Introduction

Every intellectual endeavor starts with a note.

This book aims to fill this gap by showing you how to efficiently turn your thoughts and discoveries into convincing written pieces and build up a treasure of smart and interconnected notes along the way.

Writing is not what follows research, learning or studying, it is the medium of all this work.

Getting something that is already written into another written piece is incomparably easier than assembling everything in your mind and then trying to retrieve it from there.

The quality of a paper and the ease with which it is written depends more than anything on what you have done in writing before you even made a decision on the topic.

What does make a significant difference along the whole intelligence spectrum is something else: how much self-discipline or self-control one uses to approach the tasks at hand.

It is not so important who you are, but what you do. Doing the work required and doing it in a smart way leads, somehow unsurprisingly, to success.

Every task that is interesting, meaningful and well-defined will be done, because there is no conflict between long- and short-term interests. Having a meaningful and well-defined task beats willpower every time. Not having willpower, but not having to use willpower indicates that you set yourself up for success.

1 Everything You Need to Know

A good structure is something you can trust. It relieves you from the burden of remembering and keeping track of everything. If you can trust the system, you can let go of the attempt to hold everything together in your head and you can start focusing on what is important: The content, the argument and the ideas.

A good structure enables flow, the state in which you get so completely immersed in your work that you lose track of time and can just keep on going as the work becomes effortless.

Still, we often struggle the most with procrastination and motivation. It is certainly not the lack of interesting topics, but rather the employment of problematic work routines that seems to take charge of us instead of allowing us to steer the process in the right direction.

The challenge is to structure one’s workflow in a way that insight and new ideas can become the driving forces that push us forward.

All that means is that a system is needed to keep track of the ever-increasing pool of information, which allows one to combine different ideas in an intelligent way with the aim of generating new ideas.

In fact, poor students often feel more successful (until they are tested), because they don’t experience much self-doubt.

This is why high achievers who have had a taste of the vast amount of knowledge out there are likely to suffer from what psychologists call imposter syndrome, the feeling that you are not really up to the job, even though, of all people, they are.

1.1 Good Solutions are Simple -and Unexpected

There is really no need to reorganize anything you already have. Just deal with things differently the moment you have to deal with them anyway.

Routines require simple, repeatable tasks that can become automatic and fit together seamlessly. Only when all the related work becomes part of an overarching and interlocked process, where all bottlenecks are removed, can significant change take place.

The principle of GTD is to collect everything that needs to be taken care of in one place and process it in a standardized way. This doesn’t necessarily mean that we actually do everything we once intended to do, but it forces us to make clear choices and regularly check if our tasks still fit into the bigger picture.

GTD relies on clearly defined objectives, whereas insight cannot be predetermined by definition.

Writing is not a linear process. We constantly have to jump back and forth between different tasks. It wouldn’t make any sense to micromanage ourselves on that level.

Only if you can trust your system, only if you really know that everything will be taken care of, will your brain let go and let you focus on the task at hand.

1.2 The Slip-box

Everything You Need to Do

Writing notes accompanies the main work and, done right, it helps with it. Writing is, without dispute, the best facilitator for thinking, reading, learning, understanding

Notes build up while you think, read, understand and generate ideas because you have to have a pen in your hand if you want to think, read, understand and generate ideas properly anyway. If you want to learn something for the long run, you have to write it down. If you want to really understand something, you have to translate it into your own words. Thinking takes place as much on paper as in your own head.

Writing these notes is also not the main work. Thinking is. Reading is. Understanding and coming up with ideas is and generating ideas we have.

You have to externalize your ideas, you have to write.

If we write, it is more likely that we understand what we read, remember what we learn and that our thoughts make sense. And if we have to write anyway, why not use our writing to build up the resources for our future publications?

Make fleeting notes. Always have something at hand to write with to capture every idea that pops into your mind. Don’t worry too much about how you write it down or what you write it on. These put them into one place, which you define as your inbox, and process them later.

Make literature notes. Whenever you read something, make notes about the content. Write down what you don’t want to forget or think you might use in your own thinking or writing. Keep it very short, be extremely selective, and use your own words

Make permanent notes. Now turn to your slip-box. Go through the notes you made in step one or two (ideally once a day and before you forget what you meant) and think about how they relate to what is relevant for your own research, thinking or interests

Write exactly one note for each idea and write as if you were writing for someone else: Use full sentences, disclose your sources, make references and try to be as precise, clear and brief as possible filing each one behind one or more related notes adding links to related notes

Making sure you will be able to find this note later

Develop your topics, questions and research projects bottom-up from within the system. See what is there, what is missing and what questions arise.

After a while, you will have developed ideas far enough to decide on a topic to write about. Your topic is now based on what you have, not based on an unfounded idea about what the literature you are about to read might provide.

11 Take Smart Notes

Experienced academic readers usually read a text with questions in mind and try to relate it to other possible approaches, while inexperienced readers tend to adopt the question of a text and the frames of the argument and take it as a given.

Even doctoral students sometimes just collect de-contextualized quotes from a text – probably the worst possible approach to research imaginable. his makes it almost impossible to understand the actual meaning of information. Without understanding the information within its context, it is also impossible to go beyond it, to reframe it and to think about what it could mean for another question.

Writing brief accounts on the main ideas of a text instead of collecting quotes.

11.1 Make a Career One Note at a Time

On the other hand, most people feel that writing a page a day (and having a day a week off) is quite manageable, not realizing that this would mean finishing a doctoral thesis within a year.

He would start every morning at 5:30 a.m. with a cup of coffee and a clock in front of him. Then he would write at least 250 words every 15 minutes.

Academic or nonfiction texts are not written like this because, in addition to the writing, there is the reading, the research, the thinking and the tinkering with ideas. And they almost always take significantly more time than expected.

Putting notes into the slip-box, however, is like investing and reaping the rewards of compounded interest.

In contrast to manuscript pages per day, a certain number of notes a day is a reasonable goal for academic writing.

And that is because taking a note and sorting it into the slip-box can be done in one go, while writing a manuscript page could involve weeks and months of preparation involving other tasks as well.

11.2 Think Outside the Brain

Taking literature notes is a form of deliberate practice as it gives us feedback on our understanding or lack of it, while the effort to put into our own words the gist of something is at the same time the best approach to understanding what we read.

Writing here, too, is not copying, but translating. No written piece is ever a copy of a thought in our mind.

Luhmann states as clearly as possible: it is not possible to think systematically without writing. Most people still think about thinking as a purely internal process and believe that the only function of the pen is to put finished thoughts on paper.

A common way to embed an idea into the context of the slip-box is by writing out the reasons of its importance for your own lines of thought.

But the first question I asked myself when it came to writing the first permanent note for the slip-box was: What does this all mean for my own research and the questions I think about in my slip-box? This is just another way of asking: Why did the aspects I wrote down catch my interest?

versatran01 / versatran01.github.io

How to Take Smart Notes #1