How to Take Smart Notes

For the past year, I’ve been hard at work trying to improve my reading. My reading habits had waned a few years after I left school, relying on audiobooks and podcasts to supplement a busy schedule and growing family. But as I prepare to go back to school, reading well is possibly one of the most important skills one could work on.

Of course, reading well for academia is not simply a matter of reading quickly (although it seems one can never read fast enough!). It’s also a matter of what you do with what you are reading. I attended a workshop on speedreading techniques in seminary, and over time I learned to write in my books, making symbolic notes in the margins and switching from underlining to sidelining. But I still felt like I wasn’t getting enough out of my reading. How was I supposed to use this information and find it when I needed it?

Over the years I had experimented with different ideas. At first I was writing ideas in Word documents, then I tried a Confluence account, and eventually bought a bunch of five-subject notebooks to order my learning. Each had its strengths, but nothing was working.

A friend of mine posted a few things he was learning from Tiago Forte on building a second brain, which sounded like what I was looking for. I was intrigued and bought the audiobook. Much of the file management and project management techniques were things I had already picked up working in curriculum; it was helpful, but I was already doing that. My reading and writing didn’t fit neatly into those kinds of projects. I needed something interconnected and organic.

As you may have guessed, the idea behind a “second brain” is organizing your notes in such a way that you can quickly store and recall the information you need, to create a metaphorical extension of your mind. (Yes, there are transhumanist undertones here, but we’ll ignore those for now.) With computers and phones everywhere, you might think this is easy, but finding the right system can be a challenge. Forte has some great resources about tools, and I benefitted greatly from his website and videos. But have you ever gone to the hardware store with only a vague idea of what you’re looking for? It’s a little like that. You can be looking at an aisle full of saws and blades, but until you know enough about what you intend to do with them, you’re bound to make a bad choice and waste time trying to make it work before you come back to the store and hope they’ll let you return it.

In this case, I had a purpose and a goal, but not the strategy. Sometimes the tool brings with it all the strategy you need. But sometimes you have to lay more of the philosophical groundwork to land on the right choice. This was one of those times.

The good news is I found the answer last summer. I’m only writing about it now because I wanted to thoroughly test out the system to make sure it would stick before I recommended it. (The bad news? I don’t remember exactly how I got there from Forte. It was either mentioned in his book or something I stumbled across through his online resources.)

The system I needed is described in How to Take Smart Notes: One Simple Technique to Boost Writing, Learning and Thinking, by Sönke Ahrens (2022).

I got the book because it was a well-regarded representative of the Zettelkasten method, which is the heart of this system. But Ahrens goes beyond this to deliver one of the most helpful books on non-fiction writing that I’ve ever read.

The main point of the book is that good writing stems from good note-taking. A well-disciplined writer who takes good notes will outperform someone otherwise smarter than him. Ahrens incorporates many relevant insights from other productivity books that I have read/heard over the years, dealing with things like willpower and memory. Having them all in one place and directly related to writing was a godsend.

It also includes practical wisdom for so many of the problems that I have faced as a writer over the years. I always want to go back through everything I have and organize it, find the perfect system. Ahrens says no. Don’t go back and redo your old work. I am tempted to hoard quotes because I want to be careful about plagiarism and making sure I know what is my insight, what is a paraphrase, and what is verbatim. Ahrens says focus on translating into your own words (and of course leave a trail back to the original).

Throughout the book he organically builds a solution to the problem of what to write and how to research for it. Rather than sitting around and thinking about what projects to pursue, you need to build on what you have already been doing. If you are smart about how you take notes, you will have topics and resources already lined up in advance; they are less likely to be dead-ends because you have already invested some work in them. All that’s left is selecting the ideas you will put to use.

This is the first few chapters of the book: the concept of writing and research as an organic note-taking enterprise that works with the way your brain is wired. The rest of the book is devoted to the Zettelkasten method of how to manage this kind of work. (More precisely, Zettelkasten is explained along the way as he explains how to get the most out of it.)

The basic idea is this: it’s a kind of index card system that is organized not by a pre-set order but by the connections you identify. It has a basic order out of necessity, but the version that Ahrens talks about is Luhmann’s method of relating every new card to what is already there. New subjects may start a new train of cards, but new notes for existing subjects are filed with the notes that are most relevant. This requires a judgment (which forces you to think about the connections). But rather than a simple tree of notes with different branches and sub-branches, you also periodically look through the notes to discern connections not captured by the tree.

This was exactly what I was looking for. I have tried to create folder structures that would receive all of my notes, but especially in systematic theology those folders are impossible. There are always connections between the loci (standard theological subjects) as well as between the different kinds of theology (historical, philosophical, biblical, etc.) It desperately needs interconnectedness. But the organic way those connections arise also protect the system from being too determined at the outset by what I think the structure ought to be. I don’t have to invent the perfect system and fill it; I can simply gather and build.

However, this system isn’t quite complete. You need a way to build it as you read, as a workable part of life. So Ahrens differentiates between taking fleeting notes, managing your sources, and actually arranging the notes in what is conventionally called the slip-box.

So the system that has been working for me is this:

1. Take fleeting notes on my phone in a Google doc. That way I always have it handy and can access it anywhere. I create one new file each day and add to it anything I think is interesting, whether a question I have, a task I need to do, notes from what I am reading, or an insight from a conversation. Everything for that day goes in that file. No need to format or think, just write and get back to life. (Bonus! I just discovered Docs has a quote capture tool. I point my camera at the text and it appears as a quote with minimal typos.)
2. At the end of the day (or week…or month…this is where I am still catching up) you take those notes and process them. Insights, questions, quotes, etc. go into Obsidian, which is what I am using as my digital slip-box. I can write notes there and connect them to one another easily. To-do items I put elsewhere.
3. Personally, I save my fleeting notes in an archive, but you wouldn’t have to. The important thing is that each day’s notes are broken into discrete notes you add to the slipbox.
4. When reading a book, I am taking fleeting notes as well as my usual markup in the margins. When I’m done with a chapter, I go back and summarize the insights in the book and in Zotero notes. Anything I think I will use later, I copy into Obsidian.

This may sound like a lot, but you would be surprised at how little time it takes once you build the habits. By writing down my thoughts on the fly, redistributing them, summarizing chapters, etc., I am processing what I am reading so that I can recall it and use it. All the tools I am using are free (Google Docs, Zotero, Obsidian). As I begin the schoolyear, I’m sure I will be forced to either work faster or be more selective, but I have the basic systems and habits in place to grab what I can in the hopes of using it professionally.

I’m happy to go into more detail for anyone who’s interested, but I also expect the system will improve over time (or that its fatal flaw will reveal itself). So I will leave it at that for now.

If you are interested in writing and research, I highly recommend How to Take Smart Notes. Even if you don’t adopt the Zettelkasten system, you are likely to find practical wisdom and insights to aid your writing projects.