How to take smart notes

p22

An excellent summation on how useful writing is as a facilitator for expanding our understanding.

Writing is, without dispute, the best facilitator for thinking, reading, learning, understanding and generating ideas we have.

p64

Interesting observation about teachers observing practitioners and being unable to correctly identify the veterans. They mistake those with an abundance of experience as beginners and mistake beginners, who can only strictly follow the procedures taught, as experts.

How does this example tie in with Gawande 2011 and the “Master Builder”?

p73

Literature notes are at their most effective when they are a dialog with the text and pivot to ideas and contexts already in your knowledge base. Snippets removed of all context of the source material, with no new context added do not make coherent thoughts.

How much expansion of an idea or thought happens at the literature note stage vs a permanent note is something that I have not yet settled in my own mind.

p92

Externalising memory by recording ideas and their connections is important due to the shortcuts and hacks that our brains employ, rendering our memory as unreliable not just for remembering facts, but also for analysing patterns.

There is a quote from Thinking Fast and Slow, Kahneman, 2013, 79. I had previously disregarded this book as self help guff, but I may need to re-investigate.

The brain is a tool for jumping to conclusions.

p93

When writing your thoughts , the writing isn’t a record of your thinking, the writing is your thinking. It is more than externalising memory, it is an extension of your thought process itself.

I’m not sure I can grok this completely, it still feels like a tool to harness thinking that also ends up as a record, but this idea gives the impression that the thinking is leaping up the pen into your brain. Writing is the tool (or scaffolding, as mentioned elsewhere in the book), which may make it an integral got in the thinking process, it does not make it part of the thoughts themselves.

Perhaps this is exactly what Feynman means, but the way it’s described rings false.

p102

Knowledge is much easier to gain when placed in the context of existing knowledge. When it elaborates and builds upon what we already know.

p107

A notes system shouldn’t simply surface to us exactly what we ask of it and what we expect (this is a risk of being able to return perfect search results). It should be able to surprise us with forgotten ideas and connections.

With this in mind, fight the temptation to be an archivist. Don’t attempt to tag notes with all possible relevant keywords, but ask yourself for what reason you would wish to find the note in future. What is the theme of the thought?

p112-113, 118-119

In addition to helping with recall and understanding, the notes will help you identify a duplicate idea, either of your own or someone else’s. Beyond the obvious, the benefit here is to aid with analysing the similarities and differences of very similar thoughts. This is often how whole new ideas are formed, by solidifying, tweaking, or refuting existing ideas over time with new information.

The eureka moment is a a moment built upon a critical mass of ideas and understanding. There is no big idea overnight success, but a result of small incremental ideas and corrections. Making a tool that helps analyse minute differences in seemingly identical thoughts invaluable.

p121

A key tool for creative thought is being able to make a specific idea into an abstract one and then to re-specify.

Combining specific ideas is harder than combining abstract ideas.

p122

Our brains prefer to make new information fit within existing ideas or to let the new information vanish.

p123

When uncovering new information it’s difficult to see what the information shows instead of what we expected it to show.

See p92, we see what we expected to see, we jump to conclusions we already made.

p127

Note brevity is key even in digital notebooks. The brevity of an expressed idea is what allows for one of the key actions - the re-arranging and re-combining of notes to form a larger argument.

Long notes cause the coupling of multiple ideas. Starting to recognise software architecture best practice here.

Having a consistent system and format of notes means not wasting time, however small, when reading and writing on mundane irrelevances.

p129

The clustering of related notes makes it simple to identify where our interest has been piqued. By design, we know the areas of interest which we want to write about.

When writing about a topic, use your notes to create the outline of your argument.

This is a new perspective on your ideas. We are no longer looking for new ideas and searching for connections. We are attempting to organise the ideas into a coherent and concise argument.

We are narrowing focus only onto what is necessary and ordering our thoughts into a way that makes them clear.

This perspective shift will often highlight problems and gaps in your understanding.

p134

When reading there is huge benefit in following where your interest takes you and changing course as your interest shifts.

The risk of abandoning a project due to a shift in interest is high when the direction and goals of a project are fixed up front.

p136

When drafting an argument, outlining is key. The visual structure is valuable for figuring out which notes need to be removed. Important because, due to your note taking, you’ll have the opposite problem of the bank sheet of paper.

p138

Because the clustering of ideas makes identifying areas of interest so easy, it makes context switching an incredibly low friction activity.

Meaning if you become bogged down on a task, you can just work on something else or take a break.

p139

People cant plan or estimate well. So break projects into smaller tasks for tighter feedback loops. again, huge software development crossover here

p140

Large linear blocks of work encourage delays because large tasks often grow to fit the time allotted, but never shrink.

p142-143

People maintain patterns of behaviour. Plans to change behaviour usually fail.

The further away from the immediate future you go, the more likely a behaviour is to revert to the norm.

A key is to slowly build new habits.

Rather than: “Start taking smart notes from today” Instead: “Try getting into the habit of always having a pen and paper when we read”

Then a habit of writing down the interesting parts will be a very natural and potentially automatic next step.

Once this is a routine, you can build on it, and down the line you will be able to start collecting ideas, finding connections, expanding, differentiating, questioning.