How to Take Smart Notes

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."