How to Take Smart Notes by Sönke Ahrens

This is the second, revised and expanded edition. The first edition was published under the slightly longer title "How to Take Smart Notes. One Simple Technique to Boost Writing, Learning and Thinking - for Students, Academics and Nonfiction Book Writers". The key to good and efficient writing lies in the intelligent organisation of ideas and notes. This book helps students, academics and other knowledge workers 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: the Zettelkasten. 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 your notes, quotes or references, you can focus on what really counts: thinking, understanding and developing new ideas in writing. Dr. Sönke Ahrens is a writer and researcher in the field of education and social science. He is the author of the award-winning book "Experiment and Exploration: Forms of World Disclosure" (Springer). Since its first publication, How to Take Smart Notes has sold more than 100,000 copies and has been translated into seven languages.

General summary

It presents the Zettelkasten, a writing system for note-taking created by Niklas Luhmann, a prolific german sociologist of the 20th century among other occupations.

- It gives you instructions on how to organize your noteking by separating it in:

literature notes: notes on the book, article or whatever you're reading about its general content, relevant tags and key notes.
permanent notes: the actual notes, emphasis in writing it in notes or 'blocks' instead of long pages writing so you can use the same 'block' on other writing, thus being a prolific writer.
reference notes: usage of tags and 'indexes' serves as organization for all your notes on the Zettelkasten.
fleeting notes: momentary notes, it can have any kind of utility as longs as it serves to make your thoughts/writing clear. it can be discarded or be some kind of skeleton to your permanent notes, you shouldn't leave it for more than 2 days, if you didn't use it it might be not that important for your work.

- It also presents the software to use it (personally recommend Obsidian or Logseq) or some indications to recreate it non-digitally.

- Apart from that it gives you

some sort brief (?) biography of Luhmann and why the Zettelkasten wasn't used before (it was a mystery before this book, outside a tiny bunch of german academics).
some thougths by the writer about writing, thinking and that sort.

My Review

Personally, I've read this book fully it back on 2020, it has around 176 pages and I think all of that could be nicely summarized on 40 pages at most. But the reason it receives my 4 stars instead of less is because this book was my foundation of thinking and writing, it has helped me to think more on categories and patternlike and think of note-taking as progresively instead of any other linear process nonsense for writing.

It changed the way I think about writing and boosted exponentially my cognitive processes: a. thinking clearly b. problem solving and c. methodology. This is due to my experience of almost 3 years writing though and not the book alone: I've been taking notes with the Zettelkasten foundation since 2020 June until this day and made a full writing system that was born out of the Zettelkasten and general influence from the tools for thought community.

A rec would be don't be too rigid with your note-taking system, your writings reflects your thoughts, by writing more everything will be clearer to you even though everything might not be 'clean' or pretty at the start.

I probably highlighted too many passages in this book. I would compare it to “Getting Things Done” by David Allen in terms of presenting new ideas and a practical application to them. It presents an organized system to take notes based on the Zettelkasten Method. Zettelkasten was developed and used by this German sociologist Niklas Luhmann (1927???1998). The idea is not to organize notes by topic, but rather have them stored in an abstract way (he used a numbering system on index cards). Each note is “atomic” containing only one idea with its references and reasoning. The goal is to produce notes that can be linked together in a way that encourages thinking and learning within the system. I got inspired by the book and I'm currently giving it a try to build my own Zettelkasten using the Obsidian.