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How to Take Smart Notes
Sönke Ahrens
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What is How to Take Smart Notes about?
How to Take Smart Notes is the perfect guide on how to improve our writing, reading, and learning techniques using simple but little-known tips and tricks that we can immediately apply to enhance these skills.
Key ideas of How to Take Smart Notes
Notes Before the Blank Page
Ahrens argues that writing starts long before you sit down to draft, and that the quality of any finished text depends almost entirely on the notes built up beforehand.
Three Distinct Note Types
Fleeting, literature, and permanent notes serve separate purposes, and mixing them up is the single most common reason writers accumulate material they can never use.
Compounding Through Connection
Linking notes across unrelated topics, rather than sorting them by subject, turns a slip-box into a machine that generates unexpected ideas and manuscript material by itself.
Read an excerpt from the summary
The Brewer's Son Who Wrote Sixty Books
A German civil servant named Niklas Luhmann spent his evenings, after work, sitting at a small desk and writing on index cards. He had trained as a lawyer and taken a public administration job partly because he liked the idea of having only one employer to please. In his spare time he read sociology. He wrote on the front of each card, numbered it, and dropped it into a wooden box. About a decade later he handed a manuscript to Helmut Schelsky, one of the most influential German sociologists of the postwar period, and Schelsky offered him a chair at the newly founded University of Bielefeld. Luhmann had no doctorate. He had no habilitation. He didn't even have a sociology degree.
So he sat back down at his desk and, using the same box of cards, produced both a doctoral thesis and a habilitation thesis within a year, while attending sociology lectures on the side. In 1968 he was appointed professor of sociology at Bielefeld. When asked to describe his research project he wrote one line: "My project: theory of society. Duration: thirty years. Costs: zero." He finished almost exactly on schedule, with a two-volume book called The Society of Society, in 1997. Along the way he wrote fifty-eight books and several hundred articles. Six more books appeared after his death, edited from manuscripts he had left more or less finished in a drawer.
Sönke Ahrens, a German educational researcher, wrote How to Take Smart Notes as the practical answer to a question that bothered him: how on earth did Luhmann do that? Not "how did he have so many ideas" — Ahrens doesn't believe Luhmann was uniquely brilliant — but "how was the actual work organized." Asked once about his secret, Luhmann said: "I, of course, do not think everything by myself. It happens mainly within the slip-box." Asked what he found difficult, he answered: "I only do what is easy. I only write when I immediately know how to do it. If I falter for a moment, I put the matter aside and do something else."
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Continue in the appWho is it for?
- Anyone who reads widely but struggles to turn their reading into finished writing.
- Anyone who wants to understand how Niklas Luhmann produced sixty books as a full-time professor.
- Anyone who relies on willpower and deadlines to write and wants a workflow that removes the need for both.
- Anyone who takes notes in a journal, app, or folder and finds they can never find or reuse what they wrote.
About the author: Sönke Ahrens
Sonke Ahrens is a German academic and researcher specializing in education and the philosophy of science. He holds a doctorate from Hamburg and has lectured on educational theory.
He wrote How to Take Smart Notes after studying Niklas Luhmann's personal archive and becoming convinced that Luhmann's note-taking method, rather than any unusual intellectual gift, explained the sociologist's extraordinary output.
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