(2020-02-07) Eliason How To Take Smart Notes: A Step By Step Guide

Nat Eliason summarizes How to Take Smart Notes: A Step-by-Step Guide. How to Take Smart Notes is a book by Sonke Ahrens explaining the "Zettelkasten" methodology developed by Niklas Luhmann... How to Take Smart Notes aims to provide the most accurate presentation of the "Zettelkasten" system Luhmann developed, and regardless of the accuracy, what Ahrens describes turns out to be a phenomenal system for getting more out of what you read.

The core idea of Smart Notes is that purely extracting highlights is generally a waste of time. A highlight speaks to you when you take it, but if you don't capture the idea that the highlight gave you, you're unlikely to remember the importance of that highlight later. Or even if you do feel some spark when revisiting the highlight, it might be a different interpretation.

By adding my own contextual notes to my highlights, and taking time after finishing a book to process and better organize those notes, I'm able to generate more ideas as I read and put those ideas to better use.

Step 1: Take Physical Notes as You Read

why physical notes? When you have to write your notes by hand, you'll be a bit more thoughtful with them and be forced to put things in your own words.

As you're reading, write down anything that comes to mind from the book and where you found it. It could be your own interpretation of a passage, or it could be some other seemingly random idea that the book sparked. Capture it in your notebook as a quick "fleeting note" that you can expand on later.

Handwriting makes pure copying impossible, but instead facilitates the translation of what is said (or written) into one's own words.

Step 2: Have a way of recording bibliographical sources as you read

This is where I deviate from Ahren's method slightly: I capture both my notes and the highlights, because I like having direct passages to quote later in articles like these

Step 3: Upload your notes

There are two kinds of notes to upload:

• References, the highlights that I got ideas from and want to extract
• Ideas, the thoughts that I had while reading the book

The important question here is: how can I make this idea detailed enough to stand on its own, without the context of the book or the associated highlight?

Step 4: File Your Notes

file information based on the context you want to rediscover it in, not based on the context you found it in.

Step 5: Use and Organize Your Notes

This is the true power of the Smart Notes system: since you're constantly capturing the ideas that you're getting from disparate sources and organizing them in their most important contexts, you can quickly develop ideas for new articles, books, scripts, whatever it is you create from your ideas. (cf intermediate packet)