One Simple Technique to Boost Writing, Learning and Thinking
Ratings83
Average rating4
An informational book that describes and advocates for the note taking system of the German sociologist Niklas Luhmann. The author's primary claim is that Luhmann's system of keeping a slip-box (or "zettelkasten") full of interesting ideas and bibliographic references can help students, academics, and non-fiction writers be more productive.
Reviews with the most likes.
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:
- 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
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.
Key point: information storage is not the same skill as information retrieval.