📒 Summary + Reflections

Introduction

Everybody writes- Writing is an integral part of our life. Human beings are knowledge workers in one way or the other-Students, academia, author, or a professional. Yet despite being so essential we find it hard to write & complete/ submit an academy paper/report. Part of the problem is that we are made to believe that writing starts with a blank page & that “writing has to be difficult”. What such belief leads to in most cases is deadline panic & to a state of burden in bringing our ideas into a page from scratch.

So what is the solution & why hasn’t much thought been given to this issue? Though it is central to learning, research & intellectual activities, much thought has not been given to “The art of daily note-taking”. Writing is not what follows research or learning, rather it’s the medium of all this work. However just as like breathing-which is vital for our life, but we do it constantly, it escapes our attention. A good note-taking habit solves the problem of facing a blank page. Most self-help books on writing usually discuss either the psychology of getting the writing done productively or the technicalities of writing. They don’t offer much help in innovating the note-taking habit. This book is the gap between the two – “ This book aims to fill this gap by showing you how to efficiently turn your thoughts and discoveries into convincing written pieces and build up a treasure of smart and interconnected notes along the way.”

1. The Concept & the Genius behind it.

The book introduces the story of Mr. Niklas Luhmann who worked at the German administration office in the 1960s & went on to become the most productive & revered social scientists of 20th century. He was a passionate reader, he spent his leisure time reading philosophy, organization theory & sociology & took notes on them. But what’s so special about it? Well, Luhmann had neither a doctorate nor a sociology degree, but his notes took him to become a sociology professor at Bielefeld – a position he held until his death. What he did was he collected some of his notes into a paper and presented it to an influential German sociologist. Impressed, the sociologist invited him to become a professor of sociology where he was asked to present what his research project would be. His reply: “My project: theory of society. Duration: 30 years. Costs: zero.” In 1997, 29 and a half years later, he completed the final two-volume chapter of his seminal work, The Society of Society. It changed the field of sociology. Moreover, he went to publish around 70 books and more than 400 articles before his death. Well, how did he achieve that? We hereby introduce his Zettelkasten (The slip box) & his note-taking.

2. Slip Box & overarching workflow

Many people considered Luhmann a genius. But after doing extensive research, sociologist Johannesburg Schmidt found out that Luhmann’s secret to productivity was his unique working technique. Luhmann’s himself remarked, “I, of course, do not think everything by myself. It happens mainly within the slip box”.

Luhmann wasn’t impressed with the usual note-taking habit, practiced by most people; ie highlighting, commenting on margins of text, or collecting topic-wise handwritten notes. He realized that these notes were not leading anywhere. Hence he decided to take notes on small pieces of paper & collected all of them in one place: the slip-box.

Just amassing notes in one place would not lead to anything other than a mass of notes. But he collected his notes in his slip-box in such a way that the collection became much more than the sum of its parts. His slip-box became his dialogue partner, main idea generator and productivity engine. It helped him to structure and develop his thoughts. And it was fun to work with – because it worked.

Luhmann had two slip-boxes. One was for collecting references & his brief notes on the connection of the literature- This is called a Bibliographical slip-box – “ Whenever he read something, he would write the bibliographic information on one side of a card and make brief notes about the content on the other side (Schmidt 2013, 170). The other, his main slip-box, was for storing notes and ideas. His slip-boxes were made of wood, and he wrote his notes on index cards.

Luhmann didn’t file his notes by topics. Rather, he used an abstract numbering system. Each note had a unique identifier made up of numbers and letters. When he was adding a new note behind another, let’s say a note numbered 223, he’d number the new one 224. If 224 already existed, then the new one would instead be numbered 223a, and so on. If necessary, he alternated between numbers and letters, branching out as his thoughts required.

3 – How it works?

“Each step is straightforward and well-defined: (1) assemble notes and bring them into order, (2) turn these notes into a draft, (3) review it and you’re done. “

• 1. Make fleeting notes. Always have a Quick Capture inbox where you can just chuck stuff and worry about processing it later.
• 2. Make literature notes. Whenever you read something (and by extension, watch and listen to something), make notes about the content. Write down: (a) what you don’t want to forget, (b) what you might use later, and (c) use your own words. Keep it short, be extremely selective. Be even more selective about quotes. The idea is not to fall into the collection fallacy, but to develop a mind map of ideas, arguments & discussions.
• 3. Make permanent notes. Go through your inbox once a day ideally, and think about how these notes relate to your own stuff (research, thinking, interests). Don’t just collect ideas. Develop ideas, arguments, and discussions. Does the new information contradict, correct, support or add to what you already have (in your slip-box or your mind)? Can you combine ideas to generate something new? What questions are triggered by them?
  • Write exactly one note for each idea, and write as if you’re writing for someone else. Use full sentences, disclose your sources, make references, and try to be as precise, clear, and brief as possible. Throw away fleeting notes from step 1, but the literature notes from step 2 into your reference system. You can forget about them now. All that matters is going into the slip box.
• 4. Now, add your permanent notes to the slip-box by
  • (a) Filing each behind one/more related notes.
  • (b) Adding links to related notes
  • (c) Make sure you can find this later – either link to it from your index or make a link to it on a ‘Topic’ note.
• 5. Develop your topics, questions, and research projects bottom-up from within the system.
  • Do not brainstorm for a topic. Look into the slip box to see where chains or notes/ideas have been built up into clusters.
  • The more you become interested in something, the more you’ll think and read about it, the more notes you’ll collect, and the more likely you’ll generate questions from it.
• 6. Decide on a topic to write about
• 7. Turn your notes into a rough draft. Don’t just copy them. Translate them into something coherent and embed them into the context of your argument while you build your argument out of the notes at the same time.
• 8. Edit and proofread the manuscript

4 – Tools & Techniques

• Tools are helpful but only when it serves the purpose. Though writing is not a complicated process, we sometimes fall into the trap of collecting, testing & trying a variety of tools & techniques with an intention of making thing easier or more productive, but ends up overwhelmed, distracted & writing undone.
• The idea is to avoid complicating the process, rather Keep things simple. The workflow is important, not the app. That’s why a slip box is crucial. Imagine you have read 100s of materials & highlighted or commented upon important sentences or concepts, now how do make use of these highlights?. If you stumble upon the idea to write, will you go through all materials to find the right highlighted sentence? How do you establish new connections with existing knowledge? Slip-box solves this problem by acting as an external scaffold in the overarching workflow to think in & store information- a task which our brains are not very good at.
• 4 Essential tools
  1. Something to capture your thoughts & ideas instantaneously could be a pocket notebook or an app on your phone or iPad. I use the “drafts” app for this purpose.
  2. A reference system to collect references & your literature notes. I manage this in a note-taking app called obsidian which has a Zotero plugin.
  3. Slip Box: Mr. Luhmann used the pen & paper version in a wooden box, but that’s old-fashioned now as we have software like Obsidian, Roam Research, REM Note, etc that allows setting links & tagging across the notes.
  4. An editor likes Zotero.