October 9, 2022

Good Note Taking

  —_How to Write Smart Notes_, by Sonke Ahrens

About a year ago I came across the book How to Write Smart Notes, by Sonke Ahrens. Up until this point, I’d kept my notes in my blog, a wiki and various other places. Ahren’s book outlines a note taking strategy invented by Niklas Luhmann called Zettelkasten.

Zettelkasten comprises an annotated bibliography and a slipbox containing your thought’s, ideas and questions on topics of interest to you. The claim is that using this tool and method enable the collection and organization of thoughts and learnin in a way that support deep insight and publication. I decided to use the approach and learned a lot about how to improve my note taking.

I’m fairly impressed with the results. The first example of a blog post I created using this method is the Single Responsibility Principle. I was impressed with the depth of the relationships I collected in relation to that principle.

To write that blog post I collecting 40 different ideas and wrote about 2,000 words to express those ideas. That post is about 800 words and does a nice job of covering my thinking on the subject. I’m impressed with the richness of the relationships between the principle and the concepts that drive it. It’s a good first result.

There are a great deal of resources available to describe Zettelkasten. If you are looking for a simple way to organize and collect information on topics of interest to you, this might be a worthwhile method to explore.

For me, key insights in using Zettelkasten were:

1. The importance of creating a good annotated bibliography. I tend to write the bibliography in a file with key insights and page numbers. This lets me capture the insigh in my own words and find it again if I need it.

2. The importance of writing notes about everything you read. I’ve created bibliographies for Tweets, books and research papers.

3. The discpline of reflecting upon what you’ve read and connecting it to notes in the slipbox. This is key to learning and to the richness in the resulting writing.

The downside of using Zettelkasten was that I stopped publishing blog posts for about 18 months. (I have a queue of posts, so the gap doesn’t show up in my blog.)

It took a while to get used to this new way of working and that investment didn’t immediately pay off. It took time to capture, organize and relate my ideas in new ways. So have some patience.