I started How to Take Smart Notes (before writing this post) and have read/watched several supporting texts. I don’t get it. It’s an addressing system. It doesn’t say anything about what to write down or what things to link. Does this change further in the book? Is it one of those things where knowing a mechanical step opens new doors for certain people?
The book as well as the Zettelkasten method in itself doesn’t directly solve the problems you stated in your article. It isn’t a system that tells you what to extract out of the books you read. There’s a lot of discussion of what to extract and how deep to extract in forums, and the tequnique itself doesn’t prescribe anything.
The main problem the ZK tries to solve isn’t curation of what to extract from your sources. Instead, it tries to solve the problem of information siloing that happens when you take classic notes about books that are separate from each other. Later, the ZK becomes an Ideation tool—with enough notes in the system, you can work out new knowledge and ideas just be connecting things that weren’t connected before.
It’s not about mechanical steps, either. It’s a change in how to record and organize notes. Instead of one book > one long note about the book, you ‘atomize’ knowledge into many smaller notes. Each of these notes are like mini-Wikipedia articles about a specific thing. Than you re-connect the notes, like in the world wide web. One book leads to many notes, and one note can have references to many books.
Examples of note titles, just to give you an idea: ‘Reading as forgetting’; ‘the brain isn’t for retention’; ‘information bottleneck of the brain is an advantage’; ‘GTD: Getting it out of the head as central paradigm’; ‘deep learning in AI’. Those are all closely interconnected but have totally different sources. Each of those notes is between 100-300 words long.
A few observations of mine on what to take notes on:
The overarching structure of the book, as well as central ideas. I often extract that via reading techniques (reading TOC and end/summary chapters), skimming) or by reading a summery of the book.
Everything that solves a current problem I have (especially when I read a book for a specific reason, like learning)
Everything that connects to already existing notes (often, this is just a new reference to an old note).
Everything that resonates with me or makes me excited.
Sometimes, I have 4-5 new ZK notes for a 300 page book. Sometimes I make 5 new ZK notes for one page alone. The more valuable the source, the more time I will spend with it.
One interesting thing about the ZK principle is that it’s additive. If I read a few books about a subject, I don’t need to note down the basics that I read again and again. Instead, I can focus on adding the nuances and Individualities that each book adds on top of the basics. This way, there are note trails that are almost like discussions: ‘Author A says this is so-and-so’, ‘Author B says this is this-and-that’, ‘comparison Author A, Author B’, and so on. Very satisfying, and a huge boon of the technique.
I’ve read this book and tried to read it again as I thought I was missing something, but my impression of the book is that it’s somewhat sloppy, a bit preachy of ZK being a cure-all, makes much more complicated a very simple system to the point of obfuscating the main point.
To my understanding, all the Zettlekasten is is having notes with:
1. individual names (if you look for one name, one note comes up), 2. creating links between associated ideas (if you think, “wow, this reminds me of...” you may forget that connection later, so you link them), and 3. having indexes to point you to good starting points when you develop strings of thoughts / notes.
The indexes are the most complicated part. It’s just that you don’t file notes under a single folder (as it separates from the ideas that aren’t related, but also the ones that are) so instead you semantically connect ideas on an object level basis. In order to get a general sense of the full thought you developed (“when I was researching about x, what were the main conclusions I came to?”) you can look at these indexes for a nice directory of your past thoughts.
I started How to Take Smart Notes (before writing this post) and have read/watched several supporting texts. I don’t get it. It’s an addressing system. It doesn’t say anything about what to write down or what things to link. Does this change further in the book? Is it one of those things where knowing a mechanical step opens new doors for certain people?
The book as well as the Zettelkasten method in itself doesn’t directly solve the problems you stated in your article. It isn’t a system that tells you what to extract out of the books you read. There’s a lot of discussion of what to extract and how deep to extract in forums, and the tequnique itself doesn’t prescribe anything.
The main problem the ZK tries to solve isn’t curation of what to extract from your sources. Instead, it tries to solve the problem of information siloing that happens when you take classic notes about books that are separate from each other. Later, the ZK becomes an Ideation tool—with enough notes in the system, you can work out new knowledge and ideas just be connecting things that weren’t connected before.
It’s not about mechanical steps, either. It’s a change in how to record and organize notes. Instead of one book > one long note about the book, you ‘atomize’ knowledge into many smaller notes. Each of these notes are like mini-Wikipedia articles about a specific thing. Than you re-connect the notes, like in the world wide web. One book leads to many notes, and one note can have references to many books.
Examples of note titles, just to give you an idea: ‘Reading as forgetting’; ‘the brain isn’t for retention’; ‘information bottleneck of the brain is an advantage’; ‘GTD: Getting it out of the head as central paradigm’; ‘deep learning in AI’. Those are all closely interconnected but have totally different sources. Each of those notes is between 100-300 words long.
A few observations of mine on what to take notes on:
The overarching structure of the book, as well as central ideas. I often extract that via reading techniques (reading TOC and end/summary chapters), skimming) or by reading a summery of the book.
Everything that solves a current problem I have (especially when I read a book for a specific reason, like learning)
Everything that connects to already existing notes (often, this is just a new reference to an old note).
Everything that resonates with me or makes me excited.
Sometimes, I have 4-5 new ZK notes for a 300 page book. Sometimes I make 5 new ZK notes for one page alone. The more valuable the source, the more time I will spend with it.
One interesting thing about the ZK principle is that it’s additive. If I read a few books about a subject, I don’t need to note down the basics that I read again and again. Instead, I can focus on adding the nuances and Individualities that each book adds on top of the basics. This way, there are note trails that are almost like discussions: ‘Author A says this is so-and-so’, ‘Author B says this is this-and-that’, ‘comparison Author A, Author B’, and so on. Very satisfying, and a huge boon of the technique.
I’ve read this book and tried to read it again as I thought I was missing something, but my impression of the book is that it’s somewhat sloppy, a bit preachy of ZK being a cure-all, makes much more complicated a very simple system to the point of obfuscating the main point.
To my understanding, all the Zettlekasten is is having notes with:
1. individual names (if you look for one name, one note comes up),
2. creating links between associated ideas (if you think, “wow, this reminds me of...” you may forget that connection later, so you link them), and
3. having indexes to point you to good starting points when you develop strings of thoughts / notes.
The indexes are the most complicated part. It’s just that you don’t file notes under a single folder (as it separates from the ideas that aren’t related, but also the ones that are) so instead you semantically connect ideas on an object level basis. In order to get a general sense of the full thought you developed (“when I was researching about x, what were the main conclusions I came to?”) you can look at these indexes for a nice directory of your past thoughts.