That’s right: you should be able to communicate with your system of notes. Create Notes to Converse With image courtesy hawkexpress on flickr So here’s the next step: if you take notes and write a lot, it’s only rational to do it in a way that trains your system of notes to become a partner in communication with you. 3īut chances are you already do take notes.
So you really should write down what you think if you want to improve your thinking. Thoughts and put them in a logical order. Happenings in our mind holes, but writing forces us to crystalize those This conquers hindsight bias which makes you change your mind after the fact, pretending you knew it all along.
Thoughts written down can be retrieved as-is. Writing things down improves memorization. Writing prevents you from jumping around in your mind, forgetting details, but rather to think consistently: “how is my point being developed?”. Writing improves your ability to think coherently: “what’s my point?” Whatever the answer, you’ll be able to stick to it. An Empirical Account, and the book by Steffens (pp 20–21, see references). See Luhmann, Communication with Slip Boxes. Whenever you want to think to some purpose, you should consider writing it down. Improve Thinking by Writing: Why You Should Take Notes Let’s start with the thought before we get to the note. In upcoming posts on this topic, I’ll show you a digital note taking approach which adheres to these principles. The distinction between the two doesn’t matter, yet. The principles I lay out in this post apply to both digital and paper-based notes. As holds true for every communication, you’ll learn something new when you interact with your Zettelkasten. You can interact with and communicate with your system of notes. 2ĭoing it right, you can move way beyond input/output-based note-taking. 1 German sociologist Niklas Luhmann’s productivity was increased to epic proportions (70 books, 400 articles) with the help of his Zettelkasten. Vladimir Nabokov, Jean Paul and Arno Schmidt wrote their novels’ drafts on index cards. Storing stuff in small-ish notes is the fundamental principle in creating a device called “Zettelkasten” (German for “slip box”, or “card index”). A suitable metaphor is “extended mind” or “secondary memory”. This is basic input/output-style information recording. On paper, it works with index cards onto which you write citations and notes. There’s a scholarly technique to organize personal knowledge that has been known about for ages. Notes can and should stimulate new associations and foster your creativity just like a good talk does. You can emulate communication processes with your own notes if you structure them in a certain manner. Notes can help you with that if you adhere to a few basic principles. 
This suits academics, authors and writers, journalists, but also programmers who organize their knowledge.Īssuming you’re a writer or a thinker, why should you care about the way you take notes? If you want to think creatively and write original articles and books, you need to form associations in your mind effectively. Who are invested in so-called knowledge work and who connect ideas. : People who want to improve their writing and coherent thinking, Create a Zettelkasten for your Notes to Improve Thinking and Writing
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