If you’re reading this it’s because you’re interested in learning about a concept that’s not common or you want to know what all this is about

Zettelkasten

The 8 Steps of Taking Smart Notes Ahrens recommends the following 8 steps for taking notes: Make fleeting notes Make literature notes Make permanent notes Now add your new permanent notes to the slip-box Develop your topics, questions and research projects bottom up from within the slip-box Decide on a topic to write about from within the slip-box Turn your notes into a rough draft Edit and proofread your manuscript He notes that Luhmann actually had two slip-boxes: the first was the “bibliographical” slip-box, which contained brief notes on the content of the literature he read along with a citation of the source; the second “main” slip-box contained the ideas and theories he developed based on those sources. Both were wooden boxes containing paper index cards.  Luhmann distinguished between three kinds of notes that went into his slip-boxes: fleeting notes, literature notes, and permanent notes.  1. Make fleeting notes Fleeting notes are quick, informal notes on any thought or idea that pops into your mind. They don’t need to be highly organized, and in fact shouldn’t be. They are not meant to capture an idea in full detail, but serve more as reminders of what is in your head. 2. Make literature notes The second type of note is known as a “literature note.” As he read, Luhmann would write down on index cards the main points he didn’t want to forget or that he thought he could use in his own writing, with the bibliographic details on the back.  Ahrens offers four guidelines in creating literature notes: Be extremely selective in what you decide to keep Keep the overall note as short as possible Use your own words, instead of copying quotes verbatim Write down the bibliographic details on the source 3. Make permanent notes Permanent notes are the third type of note, and make up the long-term knowledge that give the slip-box its value. This step starts with looking through the first two kinds of notes that you’ve created: fleeting notes and literature notes. Ahrens recommends doing this about once a day, before you completely forget what they contain. As you go through them, think about how they relate to your research, current thinking, or interests. The goal is not just to collect ideas, but to develop arguments and discussions over time. If you need help jogging your memory, simply look at the existing topics in your slip-box, since it already contains only things that interest you.  Here are a few questions to ask yourself as you turn fleeting and literature notes into permanent notes: How does the new information contradict, correct, support, or add to what I already know? How can I combine ideas to generate something new? What questions are triggered by these new ideas? As answers to these questions come to mind, write down each new idea, comment, or thought on its own note. If writing on paper, only write on one side, so you can quickly review your notes without having to flip them over. Write these permanent notes as if you are writing for someone else. That is, use full sentences, disclose your sources, make explicit references, and try to be as precise and brief as possible.  Once this step is done, throw away (or delete) the fleeting notes from step one and file the literature notes from step two into your bibliographic slip-box. 4. Add your permanent notes to the slip-box It’s now time to add the permanent notes you’ve created to your slip-box. Do this by filing each note behind a related note (if it doesn’t relate to any existing notes, add it to the very end). Optionally, you can also: Add links to (and from) related notes Adding it to an “index” – a special kind of note that serves as a “table of contents” and entry point for an important topic, including a sorted collection of links on the topic Each of the above methods is a way of creating an internal pathway through your slip-box. Like hyperlinks on a website, they give you many ways to associate ideas with each other. By following the links, you encounter new and different perspectives than where you started. Luhmann wrote his notes with great care, not much different from his style in the final manuscript. More often than not, new notes would become part of existing strands of thought. He would add links to other notes both close by, and in distantly related fields. Rarely would a note stay in isolation. 5. Develop your topics, questions, and research projects bottom up from within the slip-box With so many standardized notes organized in a consistent format, you are now free to develop ideas in a “bottom up” way. See what is there, what is missing, and which questions arise. Look for gaps that you can fill through further reading. If and when needed, another special kind of note you can create is an “overview” note. These notes provide a “bird’s eye view” of a topic that has already been developed to such an extent that a big picture view is needed. Overview notes help to structure your thoughts and can be seen as an in-between step in the development of a manuscript. 6. Decide on a topic to write about from within the slip-box Instead of coming up with a topic or thesis upfront, you can just look into your slip-box and look for what is most interesting. Your writing will be based on what you already have, not on an unfounded guess about what the literature you are about to read might contain. Follow the connections between notes and collect all the relevant notes on the topic you’ve found. 7. Turn your notes into a rough draft Don’t simply copy your notes into a manuscript. Translate them into something coherent and embed them into the context of your argument. As you detect holes in your argument, fill them or change the argument. 8. Edit and proofread your manuscript From this point forward, all you have to do is refine your rough draft until it’s ready to be published. This process of creating notes and making connections shouldn’t be seen as merely maintenance. The search for meaningful connections is a crucial part of the thinking process. Instead of figuratively searching our memories, we literally go through the slip-box and form concrete links. By working with actual notes, we ensure that our thinking is rooted in a network of facts, thought-through ideas, and verifiable references.

No gardener can become a good gardener without getting over the fear of pruning, and no good gardener can become a great gardener without approaching pruning as part of the craft. Chop, whack, snip. It hurt, to see everyone almost exposed to their roots, not knowing whether they’d make it or not–driving home the guilt that was admitting that I had not taken good care of them. If they didn’t succeed, it would be my fault.

When I need inspiration, I select the prose tag and look through my favorite examples of literature. If I need to recap story structure, I select the tag and review the examples I’ve noted. With this, I can review & recall the works of others with ease. Even my own. As things come to me, I may grab my notebook to write a scene or a post-it to capture a sentence, a question, or any other random thought. These sticky notes make their way to my desk where they reside until I’ve catalogued them into Readwise. I can then tag, search, and access ideas, quotes, & thoughts to use in my writing.

What I'm starting to realize is that I don't seem to be building a “digital garden” with Obsidian. What I'm building seems more of a personal wiki, a personal knowledge-base, a second brain.

What we need instead is a spatial meta layer for notes on the OS-level that lives across all apps and workflows. This would allow you to instantly take notes without having to switch context. Even better yet, the notes would automatically resurface whenever you revisit the digital location you left them at.

These outcomes and estimated effect sizes bring us back to a key applied question: Which method—longhand (on paper or eWriter) or laptop—should students use to take notes? At this point, we would argue that the available evidence does not provide a definitive answer to this question.

My hunch is that it’s not that screen reading or digital notetaking are worse for learning, but that we don’t talk enough about what the digital texts enable that might be quite different from what is enabled by print. 

I think Nvivio is far too expensive for academics. Zettelkasten interesting, but it does not recognize the url from DEVONthink and Sente (I do link to the source in each note). In addition, it is developed by a single programmer. My approach is as follows. Highlights and notes prepared in Sente or Skim are exported to DEVONthink using these scripts: https://github.com/RobTrew/tree-tools/tree/master/DevonThink% 20scripts . Then in DEVONthink I add tags to each note, and sometimes create links between them. The result is similar to Zettelkasten, but with cross-links and power of DEVONthink’ artificial intelligence (searching using a variety of Boolean operators, see and also, etc).

By then end of my PhD, I had over 800 documents in my Sente library incuding journal articles and full books, many with highlights and notes. How am I supposed to find interesting bits related to one concept, idea or topic? My highlights and notes are there somewhere in those documents but there is no easy way of tracking them down and working with them. They are searchable or can be made searchable (see Jeff Pooley’s guide  on Macademic here), but that is often not very helpful. I would for instance like to see them in one place organized according to some logic. My current practice is that I make the highlights in Sente for any potential future use and at the same time I copy the text (quote) to Scrivener with the citation info and keep these snippets organized there. I would for instance have a card for ‘innovation (def.)’ in which I would only collect various definitions of innovation from the sources I read.

you should find a method here that works for you

an Update on My Use of the Bullet Journal Method

writing is more effective for learning and remembering

Strikethru

Inbox Zero

use Evernote as a frictionless GTD list application

Bullet Journal

Tactile experience