Book Notes: How to Take Smart Notes

How to Take Smart Notes, by Sonke Ahrens, details a useful look at the Zettelkasten Method. The Zettelkasten Method is a system for note-taking, note organization, and connecting different notes or ideas together.

Zettelkasten was developed by Niklas Luhmann, a German Sociologist who published more than 70 books and 400 articles during his career. Luhmann attributed this level of productivity to his note-taking system.

While I found the book to be a bit slanted towards academic writing, the method has many applications for content creators of all types and has been gaining huge adoption. In many ways, this method is like the Getting Things Done philosophy by David Allen, just applied to idea storage.

Writing as a Tool for Thinking

• Writing is a great tool for thinking. You shouldn’t write something down after you’ve thought it through. Rather, you should “think out loud” when writing notes to process a problem or idea.
• When reading a book, an article, or listening to a lecture, translating a concept into your words is how you think through and understand an idea more fully.
• Your thinking is in your written notes. You should regularly review your notes and continue to progress your thinking in writing. This is a pillar of the Zettelkasten Method.
• The Zettelkasten method makes publication easier since you are already capturing your thoughts in writing. Your notes can be refactored and edited into published form much easier than writing after the thinking is completed. It saves time.
• The philosophies in the book, Getting Things Done (GTD), by David Allen, has many parallels to the Zettelkasten Method. GTD suggests your mind is a poor place to store action items. Instead, you should capture your actions in an external system.
  • The Zettelkasten method applies this concept to idea capture. The brain is a poor place to store ideas. Instead, you should capture your ideas in an external system where you can review, expand and link your different ideas together over time.
• Get more intentional about what you seek to learn about. Consume content with a purpose and look for the information that will progress (or challenge) your ideas. Write them all down in your system.
• Handwriting is the preferred tool for recording ideas, as it is slower and allows you to be more thoughtful and deliberate in what you record. It forces you to write things down in your own words and think things through more. Typing presents the temptation to write things down verbatim and, hence, not be fully thoughtful.
  

How to Manage your Zettelkasten System

• Each note should be comprised of one idea only, not several together. This enables easier connection of ideas together over time. If one note contains multiple ideas, they become harder to link together.
• Write each idea in your own words. Don’t record a verbatim copy of someone else’s idea, otherwise, you haven’t sufficiently thought the idea through.
  • Upon regular review, these notes could be inspected, challenged, elaborated upon, or linked to other ideas you have in your system.
• If you need to scroll down through a note, it is too long. It likely contains multiple ideas and should be broken up.
• The Zettelkasten Method consists of three types of notes:
  1. Fleeting Notes (aka your “Inbox” for ideas) – an idea you capture quickly for later processing. Get the idea out of your head, and written down. The concept is similar to an Inbox in GTD. Likewise, a Fleeting Note can later be expanded on and filed in the other categories below or deleted if not needed.
  2. Permanent Notes – where most of your notes will end up. This is permanent storage for your notes that you should review, expand and link on as you grow your library of ideas over time.
  3. Project Notes – if a note is specifically tied to a project, it should be considered a Project Note. A Project has a set time limit and due date. So notes relating to this project (that are subject to the same expiry) should go here.
• When reading an article or book, you should consider if something resonates or captures your interest in any way. If it does, you should capture it in your Inbox with a reference to the page you found it on.
  • Review your Inbox regularly and if you can expand on it and want to keep it, file it in your Permanent Notes.
    

Connecting your Ideas

• Another pillar of the Zettelkasten Method is linking your notes together where you see connections.
• Connections can be done textually by referring to the title of another note, via a hyperlink (if your software allows it), or via tagging (also if your software allows it).
• When capturing new ideas, consider how it fits into your other ideas, then make connections within your notes.
• The more you do this, the more you’ll see connections to seemingly different concepts.
• When tagging notes, they should be tagged with a bias towards something you are actively thinking about. Don’t take a note of something in isolation unless it will grow into a whole new topic you believe you will be interested in.
• Avoid traditional folder structures like you’ll see in most note-taking software. Instead, look for more links across notes and subjects.
  • Folder structures may give you arbitrary categories that could change over time, making connections harder to consider.
    

Use your Smart Notes to Generate Content Ideas

• As your library of ideas grows in your Zettelkasten system, eventually, you won’t need to “brainstorm” ideas to publish. You can browse through your notes to determine topics to post.
• Connecting your notes that are related is important. Seeing their connections helps strengthen your arguments and mature your thinking.
• Writing is not something that happens from start to finish. Your ideas, concepts, and creativity build on each other over time. If you build a habit of adding to your library, you end up with so many ideas and connections that you’ll never be short of what it is you want to write about.
• We learn something when we elaborate on a concept and by repeatedly remembering the concept in different contexts. This reinforces the learning and allows us to re-approach the concept from different perspectives. Our point of view shifts over time as we experience new things.
  

Building an Idea Library is a Form of Habit

• Slowly building a library of ideas has parallels to the principles in Atomic Habits. You can build a habit of accumulating and capturing ideas over time into your system.
• Like the compounding interest of habits mentioned in Atomic Habits, there is a compounding interest of ideas. Once you’ve invested enough time in accumulating and connecting ideas, you’ll have tremendous value in your library of knowledge that you can draw from.
  • This can allow you to be very prolific in the content you produce over time.
• Don’t force publishing content if a topic doesn’t come to you. Instead, strengthen your thinking in your notes by developing them further.
• This also relates to the concept in Atomic Habits of reducing the friction of habit adoption. Those who write a lot build systems that make it easy to write more and more, they don’t rely on willpower to force themselves to write.