How to Take Smart Notes by Sönke Ahrens

The Book in Two Sentences

Doing good work is nothing more than gaining insight and sharing it with the community. As it turns out, long uninterrupted periods of time and a reliable vehicle for generating insight are all one needs in order to build a successful career.

How to Take Smart Notes Summary

Disclaimer: these are my notes from How to Take Smart Notes. This summary contains my own ideas, references to other resources, as well as passages from the book.
Great results are based on reliable systems: "With a good system, the mere necessities of the workflow will force us to act more virtuously without actually having to become more virtuous. ...not having to use willpower indicates that you set yourself up for success."
In The Design of Everyday Things, Don Norman writes: "The best chess player in the world today is not a computer or a human but a team of humans and computers working together. ... The winning teams are able to leverage the unique skills of humans and computers to work together."
The slip box system makes writing easy and obvious: "Since writing is nothing more than the revision of a rough draft, which is nothing more than turning a series of notes into a continuous text, which are written on a day-to-day basis, connected and indexed in the slip-box, there is no need to worry about finding a topic to write about."
In his book Atomic Habits, James Clear writes, “many people think they lack motivation when what they really lack is clarity.”
Don't underestimate the importance of sharing your work: "An idea kept private is as good as one you never had. And a fact no one can reproduce is no fact at all. Making something public always means to write it down so it can be read. There is no such thing as a history of unwritten ideas."
Don't multitask, instead cultivate the right sort of attention: "Writing a paper involves much more than just typing on the keyboard. It also means reading, understanding, reflecting... It is not only impossible to focus on more than one thing at a time, but also to have a different kind of attention on more than one thing at a time."
The slip-box method creates closed-ended problems: "The workflow around the slip-box is not a prescription that tells you what to do at what stage of writing. On the contrary: It gives you a structure of clearly separable tasks, which can be completed within reasonable time and provides you with instant feedback through interconnected writing tasks. It allows you to become better by giving you the opportunity for deliberate practice..."
The slip-box method closes your tabs: "Open tasks tend to occupy our short-term memory – until they are done. ...The secret to have a 'mind like water' is to get all the little stuff out of our short-term memory. ...the only way to do that is to have a reliable external system in place where we can keep all our nagging thoughts about the many things that need to be done and trust that they will not be lost."
"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."
"Most people feel that writing a page a day (and having a day a week off) is quite manageable, not realising that this would mean finishing a doctoral thesis within a year – something that does not happen very often in reality."
"We tend to think that big transformations have to start with an equally big idea. But more often than not, it is the simplicity of an idea that makes it so powerful."

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