software out there that can handle this way of working. I use ConnectedText and Bear, but there are plenty of others that can implement all or most of the method. "Zettelkasten," the one the author recommends, didn't quite fit my needs, but I may revisit it. In any case, the book doesn't rely on any particular program. For that matter, if you really wanted, you could work with index cards, à la Luhmann.The main ideas are simple but profound. A few were especially helpful. 1) Work bottom-up, amassing notes on what interests you, rather than top-down, trying to fit into a preconceived plan. When it comes time to write, you will have a large storehouse from which to draw. 2) Separate notes on reading/study from one's own thoughts. Just that one idea is already making a huge difference in my productivity and enjoyment of writing. 3) Create opportunities to be surprised later, by linking your ideas together as much as possible, via tags, categories, or whatever your program of choice calls them. When the size of your note stash reaches critical mass, you begin to find new or forgotten relationships between ideas. The author brings in plenty of other useful points, drawn from various disciplines.I noticed some very ungenerous reviewers gave it one star, because they wanted examples. A silly demand, really, since the method is essentially non-linear, so any step-by-step example would have necessarily had to be trivial. You could also say that the book itself is a fine example of the method in action.Unlike so many tomes on writing, this book is well-written. I didn't see a translator credit, and if there wasn't one, then even more props to the author and editor. The physical book, published via Create Space, is quite aesthetically pleasing.

This book does not explain how to use Luhmann’s method precisely. It is just a compilation of over-explained ideas (nothing new under the sun, by the way) that are not even useful for applying that method. There are other resources in the web, so please, avoid buying this book.

I agree with the other critical reviews. This book is neither a clear exposition of Luhmann's techniques of note-taking nor a useful practical implementation. The book is somewhat muddled. Despite occasional insight, it will do next to nothing to improve your research. One can only hope that Luhmann's own account - buried in the German archives - of the note-taking and research methodology that enabled him to make a lifetime of fruitful connections sees the light of day.

The title is a little misleading. The "One Simple Technique" suggestion may set up false expectations that this is a lightweight non-fiction book loaded with cheap tricks and some magic sauce that will transform your working life. If that's what you are hoping for then you're half right. It can transform how you work and learn and develop your understanding but, as in all things, you're going to have to graft a little.For me it has helped me take the necessary steps to build a genuinely productive workflow and it has also led me to make significant changes to how I teach as well.I think this book will be particularly accessibly to anyone who reads qualitative research and the text is relatively dense compared to your average self help book. It is a serious chunk of work, and Ahrens' pedigree as an academic is apparent. It's not as impenetrable as many papers in the social sciences (!) but it's still a long way from the fluff that generally adorns the Amazon self help list. (And I read and like plenty of that too.) Some reviewers may take exception to references but I'm in favour of them - actually, I can't think of anything worse that pages of opinion with the lightest of efforts to refer to a single study before the author makes some sweeping statement. I like to be able to check for myself and it also offers the opportunity for you to branch into areas for your own exploration.If you are toying with the idea of building your own Zettelkasten this is the book - and check out zettelkasten.de as well as the author's website for resources.Potentially life-changing, certainly life-enhancing, but you'll have to work for it too. You can't blast through it in an hour. And, for something that could have so much impact you didn't really expect that did you? Looking at reviews, it seems some people do. I bought it on Kindle but I'm buying the paperback too so I can re-visit and devote time to it as I add the elements I want to my own Zettelkasten.

The book describes a personal knowledge management system based on the workflow of the prolific German sociologist Niklas Luhmann, called the Zettelkasten or slip-box. The systems consists of summary notes that are linked to each other. The book introduces this systems and elaborates how this system is not only a way to organise notes but also a tool to develop thoughts. I found this approach interesting and refreshingly different to many other approaches to academic productivity. However, I also found the way in which it is presented in this book quite annoying. It is like reading a 300-page infomercial. The same arguments are repeated again and again and the description of the method is embedded in meandering prose. I think this would have been a much more valuable resource if it had been condensed to about 10 pages. The focus also seems to be quite narrowly applied to disciplines that work with literature. I was missing more information about how the Zettelkasten system could expanded to contain notes on experiments or field work and link that to relevant literature.

This book goes into a lot of reasoning why you should take smart notes and why they are good for a personal knowledge management system. There isn't one clear example of what one looks like, how they should be formatted or any other practicle advice on setting up such a system.Get some index cards, put them in a box. That's about as practicle as it gets I am afraid.

Full of lengthy, wordy general considerations on reading/brain functioning etc. but very little practical guidance and not a single example of what a smart note could be. Apart from saying that you should create links between your notes (how can you practilly do that by the way when you have any thousands of them?!) and let these connections create new ideas, there's really little to take here. In the he me, talking about a so-called Zettlekasten "system" sounds very pretentious ...

I read the book for a comprehensive description of the functioning of zettelkasten. Easier in a book I thought than across many internet posts. Wrong. Most of the book was polemical destruction of straw men and expounding the author's preferred methods of study and writing academic papers. The information about zettelkasten is scattered, apparently randomly, throughout the book. Possibly sufficient if you can use a zettelkasten to put it together, but a tidier shorter description would have been more useful and effective for my purposes.There's also far too much emphasis on his preferred digital software with no discussion of the details of its working or its advantages and disadvantages against other methods. Many other programs would function perfectly well to do this. It's worth researching the methods people actually us before making an initial choice. (I say initial because it seems that it's very common to switch systems.)