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.
