How to Take Smart Notes

• #datacuration
• #knowledgemanagement
• #reading
• #writing
• #zettelkasten

A brief nonfictional book by Sönke Ahrens about note-taking skills, primarily targeting writers and researchers in academia, but also relevant to anyone who might benefit from growing a healthy collection of personal knowledge that makes it easier to find connections between disparate ideas and fields.

It primarily focuses on teaching the Zettelkasten method of notetaking. The idea is to create a single, lifelong collection of notes that summarizes ideas, one per note, in your own words, in complete sentences, and then link them to related notes and categories/tags. The end result should be a system where browsing from one note to the next helps create connections between ideas that may not have been otherwise obvious, leading to new, novel ideas and writing.

• Keep your Zettelkasten "permanent" notes separate from fleeting notes and project-specific notes (to-do lists, outlines, etc.).
• Good note-taking results in good writing. Good permanent notes can often be combined together to construct a draft paper or essay with very little extra writing needed.
• Writing should be a circular process, where permanent notes and their meaningful connections help identify topics, and create a hermeneutical circle that continues to generate new ideas, better writing, and new threads of possible research.
• Permanent notes must be written in one's own words. Copying quotes removes them from their context. Tagging/categorizing is the same: one must tag notes rather than automating it. Thinking about the rest of the notes, where the new note fits with them, what topics it relates to beyond what is written, etc. is critical to effective categorization.