• tags: How to Take Smart Notes,slip-box,PKM
  • source: Part 2: “THE FOUR UNDERLYING PRINCIPLES” from Ahrens, Sönke. How to Take Smart Notes: One Simple Technique to Boost Writing, Learning and Thinking: For Students, Academics and Nonfiction Book Writers. North Charleston, SC: CreateSpace, 2017.

Writing Is the Only Thing That Matters⌗

Don’t be afraid to writing ideas down and push them public, as there is no private knowledge in the academia area, and there is no such thing as a history of unwritten ideas. Writing to answer question, in a specific angle on a problem.

With this purpose, reading will be the main source of material for writing, and lectures or seminars will provide the ideas to write about and questions worth answering. So writing doesn’t mean to stop doing everything less well.

Writing changes the way you read and learn:

  • For finding ideas, questions worth answering, feedbacks and what you should learn: you will have a clear, tangible purpose when you attend a lecture, discussion or seminar.
  • For writing it down: you will be more focused on the most relevant aspects of reading and learning.
  • For using your own words: you will be more engaged way to read and learning.
  • For turning it into something new: you will think beyond the things you read.

Simplicity Is Paramount⌗

Change the way of organising notes, don’t store notes under topics, instead to ask youself “In which context will I want to stumble upon it again?”.

A simple idea can shape the world. The slip-box is the shipping container1 that helps to organise notes and achieve a critical mass. To do so, there are three types of notes to avoid lose its value when notes are added to it indiscriminately:

  1. Fleeting notes, which to remind, need to review within a day or two, then move to trash.

    Which is the best you can do without interruputing what you are in the middle of doing. And they are only useful if you review them within a day or two to turn them into proper notes you can use later.

  2. Permanent notes, which will never be thrown away and contain the necessary information in themselves in a permanently understandable way.

    Always stored in the same way in the same place. Which are written in a way that can still be understood even when you have forgotten the context they are taken from.

  3. Project notes, which only relevant to on particular project. Kept within a project-specific folder.

    Which can be:

    • comments in the manuscript
    • collections of projecte-related literature
    • outlines
    • sinppets of drafts
    • reminders
    • to-do lists
    • and of course the draft itself.

And there some typical mistakes we should avoid:

  1. Treat all notes as permanent notes, for example, a journal that kept everything.
  2. Only take notes related to specific projects: That means that everything you found, thought or encountered during the time of a project will be lost.
  3. Treat all notes as fleetings notes, never review or understand the fleeting notes and convert them to permanent notes.

Nobody Ever Starts From Scratch⌗

Let the Work Carry You Forward⌗

  1. Malcom McLean and Containerisation | Maersk Line ↩︎