Tag: literature notes

• How to Take Smart Notes (Book Review)

  It seems silly at this late date to write a review of one of the most influential books of the last several years, at least among knowledge workers, writers, and software developers. Anyone involved in PKM or BASB (Building a Second Brain) has no doubt already heard of this book and has probably read it (and taken notes on it!).

  

  I read How to Take Smart Notes in 2019, when Amazon recommended it to me. Amazon recommends a lot of books because their years’ of data on my idiosyncratic reading tastes allow them to know what sorts of things I might like to read. I was as astonished to find out how widely read and influential this book (with such an unassuming title!) was as I was in 2014 when a little book I read by Marie Kondo about “tidying up” became a global phenomenon.

  Note-taking seems as unlikely a popular book topic as tidying-up. But if you think about it, they probably arrived at the right time for their ideas. With material goods becoming inexpensive, we were apparently drowning in clutter and with the flood of information coming at us, we were lost for a method to keep track of things we wanted to find again.

  This book was written for students who need to be keeping track of their research and ideas for writing their papers, but it seems to have struck a chord with a variety of people who aren’t in school at all.

  A few things have annoyed me over the years about the increased popularity of the notecard method taught in this book: one of them is the fact that I keep hearing it referred to as a “slip box.” I mean, that’s an ok translation of zettelkasten, I guess. As in, it’s slips of paper in a box. But it takes it out of the realm of being familiar to speakers of American English, who would normally refer to it as a note box or an index card box. As in a card catalog or the little recipe card files our grandmothers had on their kitchen counters.

  Americans have been taking notes on index cards for their writing and speeches for as long as we’ve been a country. The method dates back to the Renaissance and has been used by people like Martin Luther King Jr., Ronald Reagan, Joan Rivers, and George Carlin.

  In fact, I was taught an index card method in high school, and it appears to be the one that Ryan Holiday learned from his mentor Robert Greene (this popular article predates the publication of How to Take Smart Notes by three years).

  So this is the second thing that I’ve found annoying: I’ve seen way too many people act as though Niklas Luhmann invented the concept of taking notes on index cards, which is absurd. What does differentiate the zettlekasten method described in this book from the index card method I learned in high school is this:

  • Pre-internet “links” between one card and another
  • One box of note cards for your lifetime instead of for a project

  This is how I learned:

  • For each book you plan to use for writing a paper, create a bibliography index card (nowadays most people use Zotero)
  • Put the bibliography in alphabetical order by author’s last name
  • Number the cards
  • File them in the back of your card box
  • As you read, take notes on index cards
  • If the note is a quotation, make sure you put it in quotes and write down the page number, but it’s preferable to put things into your own words
  • After you’ve written a stack of note cards for a book, flip the entire stack over and write on the back or each card the number of the bibliographic reference
  • File the note cards in the front of the card box

  Then, when you sit down to write, you can sort and regroup the cards into an order that makes sense for the paper you’re writing, while making sure you keep track of which books you got the ideas from.

  I did not learn Luhmann’s method of linking the cards with numbers (or bidirectional linking as we now have in Obsidian, Roam Research, Logseq and several other programs).

  I also did not learn to keep one card box for everything for all time. Basically the method involved buying a little index card box from an office supply store and using it for the paper you’re currently writing and then archiving those notes and starting from scratch when you write another paper. My card box was much, much smaller than Ryan Holiday’s scrapbooking box (a 4×6 index card is a standard size for printing photos so they fit nicely into photo boxes used by scrapbookers).

  Although I’ve been a little annoyed by some of the discussion online about the zettelkasten method, I’ve also been intrigued by all the people who are now working at creating their own. Any book that gets people excited about learning and connecting ideas has a net positive influence on the world.

  >To have an undistracted brain to think with and a reliable collection of notes to think in is pretty much all we need.

  I’ve actually been spending the last several weeks experimenting with every note-taking app I can get my hands on and now I’m listening to the audiobook version of How to Take Smart Notes as a refresher as I putter away importing notes from the last several years into my new system.

  I definitely recommend this book. It’s one of the few books that lives up to the hype and has more to say than you can get from a brief summary.

  May 29, 2024

  BASB, book reviews, literature notes, note taking, reading, second brain, zettelkasten

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• Refuse to Choose! (Book Review)

  

  This is one of my favorite books of all time. I read it years before I even knew I had ADHD and I still browse through it periodically. Recently I listened to the audiobook version read by Pam Ward.

  Barbara Sher was a practical author who wanted people to achieve their dreams. She wrote Wishcraft: How to Get What You Really Want, which was full of tools to help people set goals and nail them. But some people didn’t know what goals to set, so she wrote I Could Do Anything If I Only Knew What It Was to help people discover what they really want. Some people thought they were too old to achieve their goals, so she wrote It’s Only Too Late if You Don’t Start Now.

  She wrote Refuse to Choose! in response to the thousands of responses she received from people who had read I Could Do Anything and saw a section where she described her concept of Scanners:

  The people who wrote me were unbelievably grateful to hear themselves described in positive terms — usually for the first time. For years they had struggled to understand why they were so different from everyone they knew. They had spent years of their lives bewildered and frustrated …They couldn’t understand why they were unable to find the right careers, and they described the same patterns over and over again: Every interesting career they started soon became intolerably boring. Or they had never even tried one because they couldn’t make up their minds in the first place.

  At the time she was writing, there weren’t people going around calling themselves multi-passionate or Renaissance people. People were expected to choose a career path early in life and stick to it for the long haul. There was real angst with people who didn’t know from the time they were a teenager what their One True Interest would be forever and ever. Sher says:

  If Scanners didn’t think they should limit themselves to one field, 90 percent of their problems would cease to exist!

  She doesn’t just provide encouragement and acknowledgement that you’re not alone (although there’s plenty of both). She provides an entire toolbox full of tools that Scanners can use to manage their lives and interests, achieve their goals, and give themselves credit for the things they’ve already been doing all these years. She has a few dozen tools up her sleeve, with names like “Catalog of Ideas with Potential” and “Interest Index Binder.”

  In the second half of the book, she breaks down Scanners into categories based on the styles of people she worked with over the years. Some people pursue a lot of things at once, some pursue one thing after another, and some people cycle around to their favorites again and again. She gives each group a type (serial, sequential) and a name such as Wanderer, Jack-of-All-Trades and High-Speed Indecisive. For each group she has a plan and a list of which tools they tend to get the most benefit from.

  An example of one of her tools is called “20 to 30 Three-Ring Binders” and it’s literally a bookshelf full of binders with one per interest. So instead of having a stack of clutter that makes you feel worthless and has you wondering what on earth you’ve even been doing with your time, you have an entire shelf with each of your interests catalogued so you can see what you’ve been up to and, more importantly, jump back into things that got put aside at some point.

  Every time you get inspired by a new interest, you reach for a new binder and give that interest a home. When you start feeling stressed because yet another interest has arrived, one you can’t possibly devote yourself to in the way you want to, create a binder for it and put it on the shelf. The relief you feel after doing something this simple will surprise you. But it’s another way of knowing that nothing will be lost and everything will wait for you when you do have the time.

  For most of my life I loved tools like binders. Then I moved 2500 miles across the country and I had to sift through and assess the value of every item I owned. What is worth paying to lug across the country? What is worth paying to store until you buy a house (which, in this housing market, seems distant?). Lately I’ve been mostly paperless and I’ve explored a number of digital solutions. One of my dreams is to update some of the tools I’ve learned from this book for some of the apps I’ve been using lately.

  If you’re the kind of person who would benefit from this book, you are probably already looking it up on your favorite book site or your library’s website. For me it’s the opposite of the large number of books I’ve read and immediately forgotten over the years. Instead, it’s one of the small number that has stuck with me and made a profound difference in my life.

  May 1, 2024

  ADHD, book reviews, literature notes, reading

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• My need for better notes

  It all started in the doctor’s office, chatting with a nurse who was considering buying a Kindle. She hadn’t done much reading for pleasure since nursing school and she was looking forward to reading something that wasn’t related to her job.

  “I love my Kindle!” I enthused. “I read on it every morning while I drink my coffee.”

  “What are you reading now?” she asked.

  “It’s called 21 Lessons for the 21st Century, and I’ve been reading it for the last several days.”

  “Sounds fascinating. What’s it about?”

  “Uh, well … see … it’s … about … like, I guess some of the challenges or whatever of the upcoming, um, years.”

  What. the. heck.

  I’d been reading the book for days on end and I couldn’t think of one intelligent sentence to string together about its contents?

  When I got home and pulled out my device, I saw that I’d made 140 highlights in this book! Yes, 140 times Yuval Noah Harani said something that struck me as interesting enough to remember later, yet I wasn’t even finished reading the book and already remembered none of it. Ironically, the first highlight said:

  In a world deluged by irrelevant information, clarity is power.

  Nor was this an isolated incident. It’s not like I remembered the main points of every other book I’d ever read and this book alone failed to stick in my mind. It was much worse than that.

  When I joined Readwise and imported my Kindle highlights from the last decade, I had “read” more than a thousand books and I barely remembered most of them. Some I’m certain I only read the introduction or first few chapters. Others it was clear I’d spent a good deal of time with but I still hadn’t retained much. There were probably ten that had made a real impression on me, though I may not be able to articulate that impression clearly. It was more like a vague sense that I enjoyed my time with the book and thought of it fondly.

  So, was I actually reading every morning while I drink my coffee? Or was I just drowsing in my reading chair, hypnotically staring at the screen?

  In the time since, I’ve read books about zettelkasten and commonplace books and building a second brain and taking smart notes. I’ve watched YouTube videos where people show off their elaborate systems for never forgetting anything. I’ve tried notebooks and journals and apps (so many apps!).

  In the last few years I’ve learned what works for me, what frustrates me, what doesn’t work for me but I wish it did, and what was a complete waste of time (and, often, money!).

  If you’re looking to get more out of your notes and reading and to leverage your thoughts into projects instead of something you forget about five minutes later, you’re in the right place. I want to help you manage the information in your life so that it’s useful to you.

  Opening your notes shouldn’t feel like opening one of those sitcom closets where you get buried under a pile of clutter and a soccer ball bounces off your head.

  April 26, 2024

  BASB, commonplace books, learning, literature notes, note taking, reading, reading journals, second brain, zettelkasten

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