

They are the backbone of the system so you want to be extremely selective about what will become a good durable note. They come from the selected thoughts chosen from your fleeting and literature notes. A permanent note is about one and only one concept, as simple as possible and connected with others. Permanent notes are atomic and connected. It may seem hard at first but once you incorporate this new habit, you feel almost disappointed reading without extracting what seems compelling. The key feature here is that we want a much more active lecture and information consumption than just passive reading/listening. With a pen and a paper next to you, you want to write with your own words your understanding of the read. Literature notes are the notes you take on the fly when you are reading a book, a blog post or listening to a podcast. I suggest getting a note per day and starting the routine at a small scale: create a fleeting note each day but refine them only once a week. This routine is key to accumulate knowledge.

For this, you need to instigate a routine: clearing and deleting non-relevant paragraphs, extracting the ideas into concise notes. They are primarily the pool of new concepts.

#SMART NOTES TAKING FREE#
When an idea pops into your head or you find an idea interesting in a meeting, you want to write it to free your mental load. Overall, we can look at 3 kinds of notes:įleeting notes are your day-to-day notes. But to create notes you're proud of, you must iterate a few times with other kinds of notes. The goal is to write permanent notes and to densely connect them together. That's why we have to create a system where each note helps the system snowball effect. Note-taking without structure is pointless. Notes used once or twice are no good, we can't take advantage of them. Taking notes tends to mean "jotting down ideas on paper during meetings".
#SMART NOTES TAKING HOW TO#
Smart notes is a term used in the book " How To Take Smart Notes" written by S?nke Ahrens that tells the story of Niklas Luhmann, a sociologist who has published hundreds of articles thanks to his note-taking system: the Zettelkasten method. The concept of smart note Where do smart notes come from? She opposes it to the scout mindset: a mindset in which the search for the truth is what primarily guides its reasoning.Īs the scout's goal is to draw the most accurate map in the battlefield, taking notes becomes the map for your thoughts: they tell you what you know, what you don't know and guide you through your reflection. This is what Julia Galef calls the "soldier mindset" in " The Scout Mindset". For instance, more often than necessary, we look for arguments that unconsciously reinforce our original thoughts, we tend to argue with a pre-existing belief. Even if it's the most complex system in our body, our brain must face many obstacles in order to not fool itself. In a nutshell, our brain is limited and quickly forgets the information it's been exposed to.īesides memory, brains aren't reliable because of many cognitive biases: confirmation bias, attentional bias, mere-exposure effect, normalcy bias, you name it.
