How to Take Smart Notes (Sönke Ahrens) - Summary and notes

Structure your notes to structure your thinking

🖋️ One Paragraph Book Summary

Writing is a process that brings our thoughts to life. It doesn’t just capture our ideas - it enhances them. The more we write, the more complex and refined our thinking becomes. Since our brains aren’t particularly good at storing information, we spend so much time learning new things only to forget them later. That’s why we write notes. But if we’re going to take notes, it’s worth understanding how to do it properly and effectively. That’s exactly what this book is about. It introduces the Zettelkasten method, a note-taking system used by Niklas Luhmann, a renowned German academic. The book explains what this method is about and why it works so well. It also mentions some actionable tips and workflows you can use to to minimize the use of willpower and energy in things that don’t matter and how to apply everything into writing publications and non-fiction pieces.

🪝Thoughts Before the Notes

Everybody writes. From a young age, most of us were taught how to write in school and take notes. We note stuff down because we don’t want to forget them. In doing so, we acknowledge an important truth: our brains (at least for most people) are not great at storing information, especially knowledge that doesn’t seem immediately useful.

During the first year of my PhD, I read a lot - papers, books, articles. Some of that information stuck with me, particularly the parts directly relevant to the work I did regularly. But the rest? It didn’t matter how many highlights I made or how many papers piled up on my desk, most of it was “lost.” If I needed that information later, I had to go back: re-read the papers (or the highlights), see what I wrote on the side of the page or dig through my notebooks in my desk. Sometimes, re-reading the notes wasn’t even enough because they were written within a given context, so I also had to re-read the relevant paragraphs to understand the note.

It was frustrating. I kept finding myself repeating the same task over and over again. Eventually, I did try to have a system or to centralize my notes in one place, but that system was not really working out for me either.

Looking back, I realized the problem wasn’t my memory or where I would store my notes. It was how I’d been taught to take notes. Most of us were never really taught how to take smart or effective notes. At school, we learned a top-down approach: start with the chapter title, then the sections, then the subsections. It worked for studying, writing essays, theses, and papers. It especially excels when you already know what to expect. It makes sense to talk about the mitochondria, as the power house of the cell in a subchapter about cell structures, but that requires the previous knowledge of knowing that there are mitochondria and what other cell structures exist. It fits into a predetermined framework.

Do you see where I am going? This top-down approach falls apart when it comes to generating new insights or making discoveries. The structure is rigid, predefined, and limiting. Again, for school it works, because you follow a certain curriculum. But once I needed to create something really new myself, by connecting ideas, being creative and insightful, it felt that the system that I had was working against me.

A couple of months ago, I came across this book and it really transformed my way of thinking about note-taking and information in general. I would recommend this book to really anyone, specially people who read a lot or obtain a lot of information daily and don’t want to forget certain pieces of information. I’d also recommend it to students, though with one caveat: if your sole focus is getting the best grades possible and pass the exam without really caring about retaining the content long-term, then this book might not be that relevant to you. But if you care about learning and building a long-lasting system for you, then it will certainty be worth your time.