- Writing is Thinking,
- beginning with a thesis and then writing towards that goal is backwards and leads towards confirmation bias,
- how your workflow should be a structure to work in, not a structure imposed upon you,
- how you can build a delight-led practice of reading, thinking, and writing, that turns into a positive feedback loop,
- how reviewing and highlighting is such a shit method of study it basically isn't even learning,
- etc.
This is my literature note for the book (which, once I've generated permanent notes, will get archived and not used). Inset paragraphs are quotes from the book, everything else is my attempt to put my reading into my own words.
My literature note won't be worth much to you, just a teaser for skimming.
# l.How to Take Smart Notes
Created: 11:55
In the introduction Ahrens talks about how writing is not what happens after you've done your thinking, writing is the process of thinking. You don't know what you think until you've written it.
The time to start writing is not when you've decided to Write Something. It's now, every day. Do this well, and you'll never face a blank page again.
What determines success is what people do - meaning, that people have good processes and use discipline to consistently do it. Anyone can perform highly, there's no secret sauce. Just doing the right thing over long periods of time. The trick seems to be willpower - but that's not it. Intrinsic motivation kicks willpower's ass any day of the week.
"And nobody needs willpower to do something they wanted to do anyway. Every task that is interesting, meaningful and well-defined will be done, because there is no conflict between long and short-term interests. "
A good stucture for writing, taking notes, accomplishes this, by getting you to trust the process/system. If you can trust the system, you can get it out of your head, and then focus all of your attention on the present moment.
Also, if your system is essentially self-organizing, you can switch to a different task in it if you get bored of the first.
Ahrens main point here in the introduction is that it is bad workflow that makes writing very difficult and leads to procrastination. A good workflow removes the friction and makes it more enjoyable, something we intrinsically want to do.
He talks about how the structure is an environment to work in, not a goal or a plan. A plan is imposing a structure on yourself, making you inflexible, where a system is a structure for you to work in fluidly. This is a key difference and very important for creative and insight-led work. You can't make a plan for insight and epiphany. Making a plan will make insight seem like a distraction.
Smart Notes is similar in intent to GTD, but the gtd system doesn't map well to writing projects at the level of nitty gritty. It's best to have your GTD system point to your zk system for the writing/thinking process.
Luhman was insanely productive, but swore that he never did anything he didn't want to do. If he get stuck on something, he switched to something else that grabbed his attention. He was always doing something he was intrinsically motivated to do, which is a good explanation for how he was so productive. People perform better under stoke! Under flow! Like WAY better than when they're grinding. Luhman figured out a way to be in control, in intrinsic motivation, for a high ratio of his time. This is key. This is schwernpunkt.
HERE'S A KEY FUCKING POINT. When you make a plan, and then things get hard or weird but you've still got this idea that you've got to stick to the plan-goal, you lose a sense of agency. You lose control. This external thing - the plan-goal - becomes a thing weakening your sense of agency. *And agency is required for intrinsic motivation and flow*.
With writing, you can stay in control by by keeping your options open, and not locking in to an initial idea of what you're supposed to be writing about. Chase stoke through your writing; get pulled through your topics by your stoke.
Only if the work is set up in a way that is flexible enough to allow these small and constant adjustment can we keep our interest, motivation and work aligned - which is the procondition to effortless or almost effortless work.
Success is not about hammering through difficulty with willpower, but the result of smart working environemtns that avoid difficult circumstances in the first place. There's a mindset thing here. Being macho about things is a way to hold yourself back. Yes lean in to the effort, but embody tai chi / judo mindset when it comes to friction, to bullshit, to working circumstances that bring you out of flow, are counter to your interests, and make you feel not in control.
The system:
1. write fleeting notes. These will last a day or two.
2. Make brief literature notes. Write your own summary, don't just copy. Do take quotes, but be very selective about them.
3. Permanent notes, which begin bottom up, and link to each other. A permanent note is basically one idea, always put in your own words. Have the literature note open, and the slipbox, and start seeing connections and interesting ideas and write them down and get them into the system. Write one note for each idea. Use full sentences. Add links to related notes.
4. An index that serves as a jumping point into the contents of the permanent notes. It doesn't point to every single note, but serves to get you into the midst of any topic you happen to be interested in - you can explore links once you're in it.
A key here is the mental focus and strain, and attention, required to put the text into your own words. This is the first place actual thinking happens. Copying excerpts does almost nothing for learning. Translating it into your own words makes it stick, gets you into the material.
To write: look at your slipbox, gather a line of ideas into an outline, and order them. Turn the notes into a rough draft. Don't just copy the notes, translate them again into a manuscript.
Since writing is how we think, you can approach everything as if the only thing that matters is writing. Reading, watching youtube videos, lecutres, taking notes, it all ought to be done with the purpose of writing. Reading or listening to podcasts without turning it into writing is like flushing that time down the drain. You don't learn anything. Having this purpose (writing) helps focus the mind on the thing, keep you more engaged.
Take notes on what interests you. Don't have a more rigid intent than that. You will accumulate thinking (writing) around your interests, which of course vary through time. Eventually you can start mining your written-down interests for writing projects.
A good workflow can easily turn into a virtuous circle, where the positive experience motivates us to take on the next task with ease, which helps us to get better at what we are doing, which in return makes it more likely for us to enjoy the work, and so on. But if we fell constantly stuck in our work, we will become demotivated and mch more likely to procrastinate, leaving us with fewer positive or even bad experineces like missed deadlines. We might end up in a vicious circle of failure. (cf. Fishback, Eyal and Finkelstein, 2010)
The intent/aim is to create positive feedback loops of good experience which leads to improved performance which leads to even better experience etc, an upwards spiral of good experience and performance. The key is a workflow that supports this.
External rewards cannot establish a positive feedback loop! The work itself must be rewarding for the activity to become self-reinforcing.
The growth mindset is about finding pleasure in improving. The only way to improve is by recieving feedback, information about the errors we've made. The only way to make errors is to do stuff, to try. The more we do stuff, the more errors we generate, the more feedback we get, the more we improve, the better we feel, the better we get. High quality feedback is a super critical piece of this, and generating lots of reps is another piece (Huberman).
The feedback in zk is the process of trying to rewrite the text in our own words. It's often hard to do, or we write something and realize it's not quite right - that's the immediate feedback for error. Practically it tends to occur when we try to create permanent notes out of our literature notes.
Plans are like being on rails, which is fine if you are a train but not fine if you want to be intrinsically motivated to do stuff because you want to be able to explore and chase stoke and feel like you're in control.
Stop making plans. Become an expert.
Here, gut feeling is not a mysterious force, but an incorporated history of experience. It is the sedimentation of deeply learned practice through numerous feedback loops on success or failure.
Noobs need rules and plans, and they're slow. Experts actually think less, because they're at the level of intuitive sense. They just know what to do.
The purpose of the literature note is to generate good permanent notes.
Developing ideas bottom up rather than top down is a method for avoiding confirmation bias. traditionally, you choose a topic or thesis and then look for information to build your case. But this is like handing your brain over to confirmation bias on a silver platter. With the end goal in mind, you're going to find stuff that supports it, and will tend to unconsciously avoid information that contradicts that end goal. The zk method instead encourages you to indiscriminantly find interesting information and generate insight, which, as you follow it, leads you to some end goal / insight / thesis.
...if insight becomes a threat to your academic or writing success, you are doing it wrong.
The slipbox becomes the center of the writing process, and the attention and focus scans the potential connections between all contents within it. Delight is sparked by discovering interesting dynamics and interrelationships between the conversation that emerges out of the slipbox. Done right, contradiction and disconfirming information becomes sought after, rather than avoided, becuase (now this is me making a link) the dopamine peaks come from the connections and interactions, the richness of stuff happening in the slipbox. If I find some bit of information that seems at odds with something else in my slipbox, I'm delighted because I get to put it in, raise questions, and open up the possibility of an even greater level of insight or intellectual discovery happening. It's like it is Events in the slipbox that my brain enjoys, and it isn't much concerned about any specifc thesis or end goal. The slipbox itself is the point. Every once in a while a line of discussion arises from it that I carve into a specific project. Enrichment of the slipbox is rewarding. Facts that are all aligned on one side of an argument aren't enriching.
It takes practice to develop the skill of taking concise notes that are relevant to converting into permanent notes. Over time you'll become more efficient at it, at spotting patterns of information that are relevant.
If you can't say it clearly, you don't understand it yourself. -John Searle
Not writing ideas down as you encounter them in a text (in your own words) is barely better than not reading the text in the first place.
Converting the text into our own words is like testing ourselves on the information in realtime, forcing recall and forcing our brains to wrestle with the concept. Connect this to scott young, active recall is the way, reviewing is a waste of time.
when we try to answer a question before we know how to, we will later remember the answer better, even if our attempt failed (Arnold and McDermott 2013). If we put effot into the attempt of retrieving information, we are much more likely to remember it in the long run, even if we fail to retrieve it without help in the end (<Roediger and Karpicke 2006). Even without any feedback we will be better off if we try to remember something ourselves 8Jang et al. 2012).
Elaboration is the best way to understand material, it's been studied to death. Reviewing material is so shitty a method it's basically not even learning. Elaboration takes longer to do, and it takes effort, but reviewing is the real waste of time.
It might make sense to measure your productivity in terms of number of permanent notes written.
The brain seems to be able to remember just about everything. It seems that we forget stuff because there's a kind of inhibitory mechanism in the brain that makes irrelevant information fade quickly. So 'remembering' useful stuff isn't so much about retaining information, but about establishing connections of relevancy to the information we want to have on hand, cues in the mind that ties everything together. The ability of the brain to recall things is actually incredibly vast - we just have to learn how to take in information in a way that retains access to it. The key is to establish connections to meaningful contexts.
Topic guide notes: You can create a note that is about the best way to structure a line of thinking about a topic. Then link to this note from the index, thus creating a nice efficient route into a topic, and beginning the seed of a writing project if you want.
The ability to change the direction of our work opportunistically is a form of control that is completely different from the attempt to control the circustnaces by clinging to a plan.
Okay this is big. This is about maintaining interest and therefore motivation, and a sense of control, ie agency, is critical. Nothing signals agency more than the freedom to change your mind.
The aim here is to have your workflow set up so that you can course correct as you go to follow your interest, your stoke. This is the only way to maintain interest, and thus motivation, and thus high levels of performance. Because stoked people send it, grinders don't.
Luhmann always worked on several books or projects at the same time, so that he never got stuck at a high level. If he got stuck on one project, he just switched to another that interested him. So his overall level of momentum was always high. I have to speculate that this also contributed to seeing and making even more connections, by switching between various topics, and being able to cross fertilize at a project level in addition to the natural connections made in the slipbox.
Humans are basically incapable of making good schedules/plans. e.g. ability to estimate how long a project will take. So, like, don't.
It's more helpful to visualize the effort and training required to perform at the level you want, rather than visualize the success at the end. Lots of reasons, but this is related to dopamine scheduling and subjective control.
Also, humans find it difficult and daunting to Do A Project. Much easier to Do Make a lit note, or find a connection here. Aka next action thinking vs project thinking. Classic gtd.
Note sequences are the sweet spot. A running conversation with the ideas. I've been thinking too standalone... maybe.
## References
1. How to Take Smart Notes, Sonke Ahrens 2019