Good, productive writing is based on good note-taking. Getting something that is already written into another written piece is incomparably easier than assembling everything in your mind and then trying to retrieve it from there.

The challenge is to structure one’s workflow in a way that insight and new ideas can become the driving forces that push us forward.

Just amassing notes in one place would not lead to anything other than a mass of notes.

Keep your options open during the writing process rather than limit yourself to your first idea.

Writing these notes is also not the main work. Thinking is. Reading is. Understanding and coming up with ideas is. And this is how it is supposed to be. The notes are just the tangible outcome of it.

And if we have to write anyway, why not use our writing to build up the resources for our future publications?

In truth, it is highly unlikely that every text you read will contain exactly the information you looked for and nothing else. Otherwise, you must have already known what was in there and wouldn’t have had reason to read it in the first place.

Every idea adds to what can become a critical mass that turns a mere collection of ideas into an idea-generator.

Te best ideas are usually the ones we haven’t anticipated anyway.

To have an undistracted brain to think with and a reliable collection of notes to think in is pretty much all we need. Everything else is just clutter.

The criteria for a convincing argument are always the same, regardless of who the author is or the status of the publisher: They have to be coherent and based on facts.

Having a clear, tangible purpose when you attend a lecture, discussion or seminar will make you more engaged and sharpen your focus. You will not waste your time with the attempt to figure out what you “should” learn. Rather, you will try to learn as efficiently as possible so you can quickly get to the point where actual open questions arise, as these are the only questions worth writing about.

In the old system, the question is: Under which topic do I store this note? In the new system, the question is: In which context will I want to stumble upon it again?

The slip-box is the shipping container of the academic world. Instead of having different storage for different ideas, everything goes into the same slip-box and is standardised into the same format.

The first system is designed to find things you deliberately search for, putting all the responsibility on your brain. The slip-box is designed to present you with ideas you have already forgotten, allowing your brain to focus on thinking instead of remembering.

Most ideas will not stand the test of time, while others might become the seed for a major project. Unfortunately, they are not easy to distinguish right away. That is why the threshold to write an idea down has to be as low as possible, but it is equally crucial to elaborate on them within a day or two.

A good indication that a note has been left unprocessed too long is when you no longer understand what you meant or it appears banal.

Every intellectual endeavour starts from an already existing preconception, which then can be transformed during further inquires and can serve as a starting point for following endeavours.

Seeking feedback, not avoiding it, is the first virtue of anyone who wants to learn. Having a learning system in place that enables feedback loops in a practical way is equally important.

To seek as many opportunities to learn as possible is the most reliable long-term growth strategy. And if growth and success are not reasons enough, then maybe the fact that the fear of failure has the ugliest name of all phobias: Kakorrhaphiophobia.

The slip-box is not a collection of notes. Working with it is less about retrieving specific notes and more about being pointed to relevant facts and generating insight by letting ideas mingle.

As we are the authors of all the notes, we learn in lockstep with the slip-box.

“The problem-solving behavior of eminent scientists can alternate between extraordinary levels of focus on specific concepts and playful exploration of ideas. This suggests that successful problem solving may be a function of flexible strategy application in relation to task demands.” (Vartanian 2009, 57)

The widespread praise for planning rests on the misconception that a process like writing an academic text, which is highly dependent on cognition and thinking, can rely on conscious decision-making alone. But academic writing is an art, as well, which means it is something we can become better at with experience and deliberate practice.

Attention is not our only limited resource. Our short-term memory is also limited. We need strategies not to waste its capacity with thoughts we can better delegate to an external system.

the Zeigarnik effect: Open tasks tend to occupy our short-term memory–until they are done.

To get a good paper written, you only have to rewrite a good draft; to get a good draft written, you only have to turn a series of notes into a continuous text. And as a series of notes is just the rearrangement of notes you already have in your slip-box.

Drawing from the slip-box to develop a draft is more like a dialogue with it than a mechanical act.

Sometimes it is necessary to slowly work our way through a difficult text and sometimes it is enough to reduce a whole book to a single sentence. The only thing that matters is that these notes provide the best possible support for the next step, the writing of the actual slip-box notes.

Without a clear purpose for the notes, taking them will feel more like a chore than an important step within a bigger project.

But whether you write them by hand or not, keep in mind that it is all about the essence, the understanding and preparation for the next step–the transferring of ideas into the context of your own lines of thoughts in the slip-box.

Confirmation bias is tackled here in two steps: First, by turning the whole writing process on its head, and secondly, by changing the incentives from finding confirming facts to an indiscriminate gathering of any relevant information regardless of what argument it will support.

This is a good rule of thumb: If insight becomes a threat to your academic or writing success, you are doing it wrong.

conclusions are to be drawn from that. The slip-box forces us to be selective in reading and note-taking, but the only criterion is the question of whether something adds to a discussion in the slip-box. The only thing that matters is that it connects or is open to connections.

Extracting the gist of a text or an idea and giving an account in writing is for academics what daily practice on the piano is for pianists: The more often we do it and the more focused we are, the more virtuous we become.

With practice comes the ability to find the right words to express something in the best possible way, which means in a simple, but not simplified way.

The most important advantage of writing is that it helps us to confront ourselves when we do not understand something as well as we would like to believe.

Reading, especially rereading, can easily fool us into believing we understand a text. Rereading is especially dangerous because of the mere-exposure effect: The moment we become familiar with something, we start believing we also understand it. On top of that, we also tend to like it more

This, again, is deliberate practice. Now we are faced with a clear choice: We have to choose between feeling smarter or becoming smarter. And while writing down an idea feels like a detour, extra time spent, not writing it down is the real waste of time, as it renders most of what we read as ineffectual.

Experienced academic readers usually read a text with questions in mind and try to relate it to other possible approaches, while inexperienced readers tend to adopt the question of a text and the frames of the argument and take it as a given. What good readers can do is spot the limitations of a particular approach and see what is not mentioned in the text.

Putting notes into the slip-box, however, is like investing and reaping the rewards of compounded interest

You could therefore measure your daily productivity by the number of notes written.

The brain alone is too eager to make us feel good–even if it is by politely ignoring inconsistencies in our thinking. Only in the written form can an argument be looked at with a certain distance–literally.

“Notes on paper, or on a computer screen […] do not make contemporary physics or other kinds of intellectual endeavour easier, they make it possible”

What does help for true, useful learning is to connect a piece of information to as many meaningful contexts as possible, which is what we do when we connect our notes in the slip-box with other notes. Making these connections deliberately means building up a self-supporting network of interconnected ideas and facts that work reciprocally as cues for each other.

The first step of elaboration is to think enough about a piece of information so we are able to write about it. The second step is to think about what it means for other contexts as well.

As an extension of our own memory, the slip-box is the medium we think in, not something we think about.

The way people choose their keywords shows clearly if they think like an archivist or a writer. Do they wonder where to store a note or how to retrieve it? The archivist asks: Which keyword is the most fitting? A writer asks: In which circumstances will I want to stumble upon this note, even if I forget about it? It is a crucial difference.

The Zettelkasten does make suggestions based on existing keywords and scans for keywords in the text you wrote. But it makes sense to see these suggestions more as a warning sign than an invitation to use them: these are the most obvious ideas and probably not the best ones.

The slip-box is like a well-informed but down-to-earth communication partner who keeps us grounded. If we try to feed it some lofty ideas, it will force us to check first: What is the reference? How does that connect to the facts and the ideas you already have

Having the same thought twice or mistaking another person’s idea with our own is far from unusual. Unfortunately, most people never notice this humbling fact because they have no system that confronts them with already thought thoughts

He advocates looking out for the most powerful concepts in every discipline and to try to understand them so thoroughly that they become part of our thinking. The moment one starts to combine these mental models and attach one’s experiences to them, one cannot help but gain what he calls “worldly wisdom.”

It is much better to learn from the experiences of others–especially when this experience is reflected on and turned into versatile “mental models” that can be used in different situations.

intuition is not the opposition to rationality and knowledge, it is rather the incorporated, practical side of our intellectual endeavours, the sedimented experience on which we build our conscious, explicit knowledge

Creativity cannot be taught like a rule or approached like a plan. But we can make sure that our working environment allows us to be creative with ideas.

The real enemy of independent thinking is not an external authority, but our own inertia. The ability to generate new ideas has more to do with breaking with old habits of thinking than with coming up with as many ideas as possible.

Sometimes, it is more important to rediscover the problems for which we already have a solution than to think solely about the problems that are present to us.

Making things more complicated than they are can be a way to avoid the underlying complexity of simple ideas.

It is so much easier to see what worked than to predict what might work.

It is the one decision in the beginning, to make writing the mean and the end of the whole intellectual endeavour, that changed the role of topic-finding completely.

The risk of losing interest in what we do is high when we decide upfront on a long-term project without much clue about what to expect.