How to Take Smart Notes

Here's the book on Amazon

What I learned

Having a simple system for externalizing your thoughts improves your learning. It provides a scaffolding on which to build up your understanding and reduces the barrier towards creating new content.

The key steps

  1. Take short fleeting notes anytime you read. These serve as reminders of things that stand out to you and where you found them. Questions, critiques, and associations are particularly valuable.
  2. Translate fleeting notes into literature notes. These distill the most important ideas into your own words. They should be as short as possible while containing enough information so that you don't need to refer back to the literature afterwards.
  3. Consolidate literature notes into permanent notes. These capture what you consider to be relevant to your personal interests.
  4. Create connections between permanent notes. These help you find interesting relationships between ideas, and is usually the source of creativity.
  5. Use your permanent notes to build up new content.

Why new content?

When you create something new, you are forced to understand it more, and in doing so remember all the supporting information much more. You are creating associations between your own words and other concepts, and because humans have a greater capacity for understanding related ideas rather than discrete facts, you are actually improving your memory.

Think of it like installing hooks on a wall. Once you have a hook, you can hang other things off of it. Doing so makes it much easier to find those things later.

This was a really empowering idea, and these notes are an example of that.

Where have I mentioned this?