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.

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

How to Take Smart Notes

Indrashish Ghosh

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

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

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.

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

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

Augment your thinking with an external brain

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

How to Take Smart Notes quotes

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