This book completely revamped the way I do note-taking. Now, I think more in terms of creating atomic notes and linking them together.
#The idea of a slipbox
The slipbox is a system that contain notes about what is interesting to you. It’s not about collecting—but developing ideas, arguments and discussions. Don’t let your ideas go to waste. As you’re constantly encountering new ideas, write them up and drop them in the slipbox. It will become your idea generator. The slip-box was popularized by the German sociologist Niklas Luhmann who used his “Zettelkasten” as personal knowledge management where he externalized his thinking. Working with the slip-box means building up clusters, and combining those with other clusters. As you learn and become better, the slip-box will become more knowledgeable too. It grows in value with time. The more input you feed it, together with the connections you make, the better your personal knowledge management will be.
#The slipbox is not intended as an encyclopedia
Only write notes for the slipbox if it helps us with your own thinking. You don’t write to fill a gap in the slipbox. An overview of the slipbox is impossible and you should not be concerned with this. As an extension of your own memory, the slipbox is the medium you think in, not a thing you think about. The references between the notes are much more important than any index you can create.
#Interconnectedness of information
We dock new learning on top of something we already know. A network of ideas makes it easier to make sense of new information. You can attach it to what is already there in your head. See it as growing information on a tree. The information creates new leaves and branches. Isolated learning is like growing a branch off a tree without having the trunk to attach to.
#Write two notes a day and sort it into the slip-box
It will compound to a significant mass of knowledge over time. In only a year it would contain over 700 notes. This is a less intimidating task than sitting down to try and write a full page in one go.
#Comparing of notes
Comparing of notes serves as an ongoing examination of old notes in a new light. The brain can create patterns and connections when it sees the notes. It has a harder time when it is mere thinking of how things compare.
#Selective note taking
Use your own words when you’re taking notes. Your thinking grows deeper if you can phrase things as they make sense to you. Keep these notes together with bibliographic details, this will make up your reference system.
#Fleeting notes and permanent notes
There’s a difference between writing fleeting and permanent notes. Fleeting notes are created for remembering in the moment. Fleeting notes could be made in a notebook, on post-it’s, on napkins, whatever makes you capture thoughts fast. Speed is crucial. Permanent notes are for gathering the whole picture. It’s good practice to turn fleeting notes to permanent notes on a regular basis. Preferably daily.
#We tend to think we understand what we’re reading
It can feel like you understand what you are reading, until you are forced to rephrase what you’ve read into your own words. You need to take notes as you read, otherwise you will not grasp what you’ve read. It may feel like you understand in the moment, but after a few weeks most of that knowledge will be gone. Take notes as you read and build up an understanding over time that you can come back to.
#Taking literature notes are only half the equation
Literature notes will be archived in the reference system. The next step is to use these as a base for the conversation with The slipbox—to make connections with the thinking that is already there.
#Storage strength and retrieval strength
The ability to store memories only becomes greater over a lifetime. We could probably store a lifetime of detailed experiences in our long-term memory. Learning is not so much about storing information as it is about creating connections and bridges between different pieces of information.
Storage strength in the brain cannot be improved. Remembering facts is like cramming things into the brain, sort of like hammering them in on chisel plates.
#Writing involves more than typing
Writing means reading, understanding, reflection, finding the right words, editing, rewriting etc. You need to get your thoughts on paper first, where you can look at them and inspect them. Only after you have written something down can you start to improve it.
#Writing is the best way to get out thoughts in order
By writing something in your own words you have to prove that you get the gist of it. Writing is a process of translating from one medium to another (your thoughts into words.) So only when something is written down is it fixed enough, ready enough to be discussed.
#Bring your notes into a linear order
The slip-box is about experimenting and generating new ideas. But to work we need to bring our thoughts into a linear order. The key is to structure the draft visibly and keep it flexible. The problem would now be the exactly opposite of “blank screen syndrome”. We have so much material to work with that the job is to bring it in a linear fashion.
The power of the slip-box is that through the process of reading and writing, it inevitably produces lots of unintended by-products. If things are not relevant for our current project, they could be for a project down the road—one thought is the enabler of the next. Working on parallel projects will help you become “unstuck”, because you can always switch to a project you enjoy for the moment. This decreases “mental blockages”.
#The working memory of the brain
Short-term memory, or working memory is your brain’s cache. It collects around 30 seconds of the things you’ve recently heard or seen. This storage capacity is limited and can hold only around 4–7 items. This is the reason why you need to “externalize” your brain. You have to get closure on your open loops, and free your mental resources for new tasks. If you’re able to link things from your short-term memory to long-term memory associations you can hold more.
#Have a meaningful dialog with the texts you read
You will develop a deeper understanding and a richer context to think in. The idea is never to copy what you read, but to talk with it and create your own understanding of it.
#Give an introductory lecture on it
You can only truly understand a topic if you’re able to “Give an introductory lecture on it”. Reading with a pen in hand is the small-scale version of giving a lecture. Using permanent notes you’re left without the context of the text you’ve read from. Are you able to describe it in your own words in a way that makes sense?
#Verify that you know what you think you know
By re-reading a text you think you understand it, and that’s because of the composure effect, by just exposing yourself to it you think you have sufficient knowledge of it. This feeling disappears when you have to try and explain to someone else about what you’ve learned. It doesn’t feel good but rephrasing it in your own words so you can explain it to someone else is the only way to verify you are truly understanding.
#Storage for the brain
The brain does not store information objectively. You reinvent and rewrite it every time you try to retrieve it. The brain cannot help to see patterns and meaning everywhere. It recalls events that never happened. It completes incomplete images. Remember that the brain is a “machine for jumping to conclusions”.
#Real thinking requires some form of externalization
The thinking happens in the writing, the work happens in the writing. It’s impossible to think systematically without writing. The connections need to be fixed externally to give meaning and continuity for further thinking.
#Environmental cues for learning
Accidental cues get attached to information when we learn it in a particular environment. This means it could be hard to remember something outside the classroom if that was the place we learned it. We can’t rely on environmental cues if we want to retrieve the information outside this context. It is better to connect a piece of information to as many meaningful contexts as possible. And this is what we do when connecting our notes in the slip-box with other notes.
#Meaning is not always obvious in the moment
Meaning needs to be explored and that’s why we elaborate on it. And elaborating is nothing else than connecting the information to other information in meaningful ways. The first step is to think about a piece of information so we can write about it. The second step is to think what it means for other contexts as well.
#Focus on understanding and you cannot help but learn
Focus your time and energy on learning without trying to understand, and you will not only not understand, but probably also not learn. Writing notes and sorting them into the slip-box is nothing other than an attempt to understand the wider meaning of something. The slip-box is not sorted by topics, because this is the precondition for actively building connections between notes.
#Mental models
It’s important to have a broad theoretical toolbox to get a good grip on reality. Mental models help you understand how things work: like markets, or human behavior.
- The importance is to have a broad range of mental models in your head.
- Combine them and attach them to your experience to gain a “worldly wisdom”.
- What we learn in practice is always much more thorough and complex than what we could put in words.
#Thinking in abstraction
Abstraction is what allows us to see beyond a certain context to the core concept on what it means for us. Romeo and Juliet is a good story because we can apply the principle to any time and situation. Abstraction allows us to define an overarching theory of a thing. Humans tried long to emulate wing-flapping machines in order to fly. It was only when we let go of the details and discovered that the bending of the wing is the only thing that counts. That’s the abstraction of the theory, and the simplicity of it.
Simple ideas can be stringed together into consistent theories and build up enormous complexity. That simply doesn’t work with complicated ideas. Always think about what is missing when you write down your ideas. What are you not thinking about?
#The enemy of independent thinking is our own inertia
Creativity has more to do with the breaking of old habits than anything else. Our brains just love routines, it modifies our surroundings to make it fit with its expectations. Being able to see what we see instead of what we expect is a skill that needs practice, it’s not a character trait of being “open-minded.”
#Creativity by restriction
By standardizing your system you allow for creativity. Ideas should be captured in the same way, and connected to other notes in the same way. Not having to think about mundane tasks is a good thing for our brains. We need our few mental resources to thinking about the actual questions that matter. Less choice cannot only increase productivity but also give us more freedom, it makes it easier to be in the moment and enjoy it. Think about the way language is limited. The English alphabet contains only 26 characters. But what haven’t we been able to do with that? Poems, theories, love letters, and books. This is possible because of the restriction, not due to the lack of it.
#Brainstorming is not working
Brainstorming is an expression of an outdated fixation on the brain. The brain prioritizes ideas that are easily available in the moment, and this does not equal relevant. We like our first ideas the most and are very reluctant to let go of them. You should study by writing, and collect notes along the way. Then you don’t need brainstorming anymore. Every time we read something we make a decision on what is worth writing down and not. It is less about finding a topic to write about and more about working on the questions we generated while writing. Let questions arise from the slip-box. Evolution works by trial and error, not planning. The same is true for ideas that generate traction in the slip-box, some don’t attract further notes and are forgotten—others become bigger clusters where questions are appearing.
#Gaining knowledge aids creativity
The more you know the more creative the solution. Groundbreaking work are usually not created on a whim. The more time someone devotes to learn about a new subject, the more creative solutions he can come up with. By elaborating on what we encounter, we discover aspects we didn’t know about before, and therefore develop our interest along the way.
#Give up on planning
Be generally skeptic about planning, especially if the focus is on the outcome. All humans suffer from overconfidence bias. It does help to have a realistic idea about the steps that need to be done in order to generate the outcome. This is a roadmap. Focus on the steps. The steps are the in the process by which you can adjust your expectations on a regular basis.
#Entry points in the slip-box
Create a new note with an overview of a topic or subtopic. Then you can link from the index of the slipbox to that note and you have a good entry point. Notes should be linked to other notes and build up relationships. Avoid tags and other hierarchical structure as much as possible.
#Deliberate practice
Learning requires deliberate practice. But how do you apply deliberate practice in your learning? It’s demanding, it requires effort. We have to think to understand. And we need to connect new information with old knowledge to allow for new ideas.
#Experts rely on embodied experience
An expert has a feel for the process. He can draw from the experience he has acquired. Following the rules will never take you beyond the level of a performer. To become a master or professional you need to rely on intuition. And that’s a thing you gain by experience. Gut-feeling is not a mysterious force, but an incorporated history of experience.
#Knowledge is information applied
Knowledge is not collected information. It’s information applied. That’s why the slip-box is a medium you think in, not a place where you store information to think about.