#Stay smart notes how to

There may be more succinct introductions to zettelkasten online, but you’ll be hard pressed to find a more persuasive advocate than Ahrens. Fortunately, Ahrens’ book requires a smaller investment: it’s both short and accessible. But be warned: to reap the benefits of the method requires a significant investment in time and effort. If you’ve ever been stymied by “writer’s block,” zettelkasten might be your antidote. Since Ahrens views thinking as writing, it's effectively a writing system as well.

#Stay smart notes how to

On the face of it, How to Take Smart Notes is a book about taking notes (thrilling topic for most people, I’m sure!), but really it’s about a specific approach to thinking-a kind of thinking that occurs both externally on paper and internally in the mind. At this point, the author assures us, it is a relatively straight-forward process to transition from notes to draft manuscript to publication. Over time, the practice should result in dense network of interlinked ideas. The goal is to create a level of atomicity and abstraction that encourages connection and exploration with other ideas recorded in the note-taking system. Keywords, cross-references and index notes (notes that serve as entry-points to clusters of related ideas) can be used to link notes that are related by topic, category or idea. Instead, notes are commingled in a single repository with your other notes. Permanent notes are not organized via a top-down approach (such storing notes in category-specific silos).

A key feature of the system is that permanent notes are limited to a single idea per index card. These temporary notes are carefully considered: if the temporary note is deemed sufficiently interesting it is rewritten-with future utility and retrieval in mind-and archived in the zettelkasten as a permanent note (temporary notes that don’t warrant saving are discarded). First, the practitioner generates temporary notes while thinking, learning, and reading. Ahrens describes the process in detail in Chapter 2. The zettelkasten method is relatively straight-forward. Zettelkasten is designed for the capture, processing, and publication of ideas. Zettelkasten shares some qualities of the GTD methodology (particularly where it comes to offloading or freeing up mental capacity by recording important information), but the target audience for the book is the academic researcher, doctoral student and non-fiction writer. Mind you, the zettelkasten is not a productivity system in the way that David Allen’s Getting Things Done system is. It provides a way of saving ideas by writing them down as notes, creating connections between those ideas, and using your accumulated notes to write productively (articles, dissertations, books, etc.). Zettelkasten is a simple but powerful way of recording, organizing and generating insights from what we read and learn. This book is a life-raft in a sea of information and an urgent invitation to actively shape the digital world in which we want to live.How to Take Smart Notes by Sönke Ahrens (2017) is a book that lays out the rationale and the methods behind the zettelkasten note-taking system (also referred to as the “slip box” method). Humans are the greatest source of uncertainty in these situations and Gigerenzer shows how, when people are involved, trust in complex algorithms can lead to illusions of certainty that become a recipe for disaster.įilled with practical examples and cutting-edge research, How to Stay Smart in a Smart World examines the growing role of AI at all levels of daily life with refreshing clarity.

Do algorithms really make better decisions than humans?Ĭan we stay in control in an increasingly automated world?ĭrawing on decades of research into decision making under uncertainty, Gerd Gigerenzer makes a compelling case for the enduring importance of human discernment in an automated world that we are told can - and will - replace our efforts.įrom dating apps and self-driving cars to facial recognition and the justice system, the increasing presence of AI has been widely championed - but there are limitations and risks too.