Taking Note of Smart Notes

Having a clear structure to work in is completely different from making plans about something.

- Sӧnke Ahrens

I would be remiss not to jot out my notes from this book on taking smart notes that I just finished. This book was not just for students and writers. There are many elements provided in these pages that I can incorporate into all aspects of my life, including work and writing. Do you takes notes? How to you organize? I am always up for learning, so here are my brief notes taken for myself to review again, after I turned the last page.

Keep things as simple as possible. 

Assemble notes and ideas as drafts in notebooks or on napkins (whatever works or is at hand). These are temporary resources for those flash ideas you want to get out onto an external memory bank. Writing is not the main work - reading, thinking, and understanding is. To fully understand, you need to translate what you read into your own words, as you write it out you are forced to think about it and weigh it against what you know already.

Instead of collecting ideas, your aim should be to develop ideas and arguments. Keeping a growth mindset, keen to look at changing for the better, which looks at inward development, rather than looking to receive praise as an outward reward. Know an essential part of learning is the feedback loop.

 Seek out feedback, don't avoid it. And note that multi-tasking drains your ability to shift, and it delays your good focus. At the same time, we need to be flexible in ways that keep us concentrating if something comes along that makes you depart from it.

Let your thoughts linger. Sometimes your brain will work it out in the downtime when it's out of focus. A break will allow you to learn better by letting your brain the chance to process and move information into the long-term memory so there is space for new information.

Read with a pen in hand. If you know me, this is a given. Have a dialogue with the book in the margins. Take notes by hand. There is research that shows how the act of writing out notes by hand actually helps you learn and understand more. Since the hand can't write as fast as your typing, you are forced to think about what you are encountering, and to write the main points. Of course, this takes work, but as it is said, the one who does the work does the learning.

A wise person is one who can make sense of things by drawing from many resources of interpretation. Some tips include:

1. Pay attention to what you want to remember.

2. Properly encode info you want to keep, with cues that can help you remember.

3. Practice recall.

Ultimately, if you want to follow the book, you would start a organizational system with the notes on index cards and writing in your own words to build future projects.