• tags: How to Take Smart Notes,slip-box,GTD
  • source: Part 1: “INTRODUCTION” from Ahrens, Sönke. How to Take Smart Notes: One Simple Technique to Boost Writing, Learning and Thinking: For Students, Academics and Nonfiction Book Writers. North Charleston, SC: CreateSpace, 2017.

To Keep a Good Structure

First, it’s about the flow, and a good structure enables the flow. The flow is:

It is the state in which you get so completely immersed in you work that you lose track of time and can just on going as the work becomes effortless.

And how to be in a good structure? It’s must be a simple tool, because “The complexity is an issue”. Here we got, the slip box from Luhman and the overarching workflow from GTD:

  • Use the slip box to take and organise notes.

  • And the overarching workflow to take care of everything we need.

    Even the best tool will not improve your productivity considerably if you don’t change your daily routes the tool is embedded in, just as the fastest car won’t help you much if you don’t have proper roads to drive it on.

So how does the slip box work? Luhman taken notes with two slip boxes:

  • bibliographic one: fleeting notes: thoughts and ideas from reading books,talks or something else.
  • main slip-box: shortly after bibliographic notes were taked, review notes in bibliographic slip-box and write down some new.

“I never force myself to do anything I don’t feel like. Whenever I am stuck, I do something else.” – The son of a brewer, most productive and reverd social sientists of the 20^th century.

So with the above two well-known and proven ideas we can be in a good structure and enabling the flow.

Step by Step

Note-taking is not the main work, the main work is: Reading, Writing, Understanding and coming up with ideas. The notes are just the tangible outcome of it.

With the above steps you can write multiple papers/articles at a time.

Tools

  • Pen and paper or keyboard and computer: to write with and to write on
  • A reference management system: Zotero
  • The slip-box: Daniel Lüdecke’s Zettelkasten
  • The editor: Microsoft Word, OpenOffice,LibreOffice or NeoOffice

Keep in Mind

If we try to use a tool without putting any thought into the way we work with it, even the best tool would not be of much help.

Don’t make the slip-box as a graveyard for thoughts.