How to Take Smart Notes – Quick Summary

1-Sentence Description of How to Take Smart Notes by Sönke Ahrens

The key to good and efficient writing lies in the intelligent organization of ideas and notes.

Work as if writing is the only thing that matters. This means you are not distracted by having to record every single detail, you have purpose. Instead, the focus will be on learning the basics as quickly as possible, until valuable questions arise, which will give your writing substance.

Organize your notes by context, not by topic. A librarian should do the latter. A writer should do the former. A writer should think about how they intend on using the information, otherwise, they will quickly become overwhelmed.

Ahrens recommends the following 8 steps for taking notes.

There is another reason that note-taking flies mostly under the radar: We don’t experience any immediate negative feedback if we do it badly.

This book is for you, the good students, ambitious academics and curious nonfiction writers who understand that insight doesn’t come easy and that writing is not only for proclaiming opinions, but the main tool to achieve insight worth sharing.

Luhmann had two slip-boxes: a bibliographical one, which contained the references and brief notes on the content of the literature, and the main one in which he collected and generated his ideas, mainly in response to what he read.

Note-taking game-changer. Ahrens’ is a professor in systematic education at Hamburg University—and he really knows his shit. This book tells the story of the remarkable Luhmann note-taking system. Luhmann was a revered sociology professor who collected over 90,000 index cards over the course of his life to support his 30-year-project: “A Theory of Society.” The book goes over how Luhmann organized his note-taking in a scalable way that allowed him an unprecedented level of productivity with 30+ published books and 400+ published articles.

This book does not explain how to use Luhmann’s method precisely. It is just a compilation of over-explained ideas (nothing new under the sun, by the way) that are not even useful for applying that method. There are other resources in the web, so please, avoid buying this book.

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