Sönke Ahrens

"The key to good and efficient writing lies in the intelligent organisation of ideas and notes. This book helps students, academics and nonfiction writers to get more done, write intelligent texts and learn for the long run. It teaches you how to take smart notes and ensure they bring you and your projects forward. The Take Smart Notes principle is based on established psychological insight and draws from a tried and tested note-taking-technique. This is the first comprehensive guide and description of this system in English, and not only does it explain how it works, but also why. It suits students and academics in the social sciences and humanities, nonfiction writers and others who are in the business of reading, thinking and writing. Instead of wasting your time searching for notes, quotes or references, you can focus on what really counts: thinking, understanding and developing new ideas in writing. It does not matter if you prefer taking notes with pen and paper or on a computer, be it Windows, Mac or Linux. And you can start right away."--Page 4 of cover.

One Simple Technique to Boost Writing, Learning and Thinking - for Students, Academics and Nonfiction Book Writers

How to Take Smart Notes

Augment your thinking with an external brain

Indrashish Ghosh

We need a reliable and simple external structure to think in that compensates for the limitations of our brains.

While other systems start with a preconceived order of topics, Luhmann developed topics bottom up. He would add a note to his slip-box and then link it to a topic

Intuitively, most people do not expect much from simple ideas. They rather assume that impressive results must have equally impressively complicated means.

GTD relies on clearly defined objectives, whereas insight cannot be predetermined by definition. Writing that aims at insight must therefore be organised in a much more open manner.

Note taking is not just about collecting thoughts, but about making connections and sparking new ideas.

A good structure is something you can trust. If you can trust the system, you can let go of the attempt to hold everything together in your head and you can start focusing on what is imnortant The content, the argument and the ideas

Christian Bager Bach Houmann

Kristján Oddsson

A great introduction to the Zettelkasten system. I feel like it could have been shorter and more condensed.

Farah Aisha Shabrina

Never thought I’d need this book in my life more than anything!! It changes the whole aspect of my thinking and transforms my perspective of reading habit. Now I don’t want to let go of any information I get from reading into wasteland🤓 but, you know, like any other habit, it’s life-changing yet you are not quite sure of your capacity whether or not you will be able to maintain it. Still, worth the try📝✍️

Mert Alemdar

TR: Daha önce bu yöntemi duymuştum ancak inceleme fırsatım hiç olmamıştı. Zettelkasten denen yöntem karşıma bir çok YouTube videosunda çıkıyordu. Detaylı öğrenmek istedim. Kitabın anlatım tarzı verdiği örnekler bu örnekleri gerçek yaşamdan gerçek dillere bağlaması benim hoşuma gitti. Hayatımın bundan sonraki döneminde belli bir not tutma alışkanlığıyla devam etmek istiyorum. Bu sebepten dolayı bu kitap ile yeni bir okuma, not alma ve not tutma sayfası açacağımı inanıyorum. Bu kitapta hoşuma gitmeyen tek şey kitaptaki bütün örnekler yazarlar için hazırlanmış. Yani kitap yazma hedefi olan biri için kaleme alınmış tüm cümleler. Benim kitap yazma gibi bir hedefim yok ama ikinci bir beyin mantığıyla akılcı bir yöntem ile hayatımda öğrendiğim şeyleri kayıt altına almak istiyorum. Eğer kitap yazıyorsanız veya yazı yazıyorsanız hatta içerik üretiyorsanız bu kitap tam size göre.

EN: I've heard of this method before, but never had the opportunity to review it. The method called Zettelkasten used to appear in many YouTube videos. I wanted to know in detail. I liked that the book's narrative style connects these examples from real life to real languages. I want to continue with a certain note-taking habit in the next period of my life. For this reason, I believe that I will open a new reading, note-taking and note-taking page with this book. The only thing I don't like about this book is that all the examples in the book are prepared for the authors. So all sentences written for someone who has the goal of writing a book. I do not have a goal of writing a book, but I want to record the things I have learned in my life with a rational method with the logic of a second brain. If you're writing a book, writing articles or even producing content, this book is for you.

matej yangwao

** spoiler alert **
           Bit history on so known Zettelkasten aka Slip-Box.

Finish it later ☺️
Till then good however proposing Ahrens index don't like that much as I sense it's might be pointless, maybe good if you plan to publish work

>The slip-box system is a method of taking notes and organizing them that fosters the creation and publication of original ideas. In the original version of the system, writers took notes on index cards and organized them in a “slip-box,” or cabinet; today, a digital version is more common.

>It’s possible people haven’t focused on the workflow because it’s hard to see. Many modern users, notably researcher Andy Matuschak, have published their slip-boxes online. However, since they don’t publish the drafts of their publications, you can’t see exactly how the notes within the slip-box turn into a publishable manuscript—so it’s not as easy to understand how that part of the process works.)

>Specifically, Ahrens recommends taking three types of notes: temporary notes, literature notes, and evergreen notes.

>If your new note connects strongly to an old note—like if it supports an argument—file the new note behind that note. Otherwise, file it behind the most recent note.

>Matuschak advises avoiding the temptation to decide how you’ll link your notes before you develop your slip-box. He argues that if you try to force your ideas to connect in predetermined ways, you won’t be able to connect various nuances between the ideas; worse, you may not recognize a new subtopic (a series of connected notes) because it doesn’t fit into the structure you already have

Raúl Barroso Moreno

I picked up this book to improve my current note taking system based on reviews I had read over the internet, and especially because its premise is built upon something I have realized overtime turns out to be crucial. It has to be simple.

I have yet to put it in practice so I can’t really say about the Zettelkasten method, but I found the book a bit too repetitive to my taste. I think their concepts and its benefits could have been summarized by quite a lot considering nothing that was mentioned struck me as something unreasonably complex.

Next step is to incorporate those learnings into something actionable that could be adapted to my existing workflow.

Bouke van der Bijl

This book is quite incredible in its depth—what on the surface seems like just a book about taking notes goes much deeper than that into how thought itself works, and how you can improve the way you read and do research to learn more.

A central thesis of the book is that the people who see as 'geniuses', the Nobel-prize winning people of the world, are so productive because they have a system they use to structure their thoughts. If you want to be a successful researcher or writer, you will need to build to systematically collect insight from your research, and connect ideas across different subjects. The Zettelkasten, as described in this book, is one way to do so. It is a way to take notes, where you form connections between notes. These connections allow browsing through the notes, making it possible for you to birth new ideas across different disciplines. The implementation of it can be done in different ways, a personal wiki would be one way. 

I've started taking more notes since reading this book, I hope to see an increase in novel thoughts from it. We will see.

Andrew Louis

The interesting history of the Zettelkasten method and how to apply it to your own research. The book could have probably been 1/4 the length without sacrificing informativeness.

Marco Cavallaro 

Mindset changing book on how to take notes for research purposes. It did change the way I interact with texts, permanently. Despite the catchy title and some tentative efforts to turn theories into practice, I didn’t find it useful to implement a concrete workflow.

Félix

The book is 20% (or even less) about the “how to” aspect, the other 80% about why. 


It's not inherently bad, but while reading the book – or in my case, listening to the audiobook – you inadvertently feel hipped up about the Zettelkasten method, yet deceived about the implementation of a routine. This is amplified by Sönke Ahrens focus on social sciences when he describes the Zettelkasten as being a tool for academics, students, and others. 

Yet, the Zettelkasten feels like being a very soft tool, helpful to gather ideas for endless rambling rather than a tool for being worked with for research in, let's say, natural science, engineering. But this can also be due to the authors very social science approach to the method.

Ethan Hussong

Could have been significantly shortened. Very much felt like a book that was artificially extended for a publisher's benefit.

That being said - the ideas behind this content are excellent. We're seeing wonderful things come from new tools that leverage this like Roam and Obsidian in ways that make it easier than ever more to implement. Exciting times for the world of knowledge management.

Michał Paczków

Really good book with a deep explanation of the learning process and how a proper notes system can improve it (spoiler: Zettelkasten). What I missed in the book are illustrations and diagrams that help me understanding topics more (like in "Atomic Habits") so it's not perfect for me but really good.

𝓬𝓱𝓮𝓻𝓲𝓮

A good introduction to the Zettelkasten method with lots of references to interesting psychology experiments, but overall it was rather repetitive.

Chris Aldrich

I really wasn't sure this would be worth the time, but it was far more inter esting than I could have expected. My experience with some of the methods verifies their usefulness, but there is more that the system could be doing for related ideas of memory and spaced repetition. I highly recommend this to students and writers versus many of the similar books I've seen in the space.

Celine Nguyen ✿

This is a very humble title for one of the best books I've read on reading intentionally and strategically. Despite the title, the goal here isn't to take notes, precisely—the book is meant to give a process for how to write—which, Sönke Ahrens argues, is best done by having a system to take meaningful notes, and then use an accumulation of notes (from everything you've read) as the basis for your work.

The book is a helpful survey of basically all the major ideas and research around learning (Csikszentmihalyi's theory of flow; Ericsson's deliberate practice; theories around willpower, habit formation, ego depletion). It uses all this to argue for the Zettelkasten method of notetaking (perhaps the method du jour for productivity enthusiasts right now), used by the prolific German sociologist Niklas Luhmann, which Ahrens suggests could be the equivalent of the Getting Things Done (GTD) system, but for academic/intellectual work.

Some of my takeaways from the book: Ahrens distinguishes between different kinds of notes—fleeting notes you make while reading (e.g. highlighting, noting a page number with an interesting idea) and permanent notes, which is when these fleeting notes are copied and expanded into a permanent system (the Zettelkasten). Ahrens criticizes note-taking methods based on blind copying, noting that 'The idea is not to copy, but to have a meaningful dialogue with the texts we read.'. Therefore, those permanent notes should be brief and succinct, capturing the gist of an idea vs laboriously copying down precise details. Ahrens also discusses how existing academic structures (where disciplines are kept separate) can constrain creative thinking, and advocates for having one place to store all notes, and creating structure through linking notes to each other (noting where ideas seem to be related) to produce an emergent bottom-up structure. A top-down structure, in contrast (where predefined topics are set and notes filed underneath them) encourages siloing and stifles the ability to discover new themes in one's reading and then use them to drive more reading…research…and writing!

Ahrens is primarily addressing an audience who needs to produce writing (as Ahrens asserts, 'Writing is the only thing that matters'). It's especially helpful for me right now, as I'm entering my MA, but it should be meaningful to others who simply want to read deliberately and with an eye towards increasing their knowledge (not just reading for pleasure).

Ivaylo Durmonski

Taking notes is one of the best ways to grow intellectually. And while How to Take Smart Notes is targeting mainly students, academics, and writers, the benefits of the system described in this short how-to book are apparent for everyone.

The goal of Sönke Ahrens in this book is to relieve our brains from the burden of remembering stuff and keeping track of everything. When you outsource your findings to a simple system where everything is categorized and noted, you won’t have to constantly dig deep inside your brain to find facts. You’ll allow yourself to forget ideas which, paradoxically, will reinforce your ability to understand these findings better.

How to Take Smart Notes is a detailed guide that promotes the Zettelkasten note-taking method created by Niklas Luhmann. If you’re unfamiliar with the slip-box method by Luhmann, I highly recommend checking online for more information and also even getting the book. Ahrens describes in a really simple matter how to adopt this profound note-taking approach and implement it in your life.

If you already know the Luhmann’s secret, this book probably won’t tell you anything new. It will be only worth checking if you’re still not quite satisfied with your note-taking approach.

Key takeaway:

Simple ideas when mixed together can lead to groundbreaking discoveries. That’s actually how new systems and emerging markets are born – by finding connections between simple ideas. Your ability to find relationships between basic components will make you an elite pioneer.

Here's a link to the full review:
https://durmonski.com/book-summaries/...

Andrew Marti

I read a lot and I’ll take notes of what I read but in a haphazard way. For years, I tossed notes into Evernote, hoping I would one day get value out of them. This book opened me to new approaches in notetaking, but additionally, to new approaches in learning.

Notetaking is a vital process, not just to remember, but to prioritize, to think, to make connections, and to understand. The process is critical and this book lays out a process to do all of these things in a consistent, meaningful way.

Pedro Giménez

Every intellectual endeavour starts with a note.


This book teaches you how to think effectively through a method that consists in using the Zettelkasten to store your latticework of mental models in a note format with references between concepts. It will present you with the tools of note-taking that turned Niklas Luhmann into one of the most productive and revered social scientists of the 20th century.

Simon Gussing

Misleading book title! Not much content about taking notes but more of an introduction to the “zettelkasten method”. 

Ilia Markov

Starts great, but gets quite repetitive about mid-way through.

It can also benefit greatly from adding more examples / a walkthrough of what a slip-box looks like and how to use it for noting, planning, and writing.

How to Take Smart Notes One Simple Technique to Boost Writing, Learning and Thinking - for Students, Academics and Nonfiction Book Writers

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