#Taking smart notes book how to

Soon after youвЂ™ve jotted down your notes you need to rewrite your notes into вЂњpermanent notesвЂќ that will live in your slip-box.ДЄ slip-box, also known as a вЂњcard indexвЂќ or вЂњzettelkastenвЂќ in German, is where Niklas Luhmann would store all of his permanent notes on index cards. What is the slip-box (or Zettelkasten) method? Step three involves something called a slip-box. But there's a third thing you need to do to write truly effective notes. Understanding and writing down your notes gets you two thirds of the way there. But when you come back to these notes later, you may have completely forgotten the context in which they were written, and thus these notes will lose some of their value. When you quickly jot down notes, youвЂ™ll probably skip writing down all of the details, because in that moment, you can remember all of it just fine. What made solving this problem so difficult, exactly? Why did we need to solve it in the first place? If youвЂ™re looking through your notes for a new topic to blog about, it may be hard to find something worth blogging about.Д®ven worse - you may have documented the solution to a particularly gnarly problem you solved at work (which would make for some great blog content!) but after coming back to it later youвЂ™re finding it hard to turn it into a blog. It can start to be a bit overwhelming, especially if your notes are disjointed and all over the place without much clear organisation. Over time as you learn and note down new things, your collection of notes will grow bigger and bigger. If youвЂ™re organised, you may even have some sort of tagging system too! Keeping notes is good practice, but problems can arise depending on what you do with the notes after youвЂ™ve written them. You probably will have some sort of notebook (whether itвЂ™s paper-based or digital) where you jot down all your notes. Where writing notes can turn into a problem This will save you the hassle of trying to understand it later.

When writing your notes, it is important that you do the work upfront of understanding the meaning, by making sure theyвЂ™re written in your own words. If you go back and re-read your notes a couple of times, this will create the illusion of understanding (as you will be able to recall bits of it in your memory) but saying it in your own words takes a bit more thought and brainpower to do. The problem that comes with writing notes this way is that youвЂ™ve been able to skip the work of actually understanding the content. If youвЂ™re attending a lecture or listening to a course online, and are a super-fast typist, you might even be able to directly quote what your instructor is saying straight into your notes. When studying and making notes, a common approach is to copy down definitions of things straight from the textbook or learning resource that you are using. It explores the note-taking method of a famous German sociologist Niklas Luhmann, who published a huge amount of work in his lifetime (70 books and 400+ articles) - and it was quite possibly due to the efficient way he took notes.ДЄlthough the book was primarily aimed at students and academics who have to write papers, I still gleaned some really good lessons from it that I think are applicable to developers, especially those who write blog posts about what they learn.

#Taking smart notes book how to

I recently read the book How to Take Smart Notes by SГ¶nke Ahrens.