How to Take Smart Notes

How to Take Smart Notes is the perfect guide on how to improve your writing, reading, and learning techniques using simple yet little-known tips-and-tricks that you can implement right away to develop these skills.

Now that we acknowledged the importance of taking notes, it’s time to dive a little bit deeper into this subject. Let’s take the example of Luhmann, a sociology professor at University of Bielefeld, author of nearly 60 books and hundreds of articles.

The first type of notes he took were fleeting notes. These don’t go into a slip-box, as they’re used to uncover ideas and thoughts. Instead, it’s better to take them in a notebook or a piece of paper to which you can later come back.

Then, there are literature notes. As the name suggests, these are memos of the things you read, the reference details, all summed up in your own words so that once you come back to them, you understand what they mean to you.

Thirdly, we’ve got permanent notes. These come from your fleeting and literature notes. Use them to create new ideas, back them up using arguments, create a space for thinking, debating, and discovering multiple perspectives. These notes foster a creative thinking process.

After making permanent notes, store them in a safe place, and throw away your fleeting ones. Create a system to store your notes by importance and priority. Keywords pins or a digital system can help you store them accurately and flexibly.

By now, you should be accustomed to the term slip-box. It’s a storage box used to keep all your valuable notes in an organized way. The author suggests that we keep two of these boxes nearby, each corresponding to a different purpose.

The first slip-box should be for collecting references and book content and the notes that go with them. The second box is for storing notes on ideas and thoughts. This is considered to be the main box and the most valuable one.

But how do these slip-boxes really help? For example, let’s go back to the situation where you can’t seem to get the hang of a paper you have to write. Having ready-to-go arguments, quotes, and ideas written down will help you break the ice and create a great piece.

However, you need to take the time to prepare these slip-boxes and gather valuable information. Then, just use that knowledge base to kick start your research. Order your information properly and organize it by relevance, topics, age, and other criteria.

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