How to Take Smart Notes

I have mixed feelings about this book. It's well-written on a small scale (pages, chapters) but the overall structure is a mystery to me.

Did I find a way how to organize a mess in my notes? Not exactly, but I've found some good hints.

Good bits:

• GTD doesn't work for non-linear writing. Academic writing is non-linear. I was taught otherwise.
• Organize your notes around the context in which they're going to be useful. Not by topic. Organizing by topic is almost the same as organizing them by year. Looks neat, but it's hard to find a note you need right now.
• Quotes are useless. If you need to apply the information you've found somewhere, rewrite it in your own words.
• Brainstorming is useless. Sure, it produces ideas, but they're going to be of a very low quality.

Bad bits:

• There's a lot of barely related information. The book tries to be everything: advice on writing in general, rant on the education system, a collection of cognitive biases. I don't think it really needs all this. As I understood, the original inventor of the method had the same problems with his writing. The proposed method of writing forces you to jump from thought to thought using associations. The text looks very natural for a writer but not for a reader.
• I've read this (twice for several chapters) and still don't understand why the Zettelkasten method works. It explains how it works and what happens if you use it, though.
• The system was invented by a social "scientist". It's a pity it wasn't invented by someone who produces useful writing. From my point of view, it was invented by a guy who lectures birds on how to fly.
• Sometimes the author says "the original inventor did this and this so you should too". It's followed by a questionable explanation. Should I say it looks weird? Times changed.

I really recommend it if you:

• Don't know why the education system is broken
• Haven't heard about cognitive biases and mental models
• Have no idea how to make good notes

Stupid, stupid heirarchies.

Ever so often, you come across ideas that, if implemented properly, can change your life. This book has presented to me an idea - Zettelkasten - that I believe has this potential.

At its core, this book is a sales pitch for the virtues of Zettelkasten, a method for personal knowledge management popularised by German polymath Niklas Luhmann. Luhmann was a prolific writer, having written over 70 books, and 400 articles in his academic career. He wrote on a wide variety of subjects, and attributed his massive bibliography to his note taking system - Zettelkasten. Zettelkast in, which loosely translates to "Slip Box", is a system for curating ideas from various notes. Over his lifetime, Luhmann amassed over 90,000 notes in his slipbox, each note taken on an A6 card. The notes formed a web of knowledge that allowed him to synthesize new ideas by intermingling of the many ideas he was exposed to. The beauty of his approach was the ideas were captured in a bottoms up, associative manner. In a normal note taking system, a top down heirarchy is followed. Something like - Concept 1 - Concept 1a - Concept 1b - ...

Luhmann approached things in a different manner, he let the ideas themselves decide their relationship with other ideas. The various notes linked to each other, in a manner that flowed from idea to idea. He turned the heirarchy upside down.

The art of the Zettelkasten

Zettelkasten as a system is extremely simply. I can break it down into a few simple steps: 1. Collecting "Fleeting notes": These can be highlights, or scribblings about things that you find interesting. 2. Collecting "Literature Notes": These are notes of points that piqued your interest in books. These have to be re-written in your language, and its references must be noted down for posterity. Fleeting notes can be converted to this, if you have just some highlights, or dirty scribbles at hand. 3. Recontextualising "Literature Notes" for your slip-box: This is the core of Zettelkasten. The idea here is to create something called a "Permanent Note" from the "Literature Note". This "Permanent Note" is a polished form of the idea that recontextualises the idea you found in the literature, with respect to your slipbox. For example, you read the idea of being "verbund", a term used in the chemical industry for processes in which the by product can be used as a resource for another process. This will be your "Literature Note". You can recontextualise this idea, and based on some other Permanent note, create a Permanent Note on how all our initiatives should be "verbund". A permanent note should be written in such a manner such that it has a unique identifier, and also connects to other Permanent notes that you would want to read that are related to this note.

Step number 3 is tricky, and needs some trial and error to get right. Converting Literature notes to Permanent notes is somthing that would come with practice, something that I haven't yet mastered.

The idea is over time, the slipbox will attain a critical mass that allows for continous idea generation.

The short comings.

While the idea presented in the book is great, and the tips in general are really good, this book has quite a few shortcomings. For one, this explains the idea of the system very nicely, but faulters in explaining the implementation aspect. How to apply Zettelkasten in your daily workflow? I feel like this book doesn't get into the practical aspects adequately. I am working on implementing Zettelkasten within Logseq, my knowledge management system of choice. I have moved away from my legacy system, and will report back here on my after a few months to let you know how its going.

For now, I give this book a light 8.