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How to Take Smart Notes - 10 Principles to Revolutionize Your Note-Taking and Writing

⌗ Metadata

📖 Short Summary (1 takeaway)

  • Adopt “a reliable and simple external structure to think in that compensates for the limitations of our brains”

🧐 Why I am reading this book​

🙊 Great quotes

"Let my curiosity to lead me" #quotes

✅ Actionable item

  • Apply the 8 steps of taking smart notes
    1. Make fleeting notes
      • I capture them in daily notes. But I should give better tags to them
    2. Make literature notes
      • Capture main points that I don’t want to forget in more formal notes
    3. Make permanent notes
      • I have yet to create any of these. Need to look at the first two kinds of notes and develop arguments sand discussions with them
    4. Now add your new permanent notes to the slip-box
    5. Develop your topics, questions and research projects bottom up from within the slip-box
    6. Decide on a topic to write about from within the slip-box
    7. Turn your notes into a rough draft
    8. Edit and proofread your manuscript
  • Apply the 10 most important principles
    • Writing is not the outcome of thinking; it is the medium in which thinking takes place
    • Do your work as if writing is the only thing that matters
    • Nobody ever starts from scratch
      • A damaging myth about creativity
    • Our tools and techniques are only as valuable as the workflow
      • Good system don’t add options and features; they strip away complexity and distractions from the main work - thinking
    • Standardization enables creativity
    • Our work only gets better when exposed to high-quality feedback
      • I can really feel that right now with my work, getting PR approved by others and have to formulate why/how I am doing something is really challenging.
    • Work on multiple, simultaneous projects
      • I can relate to this. I think there is a sweet spot of just enough projects to get you to cross pollinate the ides but not too many that you are constantly distracted by something else
    • Organize your notes by context, not by topic
      • Ask yourself, in what context will I need this again?
      • Maybe that should be a new metadata tag...”context”
      • Don’t think about where you should store the note, think about where you might need to find this again
    • ==Always follow the most interesting path==
    • Save contradictory ideas
      • Enemy of independent thinking is the inability to overcome confirmation bias and break our tendency to develop one-sided opinions