Sönke
Ahrens

How
to Take Smart Notes

One Simple Technique to Boost Writing,

Learning and Thinking – for Students, Academics
and Nonfiction Book Writers.

2017

Copyright © 2017 Sönke Ahrens

All rights reserved.

takesmartnotes.com

Edited by Kathy Drouin-Keith

Cover Design by Oliver Ferreira

“Notes on paper, or on a computer screen [...]
do not make contemporary physics or other kinds of intellectual endeavor
easier, they make it possible … no matter how internal processes are
implemented [...you..] need to understand the extent to which the mind is
reliant upon external scaffolding.” (Levy 2011, 270)

“One
cannot think without writing.” (Luhmann 1992, 53)

Table of
Contents

Introduction

1     Everything You Need to Know

2     Everything You Need to Do

3     Everything You Need to Have

4     A Few Things to Keep in Mind

The
Four Underlying Principles

5     Writing Is the Only Thing That
Matters

6     Simplicity Is Paramount

7     Nobody Ever Starts From Scratch

8     Let the Work Carry You Forward

The
Six Steps to Successful Writing

9     Separate and Interlocking Tasks

10       Read for Understanding

11       Take Smart Notes

12       Develop Ideas

13       Share Your Insight

14       Make It a Habit

Afterword

Bibliography

Index

Introduction

Everybody writes. Especially in academia. Students write and professors
write. And nonfiction writers, who are the third group of people this book is
aiming to help, obviously write as well. And writing doesn’t necessarily mean
papers, articles or books, but everyday, basic writing. We write when we
need to remember something, be it an idea, a quote or the outcome of a study.
We write when we want to organise our thoughts and when we want to exchange
ideas with others. Students write when they take an exam, but the first thing
they do to prepare even for an oral examination is to grab pen and paper. We
write down not only those things we fear we won’t remember otherwise, but also
the very things we try to memorise. Every intellectual endeavour starts with a
note.

Writing
plays such a central role in learning, studying and research that it is
surprising how little we think about it. If writing is discussed, the focus
lies almost always on the few exceptional moments where we write a lengthy
piece, a book, an article or, as students, the essays and theses we have to
hand in. At first glance, that makes sense: these are the tasks that cause the
most anxiety and with which we struggle the longest. Consequently, these
“written pieces” are also what most self-help books for academics or study
guides focus on, but very few give guidance for the everyday note-taking that
takes up the biggest chunk of our writing.

The
available books fall roughly into two categories. The first teaches the formal
requirements: style, structure or how to quote correctly. And then there are
the psychological ones, which teach you how to get it done without mental
breakdowns and before your supervisor or publisher starts refusing to move the
deadline once more. What they all have in common, though, is that they start
with a blank screen or sheet of paper.[1]
But by doing this, they ignore the main part, namely note-taking, failing to
understand that improving the organisation of all writing makes a
difference. They seem to forget that the process of writing starts much, much
earlier than that blank screen and that the actual writing down of the argument
is the smallest part of its development. 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. You can use this pool of notes not only to make writing
easier and more fun for yourself, but also to learn for the long run and
generate new ideas. But most of all, you can write every day in a way that
brings your projects forward.

Writing
is not what follows research, learning or studying, it is the medium of
all this work. And maybe that is the reason why we rarely think about this
writing, the everyday writing, the note-taking and draft-making. Like
breathing, it is vital to what we do, but because we do it constantly, it
escapes our attention. But while even the best breathing technique would
probably not make much of a difference to our writing, any improvement in the
way we organise the everyday writing, how we take notes of what we encounter
and what we do with them, will make all the difference for the moment we do
face the blank page/screen – or rather not, as those who take smart
notes will never have the problem of a blank screen again.

There
is another reason that note-taking flies mostly under the radar: We don’t
experience any immediate negative feedback if we do it badly. But without an
immediate experience of failure, there is also not much demand for help. And
the publishing market working how it works, there is not much help in supply
for this lack of demand either. It is the panic in front of the blank screen
that brings students and academic writers to turn to the bookshelves full of
self-help books on writing, a market publishers meet in droves by focusing on
how to deal with this horse-has-already-left-the-barn situation. If we take
notes unsystematically, inefficiently or simply wrong, we might not even
realise it until we are in the midst of a deadline panic and wonder why there
always seem to be a few who get a lot of good writing done and still have time
for a coffee every time we ask them. And even then, it is more likely that some
form of rationalization will cloud the view of the actual reason, which is most
likely the difference between good and bad note-taking. “Some people are just
like that,” “writing has to be difficult,” “the struggle is part of the deal”
are just a few of the mantras that keep too many from inquiring what exactly
distinguishes successful writing strategies from less successful ones.

The
right question is: What can we do differently in the weeks, months or even
years before we face the blank page that will get us into the best
possible position to write a great paper easily? Very few people struggle with
their papers because they don’t know how to cite correctly or because they
suffer from a psychological issue that keeps them from writing. Few struggle to
text their friends or write emails. The rules of citation can be looked up and
there is no way that there are as many mental issues as papers postponed. Most
people struggle for much more mundane reasons, and one is the myth of the blank
page itself. They struggle because they believe, as they are made to
believe, that writing starts with a blank page. If you believe that you have
indeed nothing at hand to fill it, you have a very good reason to panic. Just
having it all in your head is not enough, as getting it down on paper is the
hard bit. That is why 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.

To
sum it up: The quality of a paper and the ease with which it is written depends
more than anything on what you have done in writing before you even made a
decision on the topic. But if that is true (and I wholeheartedly believe it
is), and the key to successful writing lies in the preparation, it also means
that the vast majority of self-help books and study guides can only help you to
close the barn door correctly and according to official rules – not just a
moment, but many months after the horse has already escaped.

With
that in mind, it is not surprising that the single most important indicator of
academic success is not to be found in people’s heads, but in the way they do
their everyday work. In fact, there is no measurable correlation between a high
IQ and academic success – at least not north of 120. Yes, a certain
intellectual capacity helps to get into academia, and if you struggle severely
with an IQ test, it is likely that you will struggle to solve academic
problems, too. But once you are in, a superior IQ will neither help you to
distinguish yourself nor protect you from failure. What does make a
significant difference along the whole intelligence spectrum is something else:
how much self-discipline or self-control one uses to approach the tasks at hand
(Duckworth and Seligman, 2005; Tangney, Baumeister, and Boone, 2004).

It
is not so important who you are, but what you do. Doing the work required and
doing it in a smart way leads, somehow unsurprisingly, to success. At first
glance, this is both good and bad news. The good news is that we wouldn’t be
able to do much about our IQ anyway, while it seems to be within our control to
have more self-discipline with a little bit of willpower. The bad news is that
we do not have this kind of control over ourselves. Self-discipline or
self-control is not that easy to achieve with willpower alone. Willpower is, as
far as we know today,[2]
a limited resource that depletes quickly and is also not that much up for
improvement over the long term (Baumeister, Bratslavsky, Muraven, and Tice,
1998; Muraven, Tice, and Baumeister, 1998; Schmeichel, Vohs, and Baumeister,
2003; Moller, 2006). And who would want to flog oneself to work, anyway?

Luckily,
this is not the whole story. We know today that self-control and
self-discipline have much more to do with our environment than with
ourselves (cf. Thaler, 2015, ch. 2) – and the environment can be changed.
Nobody needs willpower not to eat a chocolate bar when there isn’t one around.
And nobody needs willpower to do something they wanted to do anyway. Every task
that is interesting, meaningful and well-defined will be done, because there is
no conflict between long- and short-term interests. Having a meaningful and
well-defined task beats willpower every time. Not having willpower, but not
having to use willpower indicates that you set yourself up for success.
This is where the organisation of writing and note-taking comes into play.

1  Everything
You Need to Know

Until now, writing and note-taking techniques were usually taught
without much regard to the overarching workflow. This book aims to change that.
It will present you with the tools of note-taking that turned the son of a
brewer into one of the most productive and revered social scientists of the 20th
century. But moreover, it describes how he implemented them into his workflow
so he could honestly say: “I never force myself to do anything I don’t feel
like. Whenever I am stuck, I do something else.” A good structure allows you to
do that, to move seamlessly from one task to another – without threatening the
whole arrangement or losing sight of the bigger picture.

A
good structure is something you can trust. It relieves you from the burden of
remembering and keeping track of everything. If you can trust the system, you
can let go of the attempt to hold everything together in your head and
you can start focusing on what is important: The content, the argument and the
ideas. By breaking down the amorphous task of “writing a paper” into small and
clearly separated tasks, you can focus on one thing at a time, complete each in
one go and move on to the next one (Chapter 3.1). A good structure enables flow,
the state in which you get so completely immersed in your work that you lose
track of time and can just keep on going as the work becomes effortless
(Csikszentmihalyi, 1975). Something like that does not happen by chance.

As
students, researchers and nonfiction writers, we have so much more freedom than
others to choose what we want to spend our time on. Still, we often struggle
the most with procrastination and motivation. It is certainly not the lack of
interesting topics, but rather the employment of problematic work routines that
seems to take charge of us instead of allowing us to steer the process in the
right direction. A good, structured workflow puts us back in charge and
increases our freedom to do the right thing at the right time.

Having
a clear structure to work in is completely different from making plans about
something. If you make a plan, you impose a structure on yourself;
it makes you inflexible. To keep going according to plan, you have to push
yourself and employ willpower. This is not only demotivating, but also
unsuitable for an open-ended process like research, thinking or studying in
general, where we have to adjust our next steps with every new insight,
understanding or achievement – which we ideally have on a regular basis and not
just as an exception. Even though planning is often at odds with the very idea
of research and learning, it is the mantra of most study guides and self-help
books on academic writing. How do you plan for insight, which, by definition,
cannot be anticipated? It is a huge misunderstanding that the only alternative
to planning is aimless messing around. 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. We do not want to make ourselves dependent on a plan that is
threatened by the unexpected, like a new idea, discovery – or insight.

Unfortunately,
even universities try to turn students into planners. Sure, planning will get
you through your exams if you stick to them and push through. But it will not
make you an expert in the art of learning/writing/note-taking (there is research
on that: cf. Chapter 1.3). Planners are also unlikely to continue with their
studies after they finish their examinations. They are rather glad it is over.
Experts, on the other hand, would not even consider voluntarily giving up what
has already proved to be rewarding and fun: learning in a way that generates
real insight, is accumulative and sparks new ideas. The fact that you invested
in this book tells me that you would rather be an expert than a planner.

And
if you are a student seeking help with your writing, the chances are that you
already aim high too, because it is usually the best students who struggle the
most. Good students wrestle with their sentences because they care about
finding the right expression. It takes them longer to find a good idea to write
about because they know from experience that the first idea is rarely that
great and good questions do not fall into their laps. They spend more time in
the library to get a better overview of the literature, which leads to more
reading, which means that they have to juggle more information. Having read
more does not automatically mean having more ideas. Especially in the
beginning, it means having fewer ideas to work with, because you know that
others have already thought of most of them.

Good
students also look beyond the obvious. They peek over the fences of their own
disciplines – and once you have done that, you cannot go back and do what
everyone else is doing, even if you now must deal with heterogeneous ideas that
come without a manual on how they might fit together. All that means is that a
system is needed to keep track of the ever-increasing pool of information,
which allows one to combine different ideas in an intelligent way with the aim
of generating new ideas.

Poor
students do not have any of these problems. As long as they stick within the
boundaries of their discipline and read only as much as they are told to (or
less), no serious external system is required and writing can be done by
sticking with the usual formulas of “how to write a scientific paper.” In fact,
poor students often feel more successful (until they are tested),
because they don’t experience much self-doubt. In psychology, this is known as
the Dunning-Kruger effect (Kruger and Dunning, 1999). Poor students lack
insight into their own limitations – as they would have to know about the vast
amount of knowledge out there to be able to see how little they know in
comparison. That means that those who are not very good at something tend to be
overly confident, while those who have made an effort tend to underestimate
their abilities. Poor students also have no trouble finding a question to write
about: they neither lack opinions nor the confidence that they have already
thought them through. They also won’t have trouble finding confirming evidence
in the literature as they usually lack both interest and skill to detect and
think through dis-confirming facts and arguments.

Good
students, on the other hand, constantly raise the bar for themselves as they
focus on what they haven’t learned and mastered yet. This is why high achievers
who have had a taste of the vast amount of knowledge out there are likely to
suffer from what psychologists call imposter syndrome, the feeling that you are
not really up to the job, even though, of all people, they are (Clance and Imes
1978; Brems et al. 1994). This book is for you, the good students, ambitious
academics and curious nonfiction writers who understand that insight doesn’t
come easy and that writing is not only for proclaiming opinions, but the main
tool to achieve insight worth sharing.

1.1
Good Solutions are Simple – and Unexpected

There is no need to build a complex system and there is no need to
reorganise everything you already have. You can start working and developing
ideas immediately by taking smart notes.

Complexity
is an issue, though. Even if you don’t aim to develop a grand theory and just
want to keep track of what you read, organise your notes and develop your
thoughts, you will have to deal with an increasingly complex body of content,
especially because it is not just about collecting thoughts, but about making
connections and sparking new ideas. Most people try to reduce complexity by
separating what they have into smaller stacks, piles or separate folders. They
sort their notes by topics and sub-topics, which makes it look less complex,
but quickly becomes very complicated. Plus, it reduces the likelihood of
building and finding surprising connections between the notes themselves, which
means a trade-off between its usability and usefulness.

Thankfully,
we don’t have to choose between usability and usefulness. Quite the contrary.
The best way to deal with complexity is to keep things as simple as possible
and to follow a few basic principles. The simplicity of the structure allows
complexity to build up where we want it: on the content level. There is quite
extensive empirical and logical research on this phenomenon (for an overview:
cf. Sull and Eisenhardt, 2015). Taking smart notes is as simple as it gets.

Another
item of good news regards the amount of time and effort you have to put into
getting started. Even though you will change considerably the way you read,
take notes and write, there is almost no preparation time needed (except for
understanding the principle and installing one or two free programs). It is not
about redoing what you have done before, but about changing the way of working
from now on. There is really no need to reorganise anything you already have.
Just deal with things differently the moment you have to deal with them anyway.

There
is more good news. There is no need to reinvent the wheel. We only need to
combine two well-known and proven ideas. The first idea lies at the heart of
this book and is the technique of the simple slip-box. I will explain the
principle of this system in the next chapter and show how it can be implemented
in the everyday routines of students, academics or nonfiction writers.
Thankfully, there are digital versions for all major operating systems
available, but if you prefer, you can also use pen and paper. In terms of
productivity and ease, you will still easily surpass those who are taking
not-so-smart notes.

The
second idea is equally important. Even the best tool will not improve your
productivity considerably if you don’t change your daily routines the tool is
embedded in, just as the fastest car won’t help you much if you don’t have
proper roads to drive it on. Like every change in behaviour, a change in
working habits means going through a phase where you are drawn back to your old
ways. The new way of working might feel artificial at first and not necessarily
like what you intuitively would do. That is normal. But as soon as you get used
to taking smart notes, it will feel so much more natural that you will wonder
how you were ever able to get anything done before. Routines require simple,
repeatable tasks that can become automatic and fit together seamlessly (cf.
Mata, Todd, and Lippke, 2010). Only when all the related work becomes part of
an overarching and interlocked process, where all bottlenecks are removed, can
significant change take place (which is why none of the typical “10
mind-blowing tools to improve your productivity” tips you can find all over the
internet will ever be of much help).

The
importance of an overarching workflow is the great insight of David Allen’s
“Getting Things Done” (Allen, 2001). There are few serious knowledge workers
left who haven’t heard of “GTD” and that is for a good reason: It works. The
principle of GTD is to collect everything that needs to be taken care of in one
place and process it in a standardised way. This doesn’t necessarily mean that
we actually do everything we once intended to do, but it forces us to make
clear choices and regularly check if our tasks still fit into the bigger
picture. Only if we know that everything is taken care of, from the important
to the trivial, can we let go and focus on what is right in front of us. Only
if nothing else is lingering in our working memory and taking up valuable
mental resources can we experience what Allen calls a “mind like water” - the
state where we can focus on the work right in front of us without getting
distracted by competing thoughts. The principle is simple but holistic. It is
not a quick fix or a fancy tool. It doesn’t do the work for you. But it does
provide a structure for our everyday work that deals with the fact that most
distractions do not come so much from our environment, but our own minds.

Unfortunately,
David Allen’s technique cannot simply be transferred to the task of insightful
writing. The first reason is that GTD relies on clearly defined objectives,
whereas insight cannot be predetermined by definition. We usually start with
rather vague ideas that are bound to change until they become clearer in the
course of our research (cf. Ahrens, 2014, 134f.). Writing that aims at insight
must therefore be organised in a much more open manner. The other reason is
that GTD requires projects to be broken down into smaller, concrete “next
steps.” Of course, insightful writing or academic work is also done one step at
a time, but these are most often too small to be worth writing down (looking up
a footnote, rereading a chapter, writing a paragraph) or too grand to be
finished in one go. It is also difficult to anticipate which step has to be
taken after the next one. You might notice a footnote, which you check quickly
on. You try to understand a paragraph and need to look up something for
clarification. You make a note, go back to reading and then jump up to write
down a sentence that formed itself in your mind.

Writing
is not a linear process. We constantly have to jump back and forth between
different tasks. It wouldn’t make any sense to micromanage ourselves on that
level. Zooming out to the bigger picture does not really help, either, because
then we have next steps like “writing a page.” That does not really help with
navigating the things you have to do to write a page, often a whole bunch of
other things that can take an hour or a month. One has to navigate mostly by
sight. These are probably the reasons why GTD never really caught on in
academia, although it is very successful in business and has a good reputation
among the self-employed.

What
we can take from Allen as an important insight is that the secret to a
successful organization lies in the holistic perspective. Everything needs to
be taken care of, otherwise the neglected bits will nag us until the
unimportant tasks become urgent. Even the best tools won’t make much of a
difference if they are used in isolation. Only if they are embedded in a
well-conceived working process can the tools play out their strengths. There is
no point in having great tools if they don’t fit together.

When
it comes to writing, everything, from research to proofreading, is closely
connected. All the little steps must be linked in a way that will enable you to
go seamlessly from one task to another, but still be kept separate enough to
enable us to flexibly do what needs to be done in any given situation. And this
is the other insight of David Allen: Only if you can trust your system, only if
you really know that everything will be taken care of, will your brain let go
and let you focus on the task at hand.

That
is why we need a note-taking system that is as comprehensive as GTD, but one
that is suitable for the open-ended process of writing, learning and thinking.
Enter the slip-box.

1.2
The Slip-box

It is the 1960s, somewhere in Germany. Among the staff of a German administration
office is the son of a brewer. His name is Niklas Luhmann. He went to law
school, but he has chosen to be a public servant, as he did not like the idea
of having to work for multiple clients. Fully aware he is also not suited for a
career in administration, as it involves a lot of socializing, he excuses
himself every day after his 9-5 shift and goes home to do what he liked most:
reading and following his diverse interests in philosophy, organizational
theory and sociology.

Whenever
he encountered something remarkable or had a thought about what he read, he
made a note. Now, many people read in the evening and follow their interests,
and some even take notes. But for very few is it the path to something as
extraordinary as Luhmann’s career.

After
collecting notes for a while in the way most people do, commenting in the
margins of a text or collecting handwritten notes by topic, Luhmann realised
his note-taking was not leading anywhere. So he turned note-taking on its head.
Instead of adding notes to existing categories or the respective texts, he
wrote them all on small pieces of paper, put a number in the corner and
collected them in one place: the slip-box.

He
soon developed new categories of these notes. He realised that one idea, one
note was only as valuable as its context, which was not necessarily the context
it was taken from. So he started to think about how one idea could relate and
contribute to different contexts. 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.

And
it led him to enter academia. One day, he put some of these thoughts together
into a manuscript and handed it over to Helmut Schelsky, one of the most
influential sociologists in Germany. Schelsky took it home, read what this
academic outsider had written and contacted Luhmann. He suggested that he
should become a professor of sociology in the newly founded University of
Bielefeld. As attractive and prestigious as this position was, Luhmann wasn’t a
sociologist. He didn’t have the formal qualifications required even to become
an assistant for a sociology professor in Germany. He hadn’t written a
habilitation, the highest academic qualification in many European countries,
which is based on the second book after the doctoral thesis. He had never held
a doctorate or even obtained a sociology degree. Most people would take the
offer as a huge compliment, but point out the impossibility of it and move on.

Not
Luhmann. He turned to his slip-box and with its help he put together a doctoral
thesis and the habilitation thesis in less than a year – while taking
classes in sociology. Shortly after, in 1968, he was chosen to become professor
of sociology at the University of Bielefeld – a position he would hold for the
rest of his life.

In
Germany, a professor traditionally starts with a public lecture presenting his
or her projects, and Luhmann, too, was asked what his main research project
will be. His answer would become famous. He laconically stated: “My project:
theory of society. Duration: 30 years. Costs: zero” (Luhmann, 1997, 11). In
sociology, a “theory of society” is the mother of all projects.

When
he finished the final chapter, almost exactly 29 and a half years later, as a
two-volume book with the title “The Society of Society” (1997), it stirred up
the scientific community.[3]
It was a radical new theory that not only changed sociology, but stirred heated
discussions in philosophy, education, political theory and psychology as well.
Not everyone was able to follow the discussions, though. What he did was
unusually sophisticated, very different and highly complex. The chapters were
published individually, each book discussing one social system. He wrote on law,
politics, economy, communication, art, education, epistemology – and even love.

In
30 years, he published 58 books and hundreds of articles, translations not
included. Many became classics in their respective fields. Even after his
death, about half a dozen more books on diverse subjects like religion,
education or politics were published in his name – based on almost finished
manuscripts lying around in his office. There are more than a few colleagues I
know who would give a lot to be as productive in their whole lifetime as
Luhmann was after his death.

While
some career-oriented academics try to squeeze as many publications out of one
idea as possible, Luhmann seemed to do the opposite. He constantly generated
more ideas than he was able to write down. His texts read as if he is trying to
squeeze as much insight and as many ideas as possible into one publication.

When
he was asked if he missed anything in his life, he famously answered: “If I
want something, it’s more time. The only thing that really is a nuisance is the
lack of time.” (Luhmann, Baecker, and Stanitzek, 1987, 139) And while some
academics let their assistants do the main work or have a team that is writing
the papers to which they add their names, Luhmann rarely had any assistance at all.
The last assistant who worked for him swore blind that the only help he was
able to give was to spot a few typos in his manuscripts here and there.
Luhmann’s only real help was a housekeeper who cooked for him and his children
during the week, not that extraordinary considering he had to raise three
children on his own after his wife died early. Five warm meals a week of course
do not explain the production of roughly 60 influential books and countless
articles.

After
doing extensive research on Luhmann’s workflow, the German sociologist Johannes
F.K. Schmidt concluded his productivity could only be explained by his unique
working technique (Schmidt 2013, 168). That technique has never been a secret –
Luhmann was always open about it. He regularly mentioned the slip-box as the
reason for his productivity. From as early as 1985, his standard answer to the
question of how anyone could be so productive was: “I, of course, do not think
everything by myself. It happens mainly within the slip-box” (Luhmann, Baecker,
and Stanitzek 1987, 142). But few gave the slip-box and the way he worked with
it a closer look, dismissing his explanation as the modest understatement of a
genius.

His
productivity is, of course, impressive. But what is even more impressive than
the sheer number of publications or the outstanding quality of his writing is
the fact that he seemed to achieve all this with almost no real effort. He not
only stressed that he never forced himself to do something he didn’t feel like,
he even said: “I only do what is easy. I only write when I immediately know how
to do it. If I falter for a moment, I put the matter aside and do something
else.” (Luhmann et al., 1987, 154f.)[4]

Until
recently, almost no one really seemed to believe it. We are still so used to
the idea that a great outcome requires great effort that we tend not to believe
that a simple change in our work routines could not only make us more
productive, but the work also more fun. But doesn’t it make much more sense
that the impressive body of work was produced not in spite of the fact he never
made himself do anything he didn’t feel like, but because of it? Even
hard work can be fun as long as it is aligned with our intrinsic goals and we
feel in control. The problems arise when we set up our work in such an
inflexible way that we can’t adjust it when things change and become arrested
in a process that seems to develop a life of its own.

The
best way to maintain the feeling of being in control is to stay in control. And
to stay in control, it's better to keep your options open during the writing
process rather than limit yourself to your first idea. It is in the nature of
writing, especially insight-oriented writing, that questions change, the
material we work with turns out to be very different from the one imagined or
that new ideas emerge, which might change our whole perspective on what we do.
Only if the work is set up in a way that is flexible enough to allow these small
and constant adjustments can we keep our interest, motivation and work aligned
– which is the precondition to effortless or almost effortless work.

Luhmann
was able to focus on the important things right in front of him, pick up
quickly where he left off and stay in control of the process because the
structure of his work allowed him to do this. If we work in an environment that
is flexible enough to accommodate our work rhythm, we don’t need to struggle
with resistance. Studies on highly successful people have proven again and
again that success is not the result of strong willpower and the ability
to overcome resistance, but rather the result of smart working environments
that avoid resistance in the first place (cf. Neal et al. 2012; Painter et al.
2002; Hearn et al. 1998). Instead of struggling with adverse dynamics, highly
productive people deflect resistance, very much like judo champions. This is
not just about having the right mindset, it is also about having the right
workflow. It is the way Luhmann and his slip-box worked together that allowed
him to move freely and flexibly between different tasks and levels of thinking.
It is about having the right tools and knowing how to use them – and very few
understand that you need both.

People
still search for Luhmann’s “secret,” putting down his remarkable output to him
being a genius or even thinking they only need his slip-box and they would be
set. Sure, you need to be smart to be successful in academia and writing, but
if you don’t have an external system to think in and organise
your thoughts, ideas and collected facts, or have no idea how to embed it in
your overarching daily routines, the disadvantage is so enormous that it just
can’t be compensated by a high IQ.

As
far as the technology is concerned, there is no secret. It has all been in the
open for more than three decades now. So why is not everybody using a slip-box
and working effortlessly towards success? Is it because it is too complicated?
Certainly not. It is rather surprisingly simple. The reasons are much more
mundane:

1. Until
very recently, when the first results from the research on the file system were
published, some crucial misunderstandings prevailed about how Luhmann actually
worked, which led to disappointing results for many who tried to emulate the
system. The main misunderstanding stems from an isolated focus on the slip-box
and a neglect of the actual workflow in which it is embedded.

2. Almost
everything that is published about this system was only accessible in German
and was almost exclusively discussed within a small group of devoted
sociologists who specialised in Luhmann’s theory of social systems – hardly the
kind of critical mass that would draw much attention.

3. The
third and maybe the most important reason is the very fact that it is simple.
Intuitively, most people do not expect much from simple ideas. They rather
assume that impressive results must have equally impressively complicated
means.

The contemporaries of Henry Ford did not
understand why something as simple as the conveyor belt should be that
revolutionary. What difference does it make to let the cars move from worker to
worker instead of letting the workers walk from car to car? I would not be
surprised if some of them even thought of Ford as a bit simpleminded and overly
enthusiastic about a rather minor change in work organization. It is only in
hindsight that the scale of the advantages of this small tweak became obvious
to everyone. I wonder how long it will take until the advantages of Luhmann’s
slip-box and work routines become equally obvious to everyone. But by then,
everyone will already have known it all along the way.

Whatever
the reasons were: The word is out now and I wouldn’t be surprised if it spreads
fast.

1.3
The slip-box manual

How does the slip-box, the heart of this system, work?

Strictly
speaking, Luhmann had two slip-boxes: a bibliographical one, which contained
the references and brief notes on the content of the literature, and the main
one in which he collected and generated his ideas, mainly in response to what
he read. The notes were written on index cards and stored in wooden boxes.

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). These notes would end up in the bibliographic slip-box.

In
a second step, shortly after, he would look at his brief notes and think about
their relevance for his own thinking and writing. He then would turn to the
main slip-box and write his ideas, comments and thoughts on new pieces of
paper, using only one for each idea and restricting himself to one side of the
paper, to make it easier to read them later without having to take them out of
the box. He kept them usually brief enough to make one idea fit on a single
sheet, but would sometimes add another note to extend a thought.

He
usually wrote his notes with an eye towards already existing notes in the
slip-box. And while the notes on the literature were brief, he wrote them with
great care, not much different from his style in the final manuscript: in full
sentences and with explicit references to the literature from which he drew his
material. More often than not, a new note would directly follow up on another
note and would become part of a longer chain of notes. He then would add
references to notes somewhere else in the slip-box, some of them which were
located nearby, others in completely different areas and contexts. Some were
directly related and read more like comments, others contained not-so-obvious
connections. Rarely would a note stay in isolation.

He
did not just copy ideas or quotes from the texts he read, but made a
transition from one context to another. It was very much like a translation
where you use different words that fit a different context, but strive to keep
the original meaning as truthfully as possible. Writing that an author
struggles in one chapter to justify his method can be a much more adequate
description of this chapter’s content than any quote from the text itself (this
would call for an explanation, of course).

The
trick is that he did not organise his notes by topic, but in the rather
abstract way of giving them fixed numbers. The numbers bore no meaning and were
only there to identify each note permanently. If a new note was relevant or
directly referred to an already existing note, such as a comment, correction or
addition, he added it directly behind the previous note. If the existing note
had the number 22, the new note would become note number 23. If 23 already
existed, he named the new note 22a. By alternating numbers and letters, with
some slashes and commas in between, he was able to branch out into as many
strings of thought as he liked. For example, a note about causality and systems
theory carried the number 21/3d7a7 following a note with the number 21/3d7a6.

Whenever
he added a note, he checked his slip-box for other relevant notes to make
possible connections between them. Adding a note directly behind another note
is only one way of doing this. Another way is by adding a link on this and/or
the other note, which could be anywhere in the system. This very much
resembles, of course, the way we use hyperlinks on the internet. But, as I will
explain later, they are quite different and it would be rather misleading to
think of his slip-box as a personal Wikipedia or a database on paper. The
similarities are obviously there, but the subtle differences are what makes
this system unique.

By
adding these links between notes, Luhmann was able to add the same note to
different contexts. While other systems start with a preconceived order of
topics, Luhmann developed topics bottom up, then added another note to his
slip-box, on which he would sort a topic by sorting the links of the relevant
other notes.

The
last element in his file system was an index, from which he would refer to one
or two notes that would serve as a kind of entry point into a line of thought
or topic. Notes with a sorted collection of links are, of course, good entry
points.

That’s
it. Actually, it is even simpler than this, as we now have software that makes
it much easier (cf. chapter 1.3): we don’t need to manually add numbers on
notes or cut out paper as Luhmann had to.[5]

Now
that you know how the slip-box works, you only need to understand how to work
with it. And the best way to understand this is to understand a little bit
about the way we think, learn and develop ideas. And if I were forced to boil
it down to a single bullet point, it would be this: We need a reliable and
simple external structure to think in that compensates for the limitations of
our brains. But first, let me guide you through the process of writing a paper
with the slip-box.

2  Everything
You Need to Do

Imagine you do not start with a clean sheet. Imagine instead some
friendly genie (or well-paid personal assistant – whatever is more likely for
you to have available) prepared a rough draft of your paper for you. It is
already a fully developed argument including all references, quotes and some
really smart ideas. The only thing left to do is to revise this rough draft and
send it off. Make no mistake: there is still work to do and it is more than
just finding some typos. Editing is work that needs focus. You have to rephrase
some sentences, delete one or two redundancies and maybe add a couple of
sentences or even passages to fill some holes left in the argument. But at the
same time, it is a well-defined task: nothing that couldn’t be done within a
few days and certainly nothing you would have trouble motivating yourself to
do: Everybody is motivated when the finish line is within reach. No problem so
far.

Imagine
now you are not the one who has to edit the rough draft and turn it into the
final paper, but the one who has to prepare it. What would be helpful to
achieve that quickly? It would certainly make things a lot easier if you
already had everything you need right in front of you: The ideas, the
arguments, the quotes, long developed passages, complete with bibliography and
references. And not just readily available, but already in order, sorted by
chapters that have descriptive headlines. Now that’s also a clear assignment.
No worries about perfect sentences (someone else will take care of that), no
worries about finding things and coming up with ideas (someone else already
took care of that), you just focus on turning a string of ideas into a
continuous text. Again, that is still serious work and you have to put some
effort into it, if you want to make it great. You might spot a missing step in
an argument and have to fill it, or you might want to rearrange some notes or
leave something out that you regard as less relevant. But, again, this is not
an overwhelming task and luckily, it doesn’t need to be perfect. No problem so
far.

Equally
manageable is the task of bringing already existing notes into order,
especially if half of them already are in order. Searching through a file
system with strings of discussions, plenty of material and ideas is, believe it
or not, fun. It does not require the kind of focused attention you would need
to formulate a sentence or to understand a difficult text. Your attention is
rather at ease and it even helps to have a playful mindset. Only with a less
narrow focus will you be able to see connections and patterns. You see clearly
where long strings of discussions have already been built up – this is a good
starting point. If you do look for specific notes, you have an index to turn
to. No problem at all so far.

At
this point, it should become clear that you don’t need to wait for a genie to
appear, as each step is clearly not only within your abilities, but also
straightforward and well defined: Assemble notes and bring them into order,
turn these notes into a draft, review it and you are done.

Now,
that’s all well and good, you might say, but what about writing these
notes? Obviously, it is easy to write a paper if the main part of the writing
is already done and only needs to be turned into a linear text. But isn’t that
a little bit like saying: If you are short of money, just take what you need
out of your piggy bank? Everyone can make things look easy by leaving out the
main part. So, where is the genie for that?

Granted,
writing these notes is the main work. It will take enormous amounts of effort,
time, patience and willpower, and you will probably break under the weight of
this task. Just kidding. It is the easiest part of all. 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. All you have to do is to have a pen in your hand while
you are doing what you are doing anyway (or a keyboard under your fingers).
Writing notes accompanies the main work and, done right, it helps with
it. Writing is, without dispute, the best facilitator for thinking, reading,
learning, understanding and generating ideas we have. Notes build up while
you think, read, understand and generate ideas, because you have to have a pen
in your hand if you want to think, read, understand and generate ideas properly
anyway. If you want to learn something for the long run, you have to write it
down. If you want to really understand something, you have to translate it into
your own words. Thinking takes place as much on paper as in your own head.
“Notes on paper, or on a computer screen [...] do not make contemporary physics
or other kinds of intellectual endeavour easier, they make it possible,”
neuroscientist Neil Levy concludes in the introduction to the Oxford
Handbook of Neuroethics, summarizing decades of research. Neuroscientists,
psychologists and other experts on thinking have very different ideas about how
our brains work, but, as Levy writes: “no matter how internal processes are
implemented, (you) need to understand the extent to which the mind is reliant
upon external scaffolding.” (2011, 270) If there is one thing the experts agree
on, then it is this: You have to externalise your ideas, you have to write.
Richard Feynman stresses it as much as Benjamin Franklin. If we write, it is
more likely that we understand what we read, remember what we learn and that
our thoughts make sense. And if we have to write anyway, why not use our
writing to build up the resources for our future publications?

Thinking,
reading, learning, understanding and generating ideas is the main work of
everyone who studies, does research or writes. If you write to improve all of
these activities, you have a strong tailwind going for you. If you take your
notes in a smart way, it will propel you forward.

2.1
Writing a paper step by step

1. Make fleeting notes. Always have
something at hand to write with to capture every idea that pops into your mind.
Don’t worry too much about how you write it down or what you write it on. These
are fleeting notes, mere reminders of what is in your head. They should not
cause any distraction. Put them into one place, which you define as your inbox,
and process them later. I usually have a simple notebook with me, but I am
happy with napkins or receipts if nothing else is at hand. Sometimes I leave a
voice record on my phone. If your thoughts are already sorted and you have the
time, you can skip this step and write your idea directly down as a proper,
permanent note for your slip-box.

2. Make literature notes. Whenever you read
something, make notes about the content. Write down what you don’t want to
forget or think you might use in your own thinking or writing. Keep it very
short, be extremely selective, and use your own words. Be extra selective with
quotes – don’t copy them to skip the step of really understanding what they
mean. Keep these notes together with the bibliographic details in one place –
your reference system.

3. Make permanent notes. Now turn to your
slip-box. Go through the notes you made in step one or two (ideally once a day
and before you forget what you meant) and think about how they relate to what
is relevant for your own research, thinking or interests. This can soon be done
by looking into the slip-box – it only contains what interests you anyway. The
idea is not to collect, but to develop ideas, arguments and discussions. Does
the new information contradict, correct, support or add to what you already
have (in the slip-box or on 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 were 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 the fleeting
notes from step one and put the literature notes from step two into your
reference system. You can forget about them now. All that matters is going into
the slip-box.

4. Now add your new permanent notes to the
slip-box by:

a)
Filing each one behind one or more related notes (with a program, you
can put one note “behind” multiple notes; if you use pen and paper like
Luhmann, you have to decide where it fits best and add manual links to the
other notes). Look to which note the new one directly relates or, if it does
not relate directly to any other note yet, just file it behind the last one.

b)
Adding links to related notes.

c)
Making sure you will be able to find this note later by either linking
to it from your index or by making a link to it on a note that you use as an
entry point to a discussion or topic and is itself linked to the index.

5. Develop your topics, questions and research projects
bottom up from within the system. See what is there, what is missing and what
questions arise. Read more to challenge and strengthen your arguments and
change and develop your arguments according to the new information you are
learning about. Take more notes, develop ideas further and see where things
will take you. Just follow your interest and always take the path that promises
the most insight. Build upon what you have. Even if you don’t have anything in
your slip-box yet, you never start from scratch – you already have ideas on
your mind to be tested, opinions to be challenged and questions to be answered.
Do not brainstorm for a topic. Look into the slip-box instead to see
where chains of notes have developed and ideas have been built up to clusters.
Don’t cling to an idea if another, more promising one gains momentum. The more
you become interested in something, the more you will read and think about it,
the more notes you will collect and the more likely it is that you will
generate questions from it. It might be exactly what you were interested in
from the beginning, but it is more likely that your interests will have changed
– that is what insight does.

6. After a while, you will have developed ideas
far enough to decide on a topic to write about. Your topic is now based on what
you have, not based on an unfounded idea about what the literature you
are about to read might provide. Look through the connections and collect all
the relevant notes on this topic (most of the relevant notes will already be in
partial order), copy them onto your “desktop”[6]
and bring them in order. Look for what is missing and what is redundant. Don’t
wait until you have everything together. Rather, try ideas out and give
yourself enough time to go back to reading and note-taking to improve your
ideas, arguments and their structure.

7. Turn your notes into a rough draft. Don’t
simply copy your notes into a manuscript. 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. Detect holes in your argument, fill
them or change your argument.

8. Edit and proofread your manuscript. Give
yourself a pat on the shoulder and turn to the next manuscript.

These are the steps, presented as if you will write only one
paper/article at a time. In reality, you never work on just one idea, but many
ideas in different stages at the same time. And that is where the system plays
out its real strengths. We cannot help but think about more than one question
at a time and the chances are that you will think and write in the future as
well. It might not be for academia or a publication, but certainly for your own
intellectual growth. Gather what you encounter along your way and don’t let any
good idea go to waste. You might read a certain book in hope it could be useful
for one of the papers you write. Maybe you are wrong, but it still might
contain some interesting thoughts worth keeping and useful for something else
you haven’t thought about yet.

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.[7] As the only way to find out if something
is worth reading is by reading it (even just bits of it), it makes sense to use
the time spent in the best possible way. We constantly encounter interesting
ideas along the way and only a fraction of them are useful for the particular
paper we started reading it for. Why let them go to waste? Make a note and add
it to your slip-box. It improves it. Every idea adds to what can become a critical
mass that turns a mere collection of ideas into an idea-generator.

A
typical work day will contain many, if not all, of these steps: You read and
take notes. You build connections within the slip-box, which in itself will
spark new ideas. You write them down and add them to the discussion. You write
on your paper, notice a hole in the argument and have another look in the file
system for the missing link. You follow up on a footnote, go back to research
and might add a fitting quote to one of your papers in the making.

How
focused you want to read depends on your priorities. You don’t have to read
anything you don’t consider an absolute necessity for finishing your most
urgent paper, but you will still encounter a lot of other ideas and information
along the way. Spending the little extra time to add them to your system will
make all the difference, because the accidental encounters make up the majority
of what we learn.

Imagine
if we went through life learning only what we planned to learn or being
explicitly taught. I doubt we would have even learned to speak. Each added bit
of information, filtered only by our interest, is a contribution to our future
understanding, thinking and writing. And the best ideas are usually the ones we
haven’t anticipated anyway.

Most
people follow different lines of thought at the same time. They might focus for
a while on one idea, but then leave it alone for another while until they see
how to proceed further. It is helpful then to be able to pick up on another
idea now and go back to the earlier thought later. It is much more realistic to
keep this flexibility and you don’t have to worry about starting all over.

3  Everything
You Need to Have

There is this story where NASA tried to figure out how to make a ballpoint
pen that works in space. If you have ever tried to use a ballpoint pen over
your head, you have probably realised it is gravity that keeps the ink flowing.
After a series of prototypes, several test runs and tons of money invested,
NASA developed a fully functional gravity-independent pen, which pushes the ink
onto the paper by means of compressed nitrogen. According to this story, the
Russians faced the same problem. So they used pencils (De Bono, 1998, 141). The
slip-box follows the Russian model: Focus on the essentials, don’t complicate
things unnecessarily.

Academic
writing in itself is not a complicated process that requires a variety of
complicated tools, but is in constant danger of being clogged with unnecessary
distractions. Unfortunately, most students collect and embrace over time a
variety of learning and note-taking techniques, each promising to make
something easier, but combined have the opposite effect.

The
whole workflow becomes complicated: There is the technique of underlining important
sentences (sometimes in different colours or shapes), commenting in the margins
of a text, writing excerpts, employing reading methods with acronyms like SQ3R[8] or SQ4R,[9]
writing a journal, brainstorming a topic or following multi-step question
sheets – and then there are, of course, the one thousand and twelve apps and
programs that are supposed to help with learning and writing. Few of these
techniques are particularly complicated in themselves, but they are usually
used without any regard to the actual workflow, which then quickly becomes a
mess. As nothing really fits together, working within this arrangement
becomes extremely complicated indeed and difficult to get anything done.

And
if you stumble upon one idea and think that it might connect to another idea,
what do you do when you employ all these different techniques? Go through all
your books to find the right underlined sentence? Reread all your journals and
excerpts? And what do you do then? Write an excerpt about it? Where do you save
it and how does this help to make new connections? Every little step suddenly
turns into its own project without bringing the whole much further forward.
Adding another promising technique to it, then, would make things only worse.

That
is why the slip-box is not introduced as another technique, but as a crucial
element in an overarching workflow that is stripped of everything that could
distract from what is important. Good tools do not add features and more
options to what we already have, but help to reduce distractions from the main
work, which here is thinking. The slip-box provides an external scaffold
to think in and helps with those tasks our brains are not very good at, most of
all objective storage of information.

That
is pretty much it. 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.

3.1
The Tool Box

We need four tools:

·     Something
to write with and something to write on (pen and paper will do)

·     A
reference management system (the best programs are free)

·     The
slip-box (the best program is free)

·     An
editor (whatever works best for you: very good ones are free)

More is unnecessary, less is impossible.

1.  You
need something to capture ideas whenever and wherever they pop into your head.
Whatever you use, it should not require any thoughts, attention or multiple
steps to write it down. It can be a notebook, a napkin, an app on your phone or
iPad. These notes are not meant to be stored permanently. They will be deleted
or chucked soon anyway. They only function as a reminder of a thought and are
not meant to capture the thought itself, which requires time to phrase proper
sentences and check facts. I recommend having pen and paper with you at all
times. It is really hard to beat a notebook in its simplicity. If you use other
tools, make sure everything ends up in one place, a central inbox or something
like that, where you can process it soon, ideally within a day.

2.  The
reference system has two purposes: To collect the references (duh) and the
notes you take during your reading. I strongly recommend using a free program
like Zotero, which allows you to make new entries via browser plugins or just
by entering the ISBN or digital object identifier (DOI) number. Zotero also can
be integrated into Microsoft Word, OpenOffice, LibreOffice and NeoOffice, which
allows you to insert quotations without actually typing in the reference. That
not only makes things easier, you also mitigate the risk of messing things up
when you add, edit or delete additional references. You can also easily change
the format according to the standards required by your professors or the
journal you write for. You can add notes to each entry – but it would also be
fine to write your notes by hand and link them to the reference if you prefer
to write by hand at this stage. In that case, just give the notes a
standardised title like “AuthorYear” and keep them in alphabetical order in one
place. You can download Zotero for free at zotero.org (Windows, Mac and Linux).
You will find the links to all recommended programs on takesmartnotes.com.[10] If you prefer or already work with
another, equally simple program, there is no reason not to use that.

3.  The
slip-box. Some prefer the old-fashioned pen and paper version in a wooden box.
That's fine – computers can only speed up a relatively minor part of the work
anyway, like adding links and formatting references. They can’t speed up the
main part of the work, which is thinking, reading and understanding. All you
would need are sheets of paper about the size of a postcard (Luhmann used the
DIN A6 size, 148 x 105 mm or 5.83 x 4.13 inches) and a box to keep them in. And
even though there are clear benefits of handwriting (cf. below chapter 3.2.1),
I recommend using the digital version, if only for mobility. Even though you
could basically emulate the slip-box with any program that allows setting links
and tagging (like Evernote or a Wiki), I strongly recommend using Daniel
Lüdecke’s Zettelkasten. It is the only program I know that really implements
the principles behind Luhmann’s system and is at the same time simple and easy
to use. It is free and available for different operating systems. You can
download it from zettelkasten.danielluedecke.de (please consider sending a
donation to the developer if you like it).

4.  Finally,
the editor: If you use Zotero, I recommend using one of the editors it is compatible
with (Microsoft Word, OpenOffice, LibreOffice or NeoOffice), because it makes
life a lot easier if you don’t have to type in every reference manually. Except
for that, everything works fine – no editor can improve an argument.

If you have pen and paper, an editor, your slip-box and reference system
at hand, you are ready to go.

4  A
Few Things to Keep in Mind

Getting the tools ready shouldn’t have taken more than 5-10 minutes. But
having the right tools is only one part of the equation. It is easy to get
fooled by their simplicity. Many “tried them out” without really understanding
how to work with them and were expectedly disappointed with the results. Tools
are only as good as your ability to work with them. Everybody knows how to
handle a flute (you blow into one end and press your fingers on the holes
according to the notes you are playing), but nobody would try it out once and
then judge the instrument on what they hear.[11]

But
with tools like the slip-box, we sometimes forget that the handling is as
important as the possibilities of the tool itself. If we try to use a tool
without putting any thought into the way we work with it, even the best tool
would not be of much help. The slip-box, for example, would most likely be used
as an archive for notes – or worse: a graveyard for thoughts (cf. Hollier 2005,
40 on Mallarmé’s index cards). Unfortunately, there are quite a few
explanations of Luhmann’s technique on the Internet that focus in a misleading
way on the technicalities of the slip-box. This has led to plenty of
misconceptions about its abilities. But things are changing: Luhmann’s slip-box
is currently the object of a long-term research project at the University of
Bielefeld, and their first results have already given us a comprehensive
understanding about how Luhmann really worked with it. You can look up for
yourself some of his notes on their website.[12]
Soon, you will be able to access the whole digitalised slip-box online. Add to
this understanding recent psychological insights about learning, creativity and
thinking, and we also get a pretty good picture why it works. And it is
indeed crucially important not only to know how it works or how to work with
it, but also why it works. Only then will you be able to tweak it for your own
needs. And this is what this book is for: To give you all the resources you
need to work in the best possible way with the best technique available. By
keeping just a few basic principles in mind and with an understanding of the
logic behind the file system, I see no reason why anyone should not be able to
replicate Luhmann’s formula for successful learning, writing and research.

The Four Underlying Principles

5  Writing
Is the Only Thing That Matters

For students, the need for writing mainly appears in the form of
examination. In this understanding, the written work represents a
preceded performance, namely learning, understanding and the ability to analyse
other texts critically. By writing, students demonstrate what they have
learned, show their ability to think critically and ability to develop ideas.
This understanding is related to the idea that students prepare for
independent research. In this mindset, the writing of a paper is just another
skill to be learned. It is compartmentalised from the other tasks – it is seen
as one task among others. Students should not only learn to write papers, but
also learn facts, be able to discuss their ideas in seminars and listen carefully
to lectures. Writing papers is seen as a task in itself with a beginning and an
end. Almost all books written on academic writing start from this assumption.
And almost all of them proceed accordingly, describing an idealised process in
certain consecutive steps.

First,
the task to write is given, then there is the challenge to find a topic or a
specific angle on a problem, the research to do, starting with the collection
of the relevant literature, followed by reading the material, processing it and
coming to a conclusion. Writing is what follows: In the beginning stands the
question to be answered, followed by an overview of the literature, the
discussion of it and the conclusion. This, according to this thinking, prepares
you for doing independent research. Alas, it does not. If you become successful
in your research, it was not because you learned to approach writing in this
way, but despite it.

This
book is based on another assumption: Studying does not prepare students for
independent research. It is independent research. Nobody starts from
scratch and everybody is already able to think for themselves. Studying, done
properly, is research, because it is about gaining insight that cannot be
anticipated and will be shared within the scientific community under public
scrutiny. There is no such thing as private knowledge in academia. An idea kept
private is as good as one you never had. And a fact no one can reproduce is no
fact at all. Making something public always means to write it down so it can be
read. There is no such thing as a history of unwritten ideas.

School
is different. Pupils are usually not encouraged to follow their own learning
paths, question and discuss everything the teacher is teaching and move on to
another topic if something does not promise to generate interesting insight.
The teacher is there for the pupils to learn. But, as Wilhelm von Humboldt,
founder of the Humboldt University of Berlin and brother to the great explorer
Alexander von Humboldt, put it, the professor is not there for the student and
the student not for the professor. Both are only there for the truth. And truth
is always a public matter. Everything within the university aims at some
kind of publication. A written piece does not necessarily need to be accepted
in an international journal to become public. In fact, the vast majority of
what is written and discussed is not published in this narrow sense. The review
process itself is a form of presenting an idea publicly to the peers and so is
everything a student hands over to a professor or lecturer. Even the handout
for a presentation discussed with fellow students is a written piece made
public. It is public because in the discussion, it does not matter anymore what
the author meant, only what is there in writing. The moment the author
can be removed from the scene, the written piece is a public claim on truth.
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. Truth does not belong to anyone; it is the outcome of the
scientific exchange of written ideas. This is why the presentation and the
production of knowledge cannot be separated, but are rather two sides of the
same coin (Peters and Schäfer 2006, 9). If writing is the medium of research
and studying nothing else than research, then there is no reason not to work as
if nothing else counts than writing.

Working
as if nothing else counts than writing does not mean spending more time writing
at the expense of everything else. Only if we compartmentalise our work into
different, isolated tasks will it seem like focusing on writing reduces the
time we spend on other tasks. But it does not mean to read less, for this is
the main source of the writing material. It doesn’t mean to attend fewer
lectures or seminars, because they provide you with the ideas to write about
and questions worth answering. Attending lectures is also one of the best ways
to get an idea about the current state of research, not to mention the ability
to ask and discuss questions. Focusing on writing also doesn’t mean to stop
giving presentations or finding other ways of making your thoughts public.
Where else could you get feedback for your ideas?

Focusing
on writing as if nothing else counts does not necessarily mean you should do
everything else less well, but it certainly makes you do everything else differently.
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. You quickly learn to distinguish good-sounding arguments from
actual good ones, as you will have to think them through whenever you try to
write them down and connect them with your previous knowledge. It will change
the way you read as well: You will become more focused on the most relevant
aspects, knowing that you cannot write down everything. You will read in a more
engaged way, because you cannot rephrase anything in your own words if you
don’t understand what it is about. By doing this, you will elaborate on the
meaning, which will make it much more likely that you will remember it. You
also have to think beyond the things you read, because you need to turn it into
something new. And by doing everything with the clear purpose of writing about
it, you will do what you do deliberately. Deliberate practice is the
only serious way of becoming better at what we are doing (cf. Anders Ericsson,
2008). If you change your mind about the importance of writing, you will also
change your mind about everything else. Even if you decide never to write a
single line of a manuscript, you will improve your reading, thinking and other
intellectual skills just by doing everything as if nothing counts other than
writing.

6  Simplicity
Is Paramount

We tend to think that big transformations have to start with an equally
big idea. But more often than not, it is the simplicity of an idea that makes
it so powerful (and often overlooked in the beginning). Boxes, for example, are
simple. Malcom McLean, the owner of a trucking company and a former trucker
himself, regularly got stuck in traffic on the crowded coastal highways. When
he came up with an idea to circumvent the congested roads, it was a simple one.
He had no clue that it would tip the world in a new direction. He did not
foresee that his simple idea would reshape the political landscape, let some
nations rise to the top and other fall behind, make century-old professions
redundant, give birth to new industries, and would barely leave a single person
on earth unaffected by it. I am speaking, of course, of the shipping container,
which is basically just a box. When McLean converted the tanker Ideal X to be
able to carry 58 containers and set it to sail on 26 April 1956, it was just
because it made more sense to ship parts of a lorry than the whole lorry
itself, which in itself made more sense than to have them stand in traffic for
days. He certainly did not aim to turn world trade upside down and pave the way
for Asia to become the next big economic power. He just didn’t want to get
stuck in traffic anymore.

It
wasn’t just that nobody foresaw the impact of something as simple as this box.
Most ship owners had in fact considered the idea of putting different kinds of
products into the same sized boxes as fairly abstruse. Experienced stevedores
were able to use the storage room on a ship optimally by arranging and fitting
the goods, and every good came in its optimal package. Why replace it with an
obviously less optimal solution? And speaking of suboptimal, why would anyone
want to try to fit square boxes into a round-shaped ship body anyway? Ship
owners also didn’t have many customers who wanted to ship exactly the amount
that fit into a container. That either left customers unhappy or containers
half empty or filled with goods from different customers, which meant that you
had to unpack and rearrange the containers to untangle different orders in
every single harbour. That did not sound very efficient to the ears of
experienced shippers. And then you had the problem with the boxes themselves.
Once unloaded and sent off on trucks, you had to find a way to get them back.
McLean lost hundreds of containers this way. It was a logistical nightmare.

And
by the way: McLean wasn’t the only one who had the idea to use containers on
ships. Many others tried it, too, and almost all gave up on the idea soon after
– not because they were too stubborn to accept a great idea, but because they
lost too much money on it (Levinson, 2006, 45f). The idea was simple, but it
wasn’t easy to put it efficiently into practice.

In
hindsight, we know why they failed: The ship owners tried to integrate the
container into their usual way of working without changing the infrastructure
and their routines. They tried to benefit from the obvious simplicity of
loading containers onto ships without letting go of what they were used to. In
the beginning, the perception was very much shaped by what worked before, and
only the most immediate effects were visible. The ship owners looked at the
bags and crates of goods and wondered why they should pack them a second time
into another box. They were glad when they unloaded their goods at the harbour
and they were eager to move on. They wondered why they should go
container-hunting instead. They looked at the ships they had and wondered how
to fit containers into them. McLean understood better than others that it is
not the perspective of the ship-owners that counts, but the purpose of the
whole trade: to bring goods from the producer to the final destination. Only
after aligning every single part of the delivery chain, from packaging to
delivery, from the design of the ships to the design of the harbours, was the
full potential of the container unleashed.

When
the advantages became obvious, second-order effects came into play and went
into a self-reinforcing positive feedback loop. The more harbours were able to
handle containers, the more container ships were needed to be built, which made
shipping cheaper, which increased the range of goods worth shipping, which
created more traffic, which made bigger container ships economical, which
created more demand for infrastructure and so on. It wasn’t just another way of
shipping goods. It was a whole new way of doing business.

Many
students and academic writers think like the early ship owners when it comes to
note-taking. They handle their ideas and findings in the way it makes immediate
sense: If they read an interesting sentence, they underline it. If they have a
comment to make, they write it into the margins. If they have an idea, they
write it into their notebook, and if an article seems important enough, they
make the effort and write an excerpt. Working like this will leave you with a
lot of different notes in many different places. Writing, then, means to rely
heavily on your brain to remember where and when these notes were written down.
A text must then be conceptualised independently from these notes, which
explains why so many resort to brainstorming to arrange the resources
afterwards according to this preconceived idea. In this textual infrastructure,
this so-often-taught workflow, it indeed does not make much sense to rewrite
these notes and put them into a box, only to take them out again later when a
certain quote or reference is needed during writing and thinking.

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?
Most students sort their material by topic or even by seminars and semester.
From the perspective of someone who writes, that makes as much sense as sorting
your errands by purchase date and the store they were bought from. Can’t find
your trousers? Maybe they are with the bleach you bought the same day at your
department store.

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. Instead of focusing on the in-between
steps and trying to make a science out of underlining systems, reading
techniques or excerpt writing, everything is streamlined towards one thing
only: insight that can be published. The biggest advantage compared to a
top-down storage system organised by topics is that the slip-box becomes more
and more valuable the more it grows, instead of getting messy and confusing. If
you sort by topic, you are faced with the dilemma of either adding more and
more notes to one topic, which makes them increasingly hard to find, or adding
more and more topics and subtopics to it, which only shifts the mess to another
level. 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.

Even
though the slip-box, being organised bottom-up, does not face the trade-off
problem between too many or too few topics, it too can lose its value when
notes are added to it indiscriminately. It can only play out its strengths when
we aim for a critical mass, which depends not only on the number of
notes, but also their quality and the way they are handled.

To
achieve a critical mass, it is crucial to distinguish clearly between three
types of notes:

1.  Fleeting
notes, which are only reminders of information, can be written in any kind of
way and will end up in the trash within a day or two.

2.  Permanent
notes, which will never be thrown away and contain the necessary
information in themselves in a permanently understandable way. They are always
stored in the same way in the same place, either in the reference system or,
written as if for print, in the slip-box.

3.  Project
notes, which are only relevant to one particular project. They are kept
within a project-specific folder and can be discarded or archived after the
project is finished.

Only if the notes of these three categories are kept separated it will
be possible to build a critical mass of ideas within the slip-box. One
of the major reasons for not getting much writing or publishing done lies in
the confusion of these categories.

A
typical mistake is made by many diligent students who are adhering to the
advice to keep a scientific journal. A friend of mine does not let any idea,
interesting finding or quote he stumbles upon dwindle away and writes
everything down. He always carries a notebook with him and often makes a few
quick notes during a conversation. The advantage is obvious: No idea ever gets
lost. The disadvantages are serious, though: As he treats every note as if it
belongs to the “permanent” category, the notes will never build up a critical
mass. The collection of good ideas is diluted to insignificance by all the
other notes, which are only relevant for a specific project or actually not
that good on second sight. On top of that, the strict chronological order does not
offer any help to find, combine or rearrange ideas in a productive sense. It is
not surprising that my friend has a bookshelf filled with notebooks full of
wonderful ideas, but not a single publication to show.

The
second typical mistake is to collect notes only related to specific projects.
On first sight, it makes much more sense. You decide on what you are going to
write about and then collect everything that helps you to do that. The
disadvantage is that you have to start all over after each project and cut off
all other promising lines of thought. That means that everything you found,
thought or encountered during the time of a project will be lost. If you try to
mitigate the effect by opening a new folder for every potential new project
whenever you stumble upon something that might be interesting for that, you
will soon end up with an overwhelming amount of unfinished projects. If that in
itself does not become a drag on your motivation, the task of keeping track of
them will. But most importantly, without a permanent reservoir of ideas, you
will not be able to develop any major ideas over a longer period of time
because you are restricting yourself either to the length of a single project
or the capacity of your memory. Exceptional ideas need much more than that.

The
third typical mistake is, of course, to treat all notes as fleeting ones. You
can easily spot this approach by the mess that comes with it, or rather by the
cycle of slowly growing piles of material followed by the impulse for major clean-ups.
Just collecting unprocessed fleeting notes inevitably leads to chaos. Even
small amounts of unclear and unrelated notes lingering around your desk will
soon induce the wish of starting from scratch.

What
all these category-confusing approaches have in common is that the benefit of
note-taking decreases with the number of notes you keep. More notes will make
it more difficult to retrieve the right ones and bring related ones together in
a playful way. But it should be just the opposite: The more you learn and
collect, the more beneficial your notes should become, the more ideas can
mingle and give birth to new ones – and the easier it should be to write an
intelligent text with less effort.

It
is important to reflect on the purpose of these different types of notes.
Fleeting notes are there for capturing ideas quickly while you are busy doing
something else. When you are in a conversation, listening to a lecture, hear
something noteworthy or an idea pops into your mind while you are running
errands, a quick note is the best you can do without interrupting what you are
in the middle of doing. That might even apply to reading, if you want to focus
on a text without interrupting your reading flow. Then you might want to just
underline sentences or write short comments in the margins. It is important to
understand, though, that underlining sentences or writing comments in the
margins are also just fleeting notes and do nothing to elaborate on a text.
They will very soon become completely useless – unless you do something with
them. If you already know that you will not go back to them, don’t take these
kind of notes in the first place. Take proper notes instead. Fleeting notes are
only useful if you review them within a day or so and turn them into proper notes
you can use later. Fleeting literature notes can make sense if you need an
extra step to understand or grasp an idea, but they will not help you in the
later stages of the writing process, as no underlined sentence will ever
present itself when you need it in the development of an argument. These kinds
of notes are just reminders of a thought, which you haven’t had the time to
elaborate on yet. Permanent notes, on the other hand, are written in a way that
can still be understood even when you have forgotten the context they are taken
from.

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. In the first case, you forgot what it was
supposed to remind you of. In the second case, you forgot the context that gave
it its meaning.

The
only permanently stored notes are the literature notes in the reference system
and the main notes in the slip-box. The former can be very brief as the context
is clearly the text they refer to. The latter need be written with more care
and details as they need to be self-explanatory. Luhmann never underlined
sentences in the text he read or wrote comments in the margins. All he did was
take brief notes about the ideas that caught his attention in a text on a
separate piece of paper: “I make a note with the bibliographic details. On the
backside I would write ‘on page x is this, on page y is that,’ and then it goes
into the bibliographic slip-box where I collect everything I read.” (Hagen,
1997)[13] But before he stored them away, he would
read what he noted down during the day, think about its relevance for his own
lines of thought and write about it, filling his main slip-box with permanent
notes. Nothing in this box would ever get thrown away. Some notes might
disappear into the background and never catch his attention again, while others
might become connection points to various lines of reasoning and reappear on a
regular basis in various contexts.

As
it is not possible to foresee the development of the slip-box, the fate of the
notes is nothing to worry about. In contrast to the fleeting notes, every
permanent note for the slip-box is elaborated enough to have the potential to
become part of or inspire a final written piece, but that can not be decided on
up front as their relevance depends on future thinking and developments. The
notes are no longer reminders of thoughts or ideas, but contain the actual
thought or idea in written form. This is a crucial difference.

It
is the standardised format that enables the notes to build up a critical mass
in one place. It is also the key to facilitating the thinking and writing
process by removing all unnecessary complications or decisions that come with a
variety of different formats and storage places. Only because every note is in
the same format at the same place can they later be combined and assembled into
something new and no thought is ever wasted on the question of where to put or
label it.

The
last type of note, the ones that are related to only one specific project, are
kept together with other project-related notes in a project-specific folder. It
doesn’t matter in which format these notes are as they are going to end up in
the bin after the project is finished anyway (or in an archive – the bin for
the indecisive).

Project-related
notes can be:

·
comments in the manuscript

·
collections of project-related literature

·
outlines

·
snippets of drafts

·
reminders

·
to-do lists

·
and of course the draft itself.

The
Zettelkasten has the built-in function of project-specific desktops. Here, you
can not only structure your thoughts and conceptualise the chapters of your
draft, but also collect and sort the notes for this specific project without
fear that they will water down or interfere with the slip-box itself. You can
even change the notes according to your project without affecting the notes in
the slip-box.

The
same applies to the reference system. In Zotero, you can collect literature in
project-specific folders without taking them out of the reference system
itself. All this keeps the permanent notes from the project-related notes
clearly separated and allows you to experiment and tinker with them as much as
you like within the boundaries of each project without interfering with the
actual slip-box. I suggest keeping a physical binder for each project to keep
all the handwritten notes and printouts separate from the rest and combined in
one place.

When
you close the folder for your current project in the evening and nothing is
left on your desk other than pen and paper, you know that you have achieved a
clear separation between fleeting, permanent and project-related notes.

7  Nobody
Ever Starts From Scratch

“The white
sheet of paper – or today: the blank screen – is a fundamental
misunderstanding” (Nassehi 2015, 185)

The process of writing is vastly misunderstood. If you grab off the shelf
a random study guide or self-help book on writing and skim through the first
pages, the chances are that you will encounter something like this: “To make
your research more efficient, your first step should be to narrow the aspect
you choose to focus on and also formulate an explicit question that your
research and analysis will address.”[14]
Almost always, the decision on the topic is presented as the necessary first
step, after which follows everything else, like in this guide: “When you have
chosen a topic that is right for you, having taken into consideration your
personal interests and any necessary background knowledge that may be needed,
assess the availability of sources.”[15]
Thereafter, you will certainly find a multi-step plan you are supposed to
follow: Be it twelve steps, according to the Academic Skills & Learning
Centre of the Australian National University, or eight, if you go with the
recommendations of the Writing Center of the University of Wisconsin, the rough
order is always the same: Make a decision on what to write about, plan your
research, do your research, write. Interestingly enough, these road maps
usually come with the concession that this is only an idealised plan and that
in reality, it rarely works like that. This is certainly true. Writing can’t be
that linear. The obvious question is: If that is true, why not root the course
of action in reality instead?

In
order to develop a good question to write about or find the best angle for an
assignment, one must already have put some thought into a topic. To be able to
decide on a topic, one must already have read quite a bit and certainly not
just about one topic. And the decision to read something and not something else
is obviously rooted in prior understanding, and that didn’t come out of thin
air, either. 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. Basically, that is what
Hans-Georg Gadamer called the hermeneutic circle (Gadamer 2004). And even
though the hermeneutic circle is regularly taught in university, writing at the
same time continues to be taught as if we could start from scratch and
move forward in a straight line – as if it were possible to pull a good
question out of thin air and wait with the reading until the literature
research is done. The seemingly pragmatic and down-to-earth-sounding advice –
to decide what to write about before you start writing – is therefore either
misleading or banal. It is banal if it means only that you should think before
you put words on paper. It is misleading if it means that you could make a
sound plan on what to write before you have immersed yourself in the topics at
hand, which involves writing. It accompanies everything: We have to read with a
pen in hand, develop ideas on paper and build up an ever-growing pool of
externalised thoughts. We will not be guided by a blindly made-up plan picked
from our unreliable brains, but by our interest, curiosity and intuition, which
is formed and informed by the actual work of reading, thinking, discussing,
writing and developing ideas – and is something that continuously grows and
reflects our knowledge and understanding externally.

By
focusing on what is interesting and keeping written track of your own
intellectual development, topics, questions and arguments will emerge from the
material without force. Not only does it mean that finding a topic or a
research question will become easier, as we don’t have to squeeze it out of the
few ideas that are on top of our head anymore, every question that emerges out
of our slip-box will naturally and handily come with material to work with. If
we look into our slip-box to see where clusters have built up, we not only see possible
topics, but topics we have already worked on – even if we were not able to
see it up front. The idea that nobody ever starts from scratch suddenly becomes
very concrete. If we take it seriously and work accordingly, we literally never
have to start from scratch again.

Of
course, those who believe that they do start from scratch don’t really
start from scratch, either, as they too can only draw on what they have learned
or encountered before. But as they haven’t acted on this fact, they
can’t track ideas back to their origins and have neither supporting material at
hand nor their sources in order. As writing has not accompanied their previous
work, they have to either start with something completely new (which is risky)
or retrace their ideas (which is boring).

As
proper note-taking is rarely taught or discussed, it is no wonder that almost
every guide on writing recommends to start with brainstorming. If you
haven’t written along the way, the brain is indeed the only place to turn to.
On its own, it is not such a great choice: it is neither objective nor reliable
– two quite important aspects in academic or nonfiction writing. The promotion
of brainstorming as a starting point is all the more surprising as it is not
the origin of most ideas: The things you are supposed to find in your head by
brainstorming usually don’t have their origins in there. Rather, they come from
the outside: through reading, having discussions and listening to others,
through all the things that could have been accompanied and often even would
have been improved by writing. The advice to think about what to write about
before you write comes both too early and too late. Too late, as you already
have passed up the chance to build up written resources when you face the white
sheet of paper or the blank screen, but also too early, if you try to postpone
every serious content-related work until you have made a decision on the topic.

If
something comes too early and too late at the same time, it is not possible to
fix it by rearranging the order as the fictional linearity is the problem in
itself. Taking smart notes is the precondition to break with the linear order.
There is one reliable sign if you managed to structure your workflow according
to the fact that writing is not a linear process, but a circular one: the
problem of finding a topic is replaced by the problem of having too many topics
to write about. Having trouble finding the right topic is a symptom of the
wrong attempt to rely heavily on the limitations of the brain, not the
inevitable problematic starting point, as most study guides insinuate. If you
on the other hand develop your thinking in writing, open questions will become
clearly visible and give you an abundance of possible topics to elaborate
further in writing.

After
many years of working with students, I am convinced that the attempt of these
study guides to squeeze a nonlinear process like writing into a linear order is
the main reason for the very problems and frustrations they promise to solve.
How can you not have trouble finding a topic if you believe you have to decide
on one before you have done your research, have read and learned about
something? How can you not feel threatened by an empty page if you have
literally nothing at hand to fill it with? Who can blame you for
procrastinating if you find yourself stuck with a topic you decided on blindly
and now have to stick with it as the deadline is approaching? And how can
anyone be surprised that students feel overwhelmed with writing assignments
when they are not taught how to turn months and years of reading, discussing
and research into material they can really use?

These
study guides, which neglect everything before a writing assignment is given,
are a little bit like financial advisors who discuss how 65-year-olds can save
for retirement. At this point you would be better off curbing your enthusiasm
(which is exactly what one of the most often sold study guides in Germany recommends:
first, lower your expectations on quality and insight).[16]

But
those who have already developed their thinking through writing can keep the
focus on what is interesting for them at the moment and accumulate substantial
material just by doing what they most feel like doing. The material will
cluster around the questions they returned to most often, so they don’t risk
too far of a departure from their interest. If your first chosen topic turns
out to be not as interesting, you will just move on and your notes will cluster
around something else. Maybe you will even note down the reasons why the first
question is not interesting and turn that into an insight valuable enough to
make public. When it finally comes to the decision on what to write about, you
will already have made the decision – because you made it on every single step
along the way, again and again every day, improving it gradually. Instead of
spending your time worrying about finding the right topic, you will spend your
time actually working on your already existing interests and doing what is
necessary to make informed decisions – reading, thinking and writing. By
doing the work, you can trust that interesting questions will emerge.
You might not know where you will end up (and you don’t need to), but you can’t
force insight into a preconceived direction anyway. You minimise both the risk
of losing interest in a topic you have once chosen ill-informed and the risk of
having to start all over again.

Even
though academic writing is not a linear process, that does not mean you should
follow an anything-goes approach. On the contrary, a clear, reliable structure
is paramount.

8  Let
the Work Carry You Forward

You may remember from school the difference between an exergonic and an
endergonic reaction. In the first case, you constantly need to add energy to
keep the process going. In the second case, the reaction, once triggered,
continues by itself and even releases energy. The dynamics of work are not so
different. Sometimes we feel like our work is draining our energy and we can
only move forward if we put more and more energy into it. But sometimes it is
the opposite. Once we get into the workflow, it is as if the work itself gains
momentum, pulling us along and sometimes even energizing us. This is the kind
of dynamic we are looking for.

A
good workflow can easily turn into a virtuous circle, where the positive
experience motivates us to take on the next task with ease, which helps us to
get better at what we are doing, which in return makes it more likely for us to
enjoy the work, and so on. But if we feel constantly stuck in our work, we will
become demotivated and much more likely to procrastinate, leaving us with fewer
positive or even bad experiences like missed deadlines. We might end up in a
vicious circle of failure (cf. Fishbach, Eyal and Finkelstein, 2010).

Any
attempts to trick ourselves into work with external rewards (like doing
something nice after finishing a chapter) are only short-term solutions with no
prospect of establishing a positive feedback loop. These are very fragile
motivational constructions. Only if the work itself becomes rewarding can the
dynamic of motivation and reward become self-sustainable and propel the whole
process forward (DePasque and Tricomi, 2015).

The
extraordinary successful fitness motivation coach Michelle Segar uses this
dynamic to turn even the most stubborn couch potatoes into exercise aficionados
(Segar, 2015). She brings those who really don’t like exercise but know they
have to do it into a sustainable workout routine by focusing on one thing:
Creating satisfying, repeatable experiences with sports. It doesn’t matter what
her clients are doing – running, walking, team sports, gym workouts or bicycling
to work. The only thing that matters is that they discover something that gives
them a good experience that they would like to have again. Once her clients
find something, they are encouraged enough to try something else as
well. They enter the virtuous circle where willpower isn’t needed anymore
because they feel like doing it anyway. If they tried to trick themselves into
exercise by rewarding themselves afterwards with a relaxed evening on the sofa
watching TV, it wouldn’t have taken them long until they went straight for the
sofa, skipping the workout altogether, because this is how we tick.

Feedback
loops are not only crucial for the dynamics of motivation, but also the key
element to any learning process. Nothing motivates us more than the experience
of becoming better at what we do. And the only chance to improve in something
is getting timely and concrete feedback. Seeking feedback, not avoiding it, is
the first virtue of anyone who wants to learn, or in the more general terms of
psychologist Carol Dweck, to grow. Dweck shows convincingly that the
most reliable predictor for long-term success is having a “growth mindset.” To
actively seek and welcome feedback, be it positive or negative, is one of the
most important factors for success (and happiness) in the long run. Conversely,
nothing is a bigger hindrance to personal growth than having a “fixed mindset.”
Those who fear and avoid feedback because it might damage their cherished
positive self-image might feel better in the short term, but will quickly fall
behind in actual performance (Dweck 2006; 2013). Ironically, it is therefore
often the highly gifted and talented students, who receive a lot of praise, who
are more in danger of developing a fixed mindset and getting stuck. Having been
praised for what they are (talented and gifted) rather than for what they do,
they tend to focus on keeping this impression intact, rather than exposing
themselves to new challenges and the possibility of learning from failure.
Embracing a growth mindset means to get pleasure out of changing for the better
(which is mostly inwardly rewarding) instead of getting pleasure in being
praised (which is outwardly rewarding). The orientation towards the latter
makes one stick to safe, proven areas. The orientation towards the first draws
the attention to the areas most in need of improvement. 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.

Having
a growth mindset is crucial, but only one side of the equation. Having a
learning system in place that enables feedback loops in a practical way
is equally important. Being open for feedback doesn’t help very much if the
only feedback you can get comes once every few months for work you have already
finished. The linear model of academic writing comes with very few feedback
opportunities, and even those are usually spread out over time (vgl. Fritzsche,
Young und Hickson, 2003). If you choose a topic for your paper and work
according to the linear model, you will only learn if your choice was wise
after multiple stages of research. The same applies to the question of if you
understood what you read and if your idea for an argument makes sense.

Following
a circular approach, on the other hand, allows you to implement many feedback
loops, which give you the chance to improve your work while you are working on
it. It is not just about increasing the number of opportunities to learn, but
also to be able to correct the mistakes we inevitably make. As the feedback
loops are usually smaller than one big chunk of feedback at the end, they are
also much less scary and easier to embrace.

Reading
with a pen in the hand, for example, forces, us to think about what we read and
check upon our understanding. It is the simplest test: We tend to think we
understand what we read – until we try to rewrite it in our own words. By doing
this, we not only get a better sense of our ability to understand, but also
increase our ability to clearly and concisely express our understanding – which
in return helps to grasp ideas more quickly. If we try to fool ourselves here and
write down incomprehensible words, we will detect it in the next step when we
try to turn our literature notes into permanent notes and try to connect them
with others.

The
ability to express understanding in one’s own words is a fundamental competency
for everyone who writes – and only by doing it with the chance of realizing our
lack of understanding can we become better at it. But the better we become, the
easier and quicker we can make notes, which again increases the number of
learning experiences. The same applies to the crucial ability to distinguish
the important bits of a text from the less important ones: the better we become
at it, the more effective our reading will become, the more we can read, the
more we will learn. We will enter a beautiful, virtuous circle of competency.
You cannot help but feel motivated by it.

The
same goes for writing permanent notes, which have another feedback loop
built-in: Expressing our own thoughts in writing makes us realise if we really
thought them through. The moment we try to combine them with previously written
notes, the system will unambiguously show us contradictions, inconsistencies
and repetitions. While these built-in feedback loops do not make redundant the
feedback from your peers or supervisor, they are the only ones that are always
available and can help us to improve a little bit, multiple times every
single day. And the best thing about this is that while we learn and become
better, our slip-box becomes more knowledgeable too. It grows and improves. And
the more it grows, the more useful it becomes and the easier it will be for us
to make new connections.

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. Its usability grows with its size, not just
linearly but exponentially. When we turn to the slip-box, its inner
connectedness will not just provide us with isolated facts, but with lines of
developed thoughts. Moreover, because of its inner complexity, a search
throught the slip-box will confront us with related notes we did not look for.
This is a very significant difference that becomes more and more relevant over
time. The more content it contains, the more connections it can provide, and
the easier it becomes to add new entries in a smart way and receive useful
suggestions.

Our
brains work not that differently in terms of interconnectedness. Psychologists
used to think of the brain as a limited storage space that slowly fills up and
makes it more difficult to learn late in life. But we know today that the more
connected information we already have, the easier it is to learn, because new
information can dock to that information. Yes, our ability to learn isolated
facts is indeed limited and probably decreases with age. But if facts are not
kept isolated nor learned in an isolated fashion, but hang together in a
network of ideas, or “latticework of mental models” (Munger, 1994), it becomes
easier to make sense of new information. That makes it easier not only to learn
and remember, but also to retrieve the information later in the moment and
context it is needed.

As
we are the authors of all the notes, we learn in lockstep with the slip-box.
This is another big difference from using an encyclopaedia like Wikipedia. We
use the same mental models, theories and terms to organise our thoughts in our
brains as in our slip-box. That the slip-box generates an excess of
possibilities enables it to surprise and inspire us to generate new ideas and
develop our theories further. It is not the slip-box or our brains alone, but
the dynamic between them that makes working with it so productive.

The Six Steps to Successful Writing

9  Separate
and Interlocking Tasks

9.1
Give Each Task Your Undivided Attention

According to a widely cited study, the constant interruption of emails
and text messages cuts our productivity by about 40% and makes us at least 10
IQ points dumber. Even though this study was never published, makes no claims
about intelligence and is statistically irrelevant, it does seem to confirm
what most of us believe anyway and that is that we might have an attention
deficit problem. It might not show it by content, but the mere fact that it was
possible to have a misunderstanding spreading so fast under titles like
“E-mails ‘hurt IQ more than pot’ ” (CNN) is telling. There are real studies
about that as well. We know for example that watching television reduces the
attention span of children (Swing et al. 2010). We also know that the average
length of TV soundbites has steadily declined over the last several decades
(Fehrmann, 2011). During the U.S. presidential election in 1968, the average
soundbite — that is, any footage of a candidate speaking uninterrupted — was
still a little more than 40 seconds, but that had fallen to less than 10
seconds at the end of the 80s (Hallin 1994) and 7.8 seconds in 2000 (Lichter,
2001). The last election has certainly not reversed the trend. Whether that
means that the media adjust to our decreasing attention span or is causing the
trend is not easy to say.[17]
But however it might be, it is obvious that we are surrounded by more sources of
distraction and less opportunities to train our attention spans.

9.2
Multitasking is not a good idea

If more than one thing tries to catch your attention, the temptation is
great to look at more than one thing at the same time – to multitask. Many
people claim to be quite good at multitasking. For some, it is one of the most
important skills to cope with today’s informational overload. It is a common
belief that the younger generations are better at it, that it even comes
naturally to them as they grew up among the attention-seeking new media. And
studies show that those who claim to multitask a lot also claim to be very good
at it. Those interviewed in these studies do not see their productivity
impaired by it. On the contrary, they think it’s improved. But they usually
don’t test themselves in comparison with a control group.

Psychologists
who interviewed the multitaskers did test them instead of just asking. They
gave them different tasks to accomplish and compared their results with another
group that was instructed to do only one thing at a time. The outcome is
unambiguous: While those who multitasked felt more productive, their
productivity actually decreased – a lot (Wang and Tchernev 2012; Rosen 2008;
Ophir, Nass, and Wagner 2009). Not only the quantity but also the quality of
their accomplishments lagged significantly behind that of the control group.

In
some areas, like texting and driving, the downsides of multitasking are
painfully obvious. But what is most interesting about these studies is not the
fact that the productivity and the quality of the work decreases with
multitasking, but that it also impairs the ability to deal with more than
one thing at a time!

This
result is surprising, because we usually expect to become better at something
the more often we do it. But on a closer look, it makes sense. Multitasking is
not what we think it is. It is not focusing attention on more than one thing at
a time. Nobody can do that. When we think we multitask, what we really do is
shift our attention quickly between two (or more) things. And every shift is a
drain on our ability to shift and delays the moment we manage to get focused
again. Trying to multitask fatigues us and decreases our ability to deal with
more than one task.

The
fact that people nevertheless believe that they can get better at it and
increase their productivity can easily be explained by two factors. The first
is the lack of a control group or an objective external measurement that would
provide us with the feedback we need to learn. The second is what psychologists
call the mere-exposure effect: doing something many times makes us believe we
have become good at it – completely independent of our actual performance
(Bornstein 1989). We unfortunately tend to confuse familiarity with skill.

If
the only reason to mention this is to recommend you not write your thesis or
books while driving, it would be quite banal (still a good idea, though). But
it does have practical consequences for the way we work if we think about what “writing”
truly means: many different tasks we might end up trying to do at the same time
if we don’t separate them consciously and practically.

Writing
a paper involves much more than just typing on the keyboard. It also means
reading, understanding, reflecting, getting ideas, making connections,
distinguishing terms, finding the right words, structuring, organizing,
editing, correcting and rewriting. All these are not just different tasks, but
tasks requiring a different kind of attention. It is not only impossible to
focus on more than one thing at a time, but also to have a different kind of
attention on more than one thing at a time.

Usually,
when we think about attention, we only think about focused attention –
something that requires willpower to sustain. This is not too surprising,
because this is what most psychologists, philosophers and neuroscientists used
to have in mind when they talked about attention (Bruya 2010, 5). Today,
research differentiates between multiple forms of attention. Ever since Mihaly
Csikszentmihalyi in the 1970s described “flow,” the state in which being highly
focused becomes effortless (Csikszentmihalyi, 1975),[18]
other forms of attention, which are much less dependent on will and effort,
attracted researchers’ interest.

When
it comes to focused attention, we focus on one thing only, something we can
sustain for only a few seconds. The maximum duration of focused attention seems
not to have changed over time (Doyle and Zakrajsek 2013, 91). Focused attention
is different from “sustained attention,” which we need to stay focused on one
task for a longer period and is necessary to learn, understand or get something
done. This is the kind of attention that is most certainly under threat from an
increase in distractions. The average duration seems to have shrunken quite
considerably over time – we practice much less focused attention than we used
to (ibid).

The
good news is that we can train ourselves to stay focused on one thing for
longer if we avoid multitasking, remove possible distractions and separate
different kinds of tasks as much as possible so they will not interfere with
each other. This too is not just a question of having the right mindset, but,
equally important, of how we organise our workflow. A lack of structure makes
it much more challenging to stay focused for extended periods of time. The
slip-box provides not only a clear structure to work in, but also forces us to
shift our attention consciously as we can complete tasks in reasonable time
before moving on to the next one. Together with the fact that every task is
accompanied by writing, which in itself requires undistracted attention, the
slip-box can become a haven for our restless minds.

9.3
Give Each Task the Right Kind of Attention

On closer look, it becomes obvious how different the tasks are that are
usually summarised under “writing” and how different the kinds of attention are
that they require.

Proofreading,
for example, is obviously part of the writing process, but requires a very
different state of mind than the attempt to find the right words. When we
proofread a manuscript, we take on the role of a critic who takes a step back
to see the text with the eyes of a dispassionate reader. We scan the text for
typos, try to smooth out patches and check structure. We deliberately put
distance between ourselves and the text to see what is really on the paper, not
just in our heads. We try to block out the knowledge of what we meant to say to
be able to see what we wrote.

While
taking on the role of a critic is not the same as being an impartial reader, it
is enough to spot most of what we missed before: the holes in the argument, the
parts we did not explain as we did not need to explain them to ourselves. To be
able to switch between the role of critic and the role of writer requires a
clear separation between these two tasks, and that becomes easier with
experience. If we proofread a manuscript and don’t manage to get enough
distance from ourselves as authors, we will only see our thoughts, not the
actual text. It is a common issue that comes up during discussions with
students: When I point out problems within the argument, an ill-defined term or
just an ambiguous passage, students usually refer to what they mean
first and only shift their focus to what they have written when they fully
understand that what they mean is completely irrelevant within the scientific
community.

Letting
the inner critic interfere with the author isn’t helpful, either. Here we have
to focus our attention on our thoughts. If the critic constantly and
prematurely interferes whenever a sentence isn’t perfect yet, we would never
get anything on paper. We need to get our thoughts on paper first and improve
them there, where we can look at them. Especially complex ideas are
difficult to turn into a linear text in the head alone. If we try to please the
critical reader instantly, our workflow would come to a standstill. We tend to
call extremely slow writers, who always try to write as if for print, perfectionists.
Even though it sounds like praise for extreme professionalism, it is not: A
real professional would wait until it was time for proofreading, so he or she
can focus on one thing at a time. While proofreading requires more focused
attention, finding the right words during writing requires much more floating
attention.

It
is also easier to focus on finding the right words if we don’t have to think
about the structure of the text at the same time, which is why a printed
outline of the manuscript should be always in front of our eyes. We have to
know what we don’t have to write about at the moment, because we know
that we will take care of that in another part of our text.

Outlining
or changing the outline is also a very different task that requires a very
different focus on something else: not on one thought, but on the whole
argument. It is important, though, to understand outlining not as the
preparation of writing or even as planning, but as a separate task we need to
return to throughout the writing process on a regular basis. We need a
structure all the time, but as we work our way bottom-up, it is bound to change
often. And whenever we need to update the structure, we need to take a step
back, look at the big picture and change it accordingly.

Proofreading,
formulating and outlining are also different from the task of combining and
developing thoughts. Working with the slip-box means playing with ideas and
looking out for interesting connections and comparisons. It means building
clusters, combining them with other clusters and preparing the order of notes
for a project. Here, we need to puzzle with notes and find the best fit. It is
much more associative, playful and creative than the other tasks and requires a
very different kind of attention as well.

Reading,
of course, is also different. Reading in itself can require very different
kinds of attention, depending on the text. Some texts need to be read slowly
and carefully, while others are only worth skimming. It would be ridiculous to
adhere to a general formula and read every text in the same way, even though
that is what many study guides or speed-reading courses try to convince us of.
It is not a sign of professionalism to master one technique and stick to it no
matter what, but to be flexible and adjust one’s reading to whatever
speed or approach a text requires.

In
short, academic writing requires the whole spectrum of attention. To master the
art of writing, we need to be able to apply whatever kind of attention and
focus is needed.

Psychologists
used to associate scientific work exclusively with focused attention, while
other, more floating kinds of attention were exclusively associated with
creative work like art. We know today that we need both kinds of attention for
art and science. It is not surprising, therefore, that this flexibility can be
found among most, if not all, exceptional scientists. Oshin Vartanian compared
and analysed the daily workflows of Nobel Prize winners and other eminent
scientists and concluded that it is not a relentless focus, but flexible focus
that distinguishes them. “Specifically, 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)

These
studies help to solve a puzzle that has bothered psychologists who study
creative people as well. “On one hand, those with wandering, defocused,
childlike minds seem to be the most creative; on the other, it seems to be
analysis and application that’s important. The answer to this conundrum is that
creative people need both … The key to creativity is being able to switch
between a wide-open, playful mind and a narrow analytical frame.” (Dean, 2013,
152)

What
psychologists do not discuss, though, are the external conditions that
allow us to be flexible in the first place. The mental flexibility to be
extremely focused for one moment and playfully explore ideas in the next is
just one side of the equation. To be flexible, we need an equally flexible work
structure that doesn’t break down every time we depart from a preconceived
plan. One can be the best driver with the quickest reactions, able to adjust
flexibly to different street and weather conditions. None of that will help a
bit if the driver is stuck on rails. And it does not help us to have great
insight into the necessity of being flexible in our work if we are stuck in a
rigid organisation.

Unfortunately,
the most common way people organise their writing is by making plans. Although
planning is almost universally recommended by study guides, it’s the equivalent
of putting oneself on rails.

Don’t
make plans. Become an expert.

9.4
Become an Expert Instead of a Planner

“(An)
exclusive use of analytical rationality tends to impede further improvement in
human performance because of analytical rationality’s slow reasoning and its
emphasis on rules, principles, and universal solutions. Second, bodily
involvement, speed, and an intimate knowledge of concrete cases in the form of
good examples is a prerequisite for true expertise.” (Flyvbjerg 2001, 15)

The moment we stop making plans is the moment we start to learn. It is a
matter of practice to become good at generating insight and write good texts by
choosing and moving flexibly between the most important and promising tasks,
judged by nothing else than the circumstances of the given situation. It is
similar to the moment where we had the training wheels of our bikes taken off
and started to learn cycling properly. We might have felt a bit insecure in the
first moment, but at the same time, it became obvious that we would never have
learned to bicycle if we left the training wheels on. The only thing we would
have learned is to ride a bike with training wheels on.

Similarly,
no one would ever learn the art of productive academic writing just by
following plans or linear, multistep prescripts – one would learn only to
follow plans or prescripts. 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.

Experts
rely on embodied experience, which enables them to reach the state of
virtuosity. An expert in academic writing has a feel for the process, an
acquired intuition for which task will bring one closer to the finished
manuscript and what is only a distraction. There can be no universally
applicable rule about which step has to be taken when. Each new project is different,
and at each stage of the project, it might be best to read up on something, to
review a passage, to discuss an idea or to change the outline of the
manuscript. There is no universal rule that could tell one upfront at which
stage it wouldn’t make sense to follow up on an idea, a possible contradiction
or a footnote.

To
be able to become an expert, we need the freedom to make our own decisions and
all the necessary mistakes that help us learn. Like bicycling, it can only be
learned by doing it. Most study guides and academic writing teachers are trying
very hard to spare you from that experience by telling you what, when and how
to write instead. But they are keeping you from learning the very thing
academia and writing is all about: gaining insight and making it public.

And
this, by the way, is the reason why you should never ask the teachers of
paramedics for help if you find yourself in the admittedly unlikely situation
where you can choose the person who should perform CPR on you.

In
an experiment, beginner and expert paramedics and their teachers were shown
scenes of CPR performed by either experienced paramedics or those who had just
finished their training (Flyvbjerg 2001).[19]

As
you might expect, the experienced paramedics were able to spot their kind
correctly in almost all cases (~90%), while the beginners were more or less
just guessing (~50%). So far, so good. But when the teachers watched the
videos, they systematically mistook the beginners for experts and the experts
for beginners. They were wrong in most of the cases (and only right in
about a third of all the cases).

Hubert
and Stuart Dreyfus, researchers on expertise, have a simple explanation:
Teachers tend to mistake the ability to follow (their) rules with the ability
to make the right choices in real situations. Unlike the expert paramedics,
they did not look at the unique circumstances and check if the paramedics in
the videos did the best thing possible in each individual situation. Instead,
they focused on the question of whether the people in the videos acted
according to the rules they taught.

Because
trainees lack the experience to judge a situation correctly and confidently,
they need to stick to the rules they were taught, much to the delight of their
teachers. According to the Dreyfuses, the correct application of teachable
rules enables you to become a competent “performer” (which corresponds to a “3”
on their five-grade expert scale), but it won’t make you a “master” (level 4) and
certainly won’t turn you into an “expert” (level 5).

Experts,
on the other hand, have internalised the necessary knowledge so they don’t have
to actively remember rules or think consciously about their choices. They have
acquired enough experience in various situations to be able to rely on their intuition
to know what to do in which kind of situation. Their decisions in complex
situations are explicitly not made by long rational-analytical considerations,
but rather come from the gut (cf. Gigerenzer, 2008a, 2008b).

Here,
gut feeling is not a mysterious force, but an incorporated history of
experience. It is the sedimentation of deeply learned practice through numerous
feedback loops on success or failure.[20]
Even a rational and analytical endeavour like science does not function without
expertise, intuition and experience – which is one of the most interesting
outcomes of the empirical research on natural scientists in their laboratories
(Rheinberger 1997). Chess players seem to think less than beginners.
Rather, they see patterns and let themselves be guided by their
experience from the past rather than attempt to calculate turns far into the
future.

But
like in professional chess, the intuition of professional academic and
nonfiction writing can also only be gained by systematic exposure to feedback
loops and experience, which means that success in academic writing depends to a
great degree on the organization of its practical side. The
workflow around the slip-box is not a prescription that tells you what to do at
what stage of writing. On the contrary: It gives you a structure of clearly
separable tasks, which can be completed within reasonable time and provides you
with instant feedback through interconnected writing tasks. It allows you to
become better by giving you the opportunity for deliberate practice. The more
experience you gain, the more you will be able to rely on your intuition to
tell you what to do next. Instead of taking you “from intuition to professional
writing strategies”, as the title of a typical study guide promises, it is here
all about becoming a professional by acquiring the skills and experience to
judge situations correctly and intuitively so you can chuck misleading study
guides for good. Real experts, Flyvbjerg writes unambiguously, don’t make plans
(Flyvbjerg 2001, 19).

9.5
Get Closure

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. While the estimations of our long-term
memory capacity are wildly diverse and rather speculative, psychologists used
to tend to agree on a very specific number when it came to short-term memory:
We can hold a maximum of seven things in our head at the same time, plus/minus
two (Miller 1956).

Information
cannot be saved in short-term memory like on a memory stick. Rather, it kind of
floats around in our heads, seeks our attention and occupies valuable mental
resources until it is either forgotten, replaced by something more important
(according to our brains) or moved into long-term memory. When we try to
remember something, say items on a shopping list, we just keep repeating the
items mentally, instead of storing them temporarily in some corner of our
brains where we can pick them up later and think about something more
interesting in the meantime.

But
what about memory artists? It might seem like we can increase the number of
things we can remember by employing memo techniques – and not just a bit, but
significantly. But what we actually do when we use memo techniques is to bundle
items together in a meaningful way and remember the bundles – up to about seven
(Levin and Levin, 1990). Or, if recent research is right and the participants
in earlier tests have always already bundled things together, then the maximum
capacity of our working memory is not seven plus/minus two, but more like a
maximum of four (Cowan 2001).

Have
a look at the following number sequence only once and try to remember it right
away: 11 95 82 19 62 31 96 64 19 70 51 97 4.

That’s
difficult, as it has clearly more than seven digits. But it is quite easy when
you realise that these are just five years of the World Cup numbered
consecutively. Therefore, you have to remember much less than seven individual
items. You only have to remember two – the rule and the starting year.[21]

This
is why it is so much easier to remember things we understand than things we
don’t. It is not that we have to choose to focus either on learning or
understanding. It is always about understanding – and if it is only for the
sake of learning. Things we understand are connected, either through
rules, theories, narratives, pure logic, mental models or explanations. And
deliberately building these kinds of meaningful connections is what the
slip-box is all about.

Every
step is accompanied by questions like: How does this fact fit into my idea of
…? How can this phenomenon be explained by that theory? Are these two ideas
contradictory or do they complement each other? Isn’t this argument similar to
that one? Haven’t I heard this before? And above all: What does x mean for y?
These questions not only increase our understanding, but facilitate learning as
well. Once we make a meaningful connection to an idea or fact, it is difficult
not to remember it when we think about what it is connected with.

While
we want to remember some things as long as possible, we don’t want to clog our
brains with irrelevant information. And the way we organise everyday
information makes a big difference not only for long-term memories, but
short-term as well.

Here,
we have to thank Soviet psychologist Bluma Zeigarnik for her insight and
observational skills. The story goes that she went for lunch with her
colleagues and was very impressed by the waiter’s ability to remember correctly
who ordered what without the need to write anything down. It is said that she
had to go back to the restaurant to get the jacket she left there. Much to her
surprise, the waiter she admired just minutes ago for his great memory didn’t
even recognise her. Questioned about what seemed to her a contradiction, he
explained that all the waiters had no problem remembering the orders and
matching them with the guests at the table. But the very second diners left the
restaurant, the waiters all forgot them completely and focused on the next
group.

Zeigarnik
successfully reproduced what is now known as the Zeigarnik effect: Open tasks
tend to occupy our short-term memory – until they are done. That is why we get
so easily distracted by thoughts of unfinished tasks, regardless of their
importance. But thanks to Zeigarnik’s follow-up research, we also know that we
don’t actually have to finish tasks to convince our brains to stop thinking
about them. All we have to do is to write them down in a way that convinces us
that it will be taken care of. That’s right: The brain doesn't distinguish
between an actual finished task and one that is postponed by taking a note. By
writing something down, we literally get it out of our heads. This is why David
Allen’s “Getting things done” system works: The secret to have a “mind like
water” is to get all the little stuff out of our short-term memory. And
as we can’t take care of everything once and for all right now, the only way to
do that is to have a reliable external system in place where we can keep all
our nagging thoughts about the many things that need to be done and trust that
they will not be lost.

And
the same is true for the work with the slip-box. To be able to focus on the
task at hand, we have to make sure other, unfinished tasks are not lingering in
our head and wasting precious mental resources.

The
first step is to break down the amorphous task of “writing” into smaller pieces
of different tasks that can be finished in one go. The second step is to
make sure we always write down the outcome of our thinking, including possible
connections to further inquiries. As the outcome of each task is written down
and possible connections become visible, it is easy to pick up the work any
time where we left it without having to keep it in mind all the time. [22] Possible subsequent tasks are open
questions or connections to other notes, which we could elaborate on further or
not. It also comes up in explicit reminders like “review this chapter and check
for redundancies,” which belong into the project folder. Or the third option is
the simple fact that something is still in our in-box waiting to be turned into
a permanent note – a quick and not-yet–crossed-out note in our notebook, or
literature notes not yet archived in our reference system.

All
this enables us to later pick up a task exactly where we stopped without the
need to “keep in mind” that there still was something to do. That is one of the
main advantages of thinking in writing – everything is externalised anyway.

Conversely,
we can use the Zeigarnik effect to our advantage by deliberately keeping
unanswered questions in our mind. We can ruminate about them, even when we do
something that has nothing to do with work and ideally does not require our
full attention. Letting thoughts linger without focusing on them gives our
brains the opportunity to deal with problems in a different, often surprisingly
productive way. While we have a walk or a shower or clean the house, the brain
cannot help but play around with the last unsolved problem it came across. And
that is why we so often find the answer to a question in rather casual
situations.

By
taking into account these little insights into how our brains work, we can make
sure that we will not get distracted by thoughts of what we need from the
supermarket when we sit at the desk. Rather, we may solve a crucial problem
while we run errands.

9.6
Reduce the Number of Decisions

Next to the attention that can only be directed at one thing at a time
and the short-term memory that can only hold up to seven things at once, the
third limited resource is motivation or willpower. Here, too, the environmental
design of our workflow makes all the difference. It shouldn’t come as a
surprise anymore that a close cooperation with the slip-box turns out to be far
superior to any sophisticated planning.

For
the longest time, willpower was seen more as a character trait than a resource.
This has changed. Today, willpower is compared to muscles: a limited resource
that depletes quickly and needs time to recover. Improvement through training is
possible to a certain degree, but takes time and effort. The phenomenon is
usually discussed under the term “ego depletion”: “We use the term ego
depletion to refer to a temporary reduction in the self’s capacity or
willingness to engage in volitional action (including controlling the
environment, controlling the self, making choices, and initiating action)
caused by prior exercise of volition.” (Baumeister et al., 1998, 1253)

One
of the most interesting findings of the research on ego depletion is the broad
variety of things that can have a depleting effect.

“Our
results suggest that a broad assortment of actions make use of the same
resource. Acts of self-control, responsible decision making, and active choice
seem to interfere with other such acts that follow soon after. The implication
is that some vital resource of the self becomes depleted by such acts of
volition. To be sure, we assume that this resource is commonly replenished,
although the factors that might hasten or delay the replenishment remain
unknown, along with the precise nature of this resource.” (Baumeister et al.,
1998, 1263f)

Even something seemingly unrelated like being the victim of prejudices
can have a significant effect (Inzlicht, McKay, and Aronson, 2006) as
“controlling the influence of stereotypes (… may rely on the same…)
limited-strength resource on which people draw for self-regulation” (Govorun
and Payne 2006, 112).

The
smartest way to deal with this kind of limitation is to cheat. Instead of
forcing ourselves to do something we don’t feel like doing, we need to find a
way to make us feel like doing what moves our project further along. Doing the
work that need to be done without having to apply too much willpower requires a
technique, a ruse.

Even
though results of these studies are currently under intense scrutiny and have
to be taken with a grain of salt (Carter and McCullough 2014; Engber and
Cauterucci 2016; Job, Dweck and Walton 2010), it is safe to argue that a
reliable and standardised working environment is less taxing on our attention,
concentration and willpower, or, if you like, ego. It is well known that
decision-making is one of the most tiring and wearying tasks, which is why
people like Barack Obama or Bill Gates only wear two suit colours: dark blue or
dark grey. This means they have one less decision to make in the morning,
leaving more resources for the decisions that really matter.

In
the way we organise our research and writing, we too can significantly reduce
the amount of decisions we have to make. While content-related decisions have
to be made (on what is more and what is less important in an article, on the
connections between notes, the structure of a text, etc.), most organisational
decisions can be made up front, once and for all, by deciding on one
system. By always using the same notebook for making quick notes, always
extracting the main ideas from a text in the same way and always turning them
into the same kind of permanent notes, which are always dealt with in the same
manner, the number of decisions during a work session can be greatly reduced.
That leaves us with much more mental energy that we can direct towards more
useful tasks, like trying to solve the problems in question.

Being
able to finish a task in a timely manner and to pick up the work exactly where
we left it has another enjoyable advantage that helps to restore our attention:
We can have breaks without fear of losing the thread. Breaks are much more than
just opportunities to recover. They are crucial for learning. They allow the
brain to process information, move it into long-term memory and prepare it for
new information (Doyle and Zakrajsek 2013, 69).[23]
If we don’t give ourselves a break in between work sessions, be it out of eagerness
or fear of forgetting what we were doing, it can have a detrimental effect on
our efforts. To have a walk (Ratey, 2008) or even a nap[24]
supports learning and thinking.[25]

10   Read
for Understanding

“I would
advise you to read with a pen in your hand and enter in a little book short
hints of what you feel that is common or that may be useful; for this will be
the best method of imprinting such portcullis in your memory.”

– Benjamin Franklin[26]

10.1   Read
With a Pen in Hand

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, all you really have to do is have a
pen in your hand when you read.

If
you understand what you read and translate it into the different context of
your own thinking, materialised in the slip-box, you cannot help but transform
the findings and thoughts of others into something that is new and your own. It
works both ways: The series of notes in the slip-box develops into arguments,
which are shaped by the theories, ideas and mental models you have in your
head. And the theories, ideas and mental models in your head are also shaped by
the things you read. They are constantly changing and challenged by the
surprising connections with which the slip-box confronts you. The richer the
slip-box becomes, the richer your own thinking becomes. The slip-box is an idea
generator that develops in lockstep with your own intellectual development.
Together, you can turn previously separated or even isolated facts into a
critical mass of interconnected ideas.

The
step from the slip-box to the final text is pretty straightforward. The content
is already meaningful, thought through and in many parts already put into
well-connected sequences. The notes only need to be put into a linear order.
While the notes themselves are formulated so that they can be understood on
their own, they are at the same time embedded in one or more contexts that
enrich their meaning. Drawing from the slip-box to develop a draft is more like
a dialogue with it than a mechanical act. Therefore, the outcome is never a
copy of previous work, but always comes with surprises. There will always be
something you couldn’t have anticipated. Obviously, the same applies to every
single step before. The outcome of reading with a pen in the hand is not
possible to anticipate either, and here, too, the idea is not to copy, but to
have a meaningful dialogue with the texts we read.

When
we extract ideas from the specific context of a text, we deal with ideas that
serve a specific purpose in a particular context, support a specific argument,
are part of a theory that isn’t ours or written in a language we wouldn’t use.
This is why we have to translate them into our own language to prepare them to
be embedded into new contexts of our own thinking, the different context(s)
within the slip-box. Translating means to give the truest possible account of
the original work, using different words – it does not mean the freedom to make
something fit. As well, the mere copying of quotes almost always changes their
meaning by stripping them out of context, even though the words aren’t changed.
This is a common beginner mistake, which can only lead to a patchwork of ideas,
but never a coherent thought.

While
the literature notes will be stored within the reference system together with
the bibliographic details, separate from the slip-box, but still close to the
context of the original text, they are already written with an eye towards the
lines of thoughts within the slip-box. Luhmann describes this step as follows:
“I always have a slip of paper at hand, on which I note down the ideas of
certain pages. On the backside I write down the bibliographic details. After
finishing the book I go through my notes and think how these notes might be
relevant for already written notes in the slip-box. It means that I always read
with an eye towards possible connections in the slip-box.” (Luhmann et al.,
1987, 150)

How
extensive the literature notes should be really depends on the text and what we
need it for. It also depends on our ability to be concise, the complexity of
the text and how difficult it is to understand. As literature notes are also a
tool for understanding and grasping the text, more elaborate notes make sense
in more challenging cases, while in easier cases it might be sufficient to just
jot down some keywords. Luhmann, certainly being on the outer spectrum of
expertise, contented himself with pretty short notes and was still able to turn
them into valuable slip-box notes without distorting the meaning of the original
texts.[27] It is mainly a matter of having an
extensive latticework of mental models or theories in our heads that enable us
to identify and describe the main ideas quickly (cf. Rickheit and
Sichelschmidt, 1999). Whenever we explore a new, unfamiliar subject, our notes
will tend to be more extensive, but we shouldn’t get nervous about it, as this
is the deliberate practice of understanding we cannot skip. 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. And what is most helpful is to reflect on
the frame, the theoretical background, methodological approach or perspective
of the text we read. That often means to reflect as much on what is not mentioned
as what is mentioned.

Taking
literature notes this way is very different from the way literature notes are
taken by most students, which is either not systematic enough or overly
systematic. Most often, it is just systematic in the wrong way: By employing
often-recommended reading techniques like SQ3R or SQ4R, they treat every text
the same, regardless of the content. They do not clearly decide on the format
and the organisation of their notes and do not have a plan for what to do with
them afterwards. Without a clear purpose for the notes, taking them will feel
more like a chore than an important step within a bigger project. Sometimes,
long excerpts are written with good intentions, but that is not sustainable.
Sometimes the only thing that is done is underlining sentences and making some
comments in the margins of a book, which is almost like taking no notes at all.
And more often than not, reading is not accompanied by taking notes, which is,
in terms of writing, almost as valuable as not having read at all. Here, everything
is about building up a critical mass of useful notes in the slip-box, which
gives us a clear idea of how to read and how to take literature notes.

While
the purpose of taking literature notes is as clear as the procedure, you are
free to use whatever technique helps the most with understanding what you are
reading and getting to useful notes – even if you use ten different colours for
underlining and a SQ8R reading technique. But all of this would be just an
extra step before you do the only step that really counts, which is to take the
permanent note that will add value to the actual slip-box. You need to take
some form of literature note that captures your understanding of the text, so
you have something in front of your eyes while you are making the slip-box
note. But don’t turn it into a project in itself. Literature notes are short
and meant to help with writing slip-box notes. Everything else either helps to
get to this point or is a distraction.

You
can type a literature note directly into Zotero, where it will be stored with
the bibliographic details. You might want to write them by hand, though.
Different independent studies indicate that writing by hand facilitates
understanding. In a small but fascinating study, two psychologists tried to
find out if it made a difference if students in a lecture took notes by hand or
by typing them into their laptops (Mueller and Oppenheimer 2014). They were not
able to find any difference in terms of the number of facts the students were
able to remember. But in terms of understanding the content of the lecture,
the students who took their notes by hand came out much, much better. After a
week, this difference in understanding was still clearly measurable.

There
is no secret to it and the explanation is pretty simple: Handwriting is slower
and can’t be corrected as quickly as electronic notes. Because students can’t
write fast enough to keep up with everything that is said in a lecture, they
are forced to focus on the gist of what is being said, not the details. But to
be able to note down the gist of a lecture, you have to understand it in the
first place. So if you are writing by hand, you are forced to think about
what you hear (or read) – otherwise you wouldn’t be able to grasp the
underlying principle, the idea, the structure of an argument. Handwriting makes
pure copying impossible, but instead facilitates the translation of what is
said (or written) into one’s own words. The students who typed into their
laptops were much quicker, which enabled them to copy the lecture more closely
but circumvented actual understanding. They focused on completeness. Verbatim
notes can be taken with almost no thinking, as if the words are taking a short
cut from the ear to the hand, bypassing the brain.

If you decide to write your notes by hand, just
keep them in one place and sort them alphabetically in the usual way:
“SurnameYear”. Then you can easily match them with the bibliographic details in
your reference system. 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.

10.2   Keep
an Open Mind

While selectivity is the key to smart note-taking, it is equally important
to be selective in a smart way. Unfortunately, our brains are not very smart in
selecting information by default. While we should seek out dis-confirming
arguments and facts that challenge our way of thinking, we are naturally drawn
to everything that makes us feel good, which is everything that confirms what
we already believe we know.

The
very moment we decide on a hypothesis, our brains automatically go into search
mode, scanning our surroundings for supporting data, which is neither a good way
to learn nor research. Worse, we are usually not even aware of this confirmation
bias (or myside bias[28]) that surreptitiously meddles with
our life. Somehow, we just seem to happen to be surrounded by people who all
think alike. (Not on purpose, of course. We just spend our time with people we
like. And why do we like them? Correct: Because they think like us.) We just
seem to happen to read the publications that tend to confirm what we already
know. (Not on purpose, of course. We just try to stick with good, intelligent
texts. And what makes us think these texts are good and intelligent? Correct:
because they make sense to us.) We look around and just cut out
dis-confirming facts without even noticing what we don’t see, very much like
the same city can one day be full of happy people and the other day full of
miserable ones, depending on our mood.

Confirmation
bias is a subtle but major force. As the psychologist Raymond Nickerson puts
it: “If one were to attempt to identify a single problematic aspect of human
reasoning that deserves attention above all others, the confirmation bias would
have to be among the candidates for consideration” (Nickerson 1998, 175).

Even
the best scientists and thinkers are not free from it. What sets them apart is
the mere fact that they are aware of the problem and do something about it. The
classic role model would be Charles Darwin. He forced himself to write down
(and therefore elaborate on) the arguments that were the most critical of his theories.
“I had [...] during many years followed a golden rule, namely, that whenever a
published fact, a new observation or thought came across me, which was opposed
to my general results, to make a memorandum of it without fail and at once; for
I had found by experience that such facts and thoughts were far more apt to
escape from the memory than favorable ones. Owing to this habit, very few
objections were raised against my views, which I had not at least noticed and
attempted to answer.” (Darwin 1958, 123)

This
is a good (primarily mental) technique to deal with confirmation bias. But we
are looking for ways to implement insight into our psychological limitations in
an external system. We want to make the right decisions without too much mental
effort – very much like Odysseus, who made it impossible for himself to follow
the luring singing of the Sirens by getting himself lashed to the mast of his
ship. With a good system, the mere necessities of the workflow will force us to
act more virtuously without actually having to become more virtuous.
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.

The
linear process promoted by most study guides, which insanely starts with the
decision on the hypothesis or the topic to write about, is a sure-fire way to
let confirmation bias run rampant. First, you basically fix your present
understanding, as the outcome instead of using it as the starting point,
priming yourself for one-sided perception. Then you artificially create a
conflict of interest between getting things done (finding support for your
preconceived argument) and generating insight, turning any departure from your
preconceived plan into a mutiny against the success of your own project. This
is a good rule of thumb: If insight becomes a threat to your academic or
writing success, you are doing it wrong.

Developing
arguments and ideas bottom-up instead of top-down is the first and most
important step to opening ourselves up for insight. We should be able to focus
on the most insightful ideas we encounter and welcome the most surprising turns
of events without jeopardizing our progress or, even better, because it brings
our project forward. We postpone the decision on what to write about
specifically and focus on building a critical mass within the slip-box. Instead
of having the hypothesis in mind all the time, we want to:

·    Confirm
that we have separated tasks and focus on understanding the text we read,

·    Make
sure we have given a true account of its content

·    Find
the relevance of it and make connections.

Only then do we take a step back to look at what developed, then make a
decision on what 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. Everything can contribute to the development of thoughts
within the slip-box: an addition as well as a contradiction, the questioning of
a seemingly obvious idea as well as the differentiation of an argument. What we
are looking for are facts and information that can add something and
therefore enrich the slip-box. One of the most important habitual changes when
starting to work with the slip-box is moving the attention from the individual
project with our preconceived ideas towards the open connections within the
slip-box.

After
aligning our interests, we can go a step further and prime ourselves for
seeking out dis-confirming facts. Collecting only one-sided ideas wouldn’t be
very enriching. Yes, we have to be selective, but not in terms of pros and
cons, but in terms of relevant or irrelevant. And as soon we focus on the
content of the slip-box, dis-confirming data becomes suddenly very attractive,
because it opens up more possible connections and discussions within the
slip-box, while mere confirming data does not. It becomes easier to seek out
dis-confirming data with practice and can become quite addictive. The
experience of how one piece of information can change the whole perspective on
a certain problem is exciting. And the more diverse the content of the slip-box
is, the further it can bring our thinking forward – provided we haven’t decided
on the direction upfront. Contradictions within the slip-box can be discussed
on follow-up notes or even in the final paper. It is so much easier to develop
an interesting text from a lively discussion with a lot of pros and cons than
from a collection of one-sided notes and seemingly fitting quotes. In fact, it
is almost impossible to write anything interesting and worth publishing (and
therefore motivating) if it is based on nothing else than an idea we were able
to come up with up front before elaborating on the problem.

The
slip-box is pretty agnostic about the content it is fed. It just prefers relevant
notes. It is after reading and collecting relevant data, connecting
thoughts and discussing how they fit together that it is time to draw
conclusions and develop a linear structure for the argument.

10.3   Get
the Gist

The ability to distinguish relevant from less relevant information is
another skill that can only be learned by doing. It is the practice of looking
for the gist and distinguishing it from mere supporting details. As we are
forced to make this distinction when we read with a pen in our hand and write
permanent note after permanent note, it is more than mere practice: it is
deliberate practice repeated multiple times a day. 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.

Patterns
that help us navigate texts and discourses are not only theories, concepts or
the respective terminology, but also typical mistakes we automatically scan an
argument for, general categories we apply, writing styles that indicate a
certain school of thought or mental models we learn or develop from different
insights and can collect like a great and ever-increasing set of thinking
tools. Without these tools and reference points, no professional reading or
understanding would be possible. We would read every text in the same way: like
a novel. But with the learned ability of spotting patterns, we can enter the circle
of virtuosity: Reading becomes easier, we grasp the gist quicker, can read more
in less time, and can more easily spot patterns and improve our understanding
of them. And along the way, we increase our set of thinking tools, which will
not only help with academic work, but with thinking and understanding in
general. That is why Berkshire Hathaway vice chairman Charlie Munger describes
as worldly-wise someone who has a broad set of these tools and knows how to
apply them.

But
this dynamic can only start if we ourselves deliberately decide to take
on the task of reading and being selective about it, relying on nothing other
than our own judgement of what is important and what is not. Textbooks or
secondary literature in general cannot take this off our hands, and students
who solely rely on them have no chance of becoming “worldly wise.” This is not
far off from what philosopher Immanuel Kant described in his famous text about
the Enlightenment: “Nonage [immaturity] is the inability to use one’s own
understanding without another’s guidance. This nonage is self-imposed if its
cause lies not in lack of understanding but in indecision and lack of courage
to use one’s own mind without another’s guidance. Dare to know! (Sapere aude.)
‘Have the courage to use your own understanding,’ is therefore the motto of the
Enlightenment.” (Kant 1784)

I
suggest taking this literally. The ability to use one’s own understanding is a
challenge, not a given. Luhmann stresses the importance of permanent notes in
this regard:

“The
problem with reading academic texts seems to be that we need not the short-term
memory, but the long-term memory to develop reference points for distinguishing
the important things from the less important, the new information from the mere
repeated. But it is of course impossible to remember everything. That would be
rote learning. To put it differently: One has to read extremely selectively and
extract widespread and connected references. One has to be able to follow
recurrences. But how to learn it if guidance is impossible? […] Probably the
best method is to take notes – not excerpts, but condensed reformulated
accounts of a text. Rewriting what was already written almost automatically
trains one to shift the attention towards frames, patterns and categories in
the observations, or the conditions/assumptions, which enable certain, but not
other descriptions. It makes sense to always ask the question: What is not
meant, what is excluded if a certain claim is made? If someone speaks of ‘human
rights:’ What distinction is made? A distinction towards ‘non-human rights?’
‘Human duties?’ Is it a cultural comparison or one with some historic people
who didn’t have the concept of human rights, but lived okay together anyway?
Often, the text does not give an answer or a clear answer to this question. But
then one has to resort to one’s own imagination.” (Luhmann 2000, 154f)

The better you become in doing this, the quicker you can jot down notes,
which are still helpful. Luhmann’s notes are very condensed (Schmidt 2015).
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. Not
only will the readers of your text appreciate your ability to explain something
clearly, those you talk to will benefit from this ability as well, as it is not
limited to writing. It spills over into speaking and thinking. It is proven
that readers regard an author and an audience a speaker as more intelligent the
more clear and to the point their expressions are (Oppenheimer 2006).

The
ability to spot patterns, to question the frames used and detect the
distinctions made by others, is the precondition to thinking critically and looking
behind the assertions of a text or a talk. Being able to re-frame questions,
assertions and information is even more important than having an extensive
knowledge, because without this ability, we wouldn’t be able to put our
knowledge to use. The good news is that these skills can be learned. But it
requires deliberate practice (Ericsson, Krampe, and Tesch-Römer 1993; Anders
Ericsson 2008). Taking smart notes is the deliberate practice of these skills.
Mere reading, underlining sentences and hoping to remember the content is not.

10.4   Learn
to Read

“If you
can’t say it clearly, you don’t understand it yourself.” (John Searle)

Physicist and Nobel Prize winner Richard Feynman once said that he could
only determine whether he understood something if he could give an introductory
lecture on it. Reading with a pen in your hand is the small-scale equivalent of
a lecture. Permanent notes, too, are directed towards an audience ignorant of
the thoughts behind the text and unaware of the original context, only equipped
with a general knowledge of the field. The only difference is that the audience
here consists of our future selves, which will very soon have reached the same
state of ignorance as someone who never had access to what we have written
about. Of course, it would be helpful to involve other people at all stages of
the writing process, because then we can see in their faces how well we have
put something or how convincing our arguments are, but that is rather
impractical.

Also,
we shouldn’t underestimate the advantages of writing. In oral presentations, we
easily get away with unfounded claims. We can distract from argumentative gaps
with confident gestures or drop a casual “you know what I mean” irrespective of
whether we know what we meant. In writing, these manoeuvres are a little
too obvious. It is easy to check a statement like: “But that is what I said!”
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.

“The
principle is that you must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to
fool,” Feynman stressed in a speech to young scientists (Feynman 1985, 342).
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 (Bornstein 1989).

While
it is obvious that familiarity is not understanding, we have no chance of
knowing whether we understand something or just believe we understand something
until we test ourselves in some form. If we don’t try to verify our
understanding during our studies, we will happily enjoy the feeling of getting
smarter and more knowledgeable while in reality staying as dumb as we were.
This warm feeling disappears quickly when we try to explain what we read in our
own words in writing. Suddenly, we see the problem. The attempt to
rephrase an argument in our own words confronts us without mercy with all the
gaps in our understanding. It certainly feels less good, but this struggle is
the only chance we have to improve our understanding, to learn and move forward
(cf. below). 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.

Understanding
is not just a precondition to learning something. To a certain degree, learning
is understanding. And the mechanisms are not so different, either: We
can only improve our learning if we test ourselves on our progress. Here, too,
rereading or reviewing does not confront us with the things we haven’t learned
yet, although it makes us feel like we have. Only the actual attempt to
retrieve information will clearly show us if we have learned something or not.
The mere-exposure effect would fool us here, too: Seeing something we have seen
before causes the same emotional reaction as if we had been able to
retrieve the information from our memory. Rereading, therefore, makes us feel
we have learned what we read: “I know that already!” Our brains are terrible
teachers in this regard. We face here the same choice between methods that make
us feel like we learned something and methods that truly do make us learn
something.

If
you now think: “That’s ridiculous. Who would want to read and pretend to learn
just for the illusion of learning and understanding?” please look up the
statistics: The majority of students chooses every day not to test
themselves in any way. Instead, they apply the very method research has shown
again (Karpicke, Butler, and Roediger 2009) and again (Brown 2014, ch. 1) to be
almost completely useless: rereading and underlining sentences for later
rereading. And most of them choose that method, even if they are taught that
they don’t work. Consciously, we probably would all choose the same, but
what really matters are the many small, implicit choices we have to make every
day, and they are most often made unconsciously.

This
is why choosing an external system that forces us to deliberate practice and confronts
us as much as possible with our lack of understanding or not-yet-learned
information is such a smart move. We only have to make the conscious choice
once.

10.5   Learn
by Reading

Learning itself requires deliberate practice, and I mean actual learning
that helps us to increase our understanding of the world, not just the learning
that makes us pass a test. And deliberate practice is demanding; it requires
effort. Trying to skip this step would be like going to the gym and trying to
work out with the least effort possible. That just doesn’t make sense, just
like it wouldn’t make sense to hire a coach to do the heavy lifting. A coach is
not there to do the work, but to show us how to use our time and effort in the
most effective way. What is self-evident in sports we are only starting to
realise is true for learning as well. “The one who does the work does the
learning,” writes Doyle (2008, 63). It is hard to believe, but in education
that is still a revolutionary idea.

Learning
requires effort, because we have to think to understand and we need to actively
retrieve old knowledge to convince our brains to connect it with new ideas as
cues. To understand how groundbreaking this idea is, it helps to remember how
much effort teachers still put into the attempt to make learning easier for
their students by prearranging information, sorting it into modules, categories
and themes. By doing that, they achieve the opposite of what they intend to do.
They make it harder for the student to learn because they set everything up for
reviewing, taking away the opportunity to build meaningful connections and to
make sense of something by translating it into one’s own language. It is like
fast food: It is neither nutritious nor very enjoyable, it is just convenient.

It
would be surprising if teachers changed the topic in the middle of the lesson,
moving on to the next chapter before anyone had the chance to really understand
the first one, only to come back to the previous topic later. It would also be
unexpected to test the students constantly, half of the time about things that
weren’t even mentioned yet. But as much as it would probably annoy the
students, who are used to having their material presented in neat categories,
it would force them to make sense of what they encounter – and that would make
them really learn it.

“Manipulations
such as variation, spacing, introducing contextual interference, and using
tests, rather than presentations, as learning events, all share the property
that they appear during the learning process to impede learning, but they then
often enhance learning as measured by post-training tests of retention and
transfer. Conversely, manipulations such as keeping conditions constant and
predictable and massing trials on a given task often appear to enhance the rate
of learning during instruction or training, but then typically fail to support
long-term retention and transfer” (Bjork, 2011, 8).

When we try to answer a question before we know how to, we will later
remember the answer better, even if our attempt failed (Arnold and McDermott
2013). If we put effort into the attempt of retrieving information, we are much
more likely to remember it in the long run, even if we fail to retrieve it
without help in the end (Roediger and Karpicke 2006). Even without any
feedback, we will be better off if we try to remember something ourselves (Jang
et al. 2012). The empirical data is pretty unambiguous, but these learning
strategies do not necessarily feel right. Intuitively, most students resort to
cramming, which is just another term for reading something again and again in a
failed attempt to learn it (Dunlosky et al. 2013). And as much as rereading
doesn’t help with learning, it certainly doesn’t help with understanding.
Admittedly, cramming does get information into your head for a short while –
usually long enough to stay in there to pass a test. But cramming won’t help
you learn. As Terry Doyle and Todd Zakrajsek put it: “If learning is your goal,
cramming is an irrational act” (Doyle and Zakrajsek 2013).[29]

Instead
of reviewing a text, you could just as well play a round of ping-pong. In fact,
chances are it would help you more because exercise helps to transfer
information into long-term memory (cf. Ratey 2008). Plus, exercise reduces
stress, which is good, because stress floods our brains with hormones that
suppress learning processes (Baram et al. 2008).

In
short: Pure re-viewing just doesn’t make any sense, neither for understanding
nor for learning. It is debatable if we even can call it learning.

It
is not surprising, therefore, that the best-researched and most successful
learning method is elaboration. It is very similar to what we do when we take
smart notes and combine them with others, which is the opposite of mere
re-viewing (Stein et al. 1984) Elaboration means nothing other than really
thinking about the meaning of what we read, how it could inform different
questions and topics and how it could be combined with other knowledge. In
fact, “Writing for Learning” is the name of an “elaboration method” (Gunel,
Hand, and Prain 2007). But there is a caveat. Even though elaboration works
verifiably well for deep understanding, it might not be the best choice if you
just want to learn isolated encyclopaedic facts (Rivard 1994). But as long as
you are not striving for a career as a quiz show candidate, why would you want
that, anyway? The slip-box takes care of storing facts and information.
Thinking and understanding is what it can’t take off your shoulders, which is
why it makes sense to focus on this part of the work. That it facilitates
learning as well is a nice side effect. Luhmann almost never read a text twice
(Hagen 1997) and was still regarded as an impressive conversation partner who
seemed to have all information ready to hand.[30]

Working
with the slip-box, therefore, doesn’t mean storing information in there instead
of in your head, i.e. not learning. On the contrary, it facilitates real, long-term
learning. It just means not cramming isolated facts into your brain – something
you probably wouldn’t want to do anyway. The objection that it takes too much
time to take notes and sort them into the slip-box is therefore short-sighted.
Writing, taking notes and thinking about how ideas connect is exactly the kind
of elaboration that is needed to learn. Not learning from what we read because
we don’t take the time to elaborate on it is the real waste of time.

There
is a clear division of labour between the brain and the slip-box: The slip-box
takes care of details and references and is a long-term memory resource that
keeps information objectively unaltered. That allows the brain to focus on the
gist, the deeper understanding and the bigger picture, and frees it up to be
creative. Both the brain and the slip-box can focus on what they are best at.

11   Take
Smart Notes

The educational psychologist Kirsti Lonka compared the reading approach
of unusually successful doctoral candidates and students with those who were
much less successful. One difference stood out as critical: The ability to
think beyond the given frames of a text (Lonka 2003, 155f).

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.

Even
more problematic than staying within the given frame of a text or an argument
is the inability to interpret particular information in the text within the
bigger frame or argument of the text. Even doctoral students sometimes just collect
de-contextualised quotes from a text – probably the worst possible approach to
research imaginable. This makes it almost impossible to understand the actual
meaning of information. Without understanding information within its context,
it is also impossible to go beyond it, to reframe it and to think about what it
could mean for another question.

Jerome
Bruner, a psychologist Lonka refers to, goes a step further and says that
scientific thinking is plainly impossible if we can’t manage to think beyond a
given context and we only focus on the information as it is given to us
(Bruner, 1973, quoted after ibid.) It is not surprising, therefore, that Lonka
recommends what Luhmann recommends: Writing brief accounts on the main ideas of
a text instead of collecting quotes. And she also stresses that it is no less
important to do something with these ideas – to think hard about how they
connect with other ideas from different contexts and could inform questions
that are not already the questions of the author of the respective text.

This
is exactly what we do when we take the next step, in which we write and add
permanent notes to the slip-box. We don’t just play with ideas in our heads,
but do something with them in a very concrete way: We think about what they
mean for other lines of thoughts, then we write this explicitly on paper and
connect them literally with the other notes.

11.1   Make
a Career One Note at a Time

The first time one faces the challenge of writing a long text, say a
dissertation, it is pretty normal to feel intimidated by the prospective of
filling a few hundred pages with well-conceived ideas, source-based research
and correct references on every page. If you don’t feel some kind of respect
for this task, there is something wrong with you. On the other hand, most
people feel that writing a page a day (and having a day a week off) is quite
manageable, not realising that this would mean finishing a doctoral thesis
within a year – something that does not happen very often in reality.

The
technique of writing a certain amount every day was perfected by Anthony
Trollope, one of the most popular and productive authors of the 19th
century: He would start every morning at 5:30 a.m. with a cup of coffee and a
clock in front of him. Then he would write at least 250 words every 15 minutes.
This, he writes in his autobiography: “allowed me to produce over ten pages of
an ordinary novel volume a day, and if kept up through ten months, would have
given as its results three novels of three volumes each in the year” (Trollope,
2008, 272). And that, mind you, was before breakfast.

Academic
or nonfiction texts are not written like this because in addition to the
writing, there is the reading, the research, the thinking and the tinkering
with ideas. And they almost always take significantly more time than expected:
If you ask academic or nonfiction writers, students or professors how much time
they expect it would take them to finish a text, they systematically
underestimate the time they need – even when they are asked to estimate the
time under the worst-case scenario and if the real conditions turned out to be
quite favourable (Kahneman 2013, 245ff). On top of that: half of all doctoral
theses will stay unfinished forever (Lonka, 2003, 113). Academic and nonfiction
writing is not as predictable as a Trollope novel and the work it involves
certainly can’t be broken down to something like “one page a day.”

It
does make sense to break down the work into manageable and measurable steps,
but pages per day don’t work that well as a unit when you also have to read, do
research and think. But even though academic and nonfiction writing involve
more of other types of work than fiction writing, Luhmann managed to beat
Trollope in productivity if you count his articles as well as his books.
Luhmann wrote 58 books and hundreds of articles, while Trollope wrote 47 novels
plus 16 other books. Granted, it might have something to do with the fact that
Luhmann did some work after breakfast as well. But the main reason is the
slip-box, which compares to Trollope’s technique as investing with compounded
interest compares to a piggy-bank. Trollope is like a diligent saver who puts a
little sum to the side every day, which adds up over time toward something
impressive. Three dollars put aside each day (say, one takeout coffee) add up
over the year to a small vacation ($1,000) and over a working life to a deposit
on a flat as a permanent holiday retreat.[31]
Putting notes into the slip-box, however, is like investing and reaping the
rewards of compounded interest (which would in this example almost pay for the
whole flat).[32]

And
likewise, the sum of the slip-box content is worth much more than the sum of
the notes. More notes mean more possible connections, more ideas, more synergy
between different projects and therefore a much higher degree of productivity.
Luhmann’s slip-box contains about 90,000 notes, which sounds like an incredibly
large number. But it only means that he wrote six notes a day from the day he
started to work with his slip-box until he died.

If
you, by any chance, don’t have the ambition to compete with him in terms of
books per year, you could settle for three notes a day and still build up a
significant critical mass of ideas in a very reasonable time. And you could
settle for less than one book every twelve months. In contrast to manuscript
pages per day, a certain number of notes a day is a reasonable goal for
academic writing. And that is because taking a note and sorting it into the
slip-box can be done in one go, while writing a manuscript page could involve
weeks and months of preparation involving other tasks as well. You could
therefore measure your daily productivity by the number of notes written.

11.2   Think
Outside the Brain

Taking literature notes is a form of deliberate practice as it gives us
feedback on our understanding or lack of it, while the effort to put into our
own words the gist of something is at the same time the best approach to
understanding what we read.

Taking
permanent notes of our own thoughts is a form of self-testing as well: do they
still make sense in writing? Are we even able to get the thought on paper? Do
we have the references, facts and supporting sources at hand? And at the same
time, writing it is the best way to get our thoughts in order. Writing here,
too, is not copying, but translating (from one context and from one medium into
another). No written piece is ever a copy of a thought in our mind.

When
we take permanent notes, it is much more a form of thinking within the medium
of writing and in dialogue with the already existing notes within the slip-box
than a protocol of preconceived ideas. Any thought of a certain complexity
requires writing. Coherent arguments require the language to be fixed, and only
if something is written down is it fixed enough to be discussed independently
from the author. 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. We need
this distance to think about an argument – otherwise the argument itself
would occupy the very mental resources we need for scrutinizing it.

As
we write notes with an eye towards existing notes, we take more into account
than the information that is already available in our internal memory. That is
extremely important, because the internal memory retrieves information not in a
rational or logical way, but according to psycho-logical rules. The brain also
doesn’t store information neurally and objectively. We reinvent and rewrite our
memory every time we try to retrieve information. The brain works with rules of
thumb and makes things look as if they fit, even if they don’t. It remembers
events that never happened, connects unrelated episodes to convincing
narratives and completes incomplete images. It cannot help but see patterns and
meaning everywhere, even in the most random things (cf. Byrne, 2008). The
brain, as Kahneman writes, is “a machine for jumping to conclusions” (Kahneman,
2013, 79). And a machine that is designed for jumping to conclusions is not the
kind of machine you want to rely on when it comes to facts and rationality – at
least, you would want to counterbalance it. Luhmann states as clearly as
possible: it is not possible to think systematically without writing (Luhmann
1992, 53). Most people still think about thinking as a purely internal process,
and believe that the only function of the pen is to put finished thoughts on
paper. Richard Feynman once had a visitor in his office, a historian who wanted
to interview him. When he spotted Feynman’s notebooks, he said how delighted he
was to see such “wonderful records of Feynman’s thinking.”

“No,
no!” Feynman protested. “They aren’t a record of my thinking process. They are
my thinking process. I actually did the work on the paper.”

“Well,”
the historian said, “the work was done in your head, but the record of it is
still here.”

“No,
it’s not a record, not really. It’s working. You have to work on paper, and
this is the paper.”[33]

This,
obviously, was a very important distinction to Feynman, much more than just a
linguistic difference – and for a good reason: It is the distinction that makes
all the difference when it comes to thinking.

Philosophers,
neuroscientists, educators and psychologists like to disagree in many different
aspects on how the brain works. But they no longer disagree when it comes to
the need for external scaffolding. Almost all agree nowadays that real thinking
requires some kind of externalization, especially in the form of writing.
“Notes on paper, or on a computer screen [...] do not make contemporary physics
or other kinds of intellectual endeavour easier, they make it possible” is one
of the key takeaways in a contemporary handbook of neuroscientists (Levy 2011,
290) Concluding the discussions in this book, Levy writes: “In any case, no
matter how internal processes are implemented, insofar as thinkers are
genuinely concerned with what enables human beings to perform the spectacular
intellectual feats exhibited in science and other areas of systematic enquiry,
as well as in the arts, they need to understand the extent to which the mind is
reliant upon external scaffolding.” (Ibid.) In our system, the scaffolding is
done explicitly by connecting the thoughts within the external memory of the
slip-box. Luhmann writes: “Somehow one has to mark differences, keep track of
distinctions, either explicitly or implicitly in concepts,” because only if the
connections are somehow fixed externally can they function as models or
theories to give meaning and continuity for further thinking (Luhmann, 1992,
53).

A
common way to embed an idea into the context of the slip-box is by writing out
the reasons of its importance for your own lines of thought. For example, I
recently read the book “Scarcity: Why Having Too Little Means So Much” (2013)
by Mullainathan and Shafir. They investigate how the experience of scarcity has
cognitive effects and causes changes in decision-making processes. They help
the reader understand why people with almost no time or money sometimes do
things that don’t seem to make any sense to outside observers. People facing deadlines
sometimes switch frantically between all kinds of tasks. People with little
money sometimes spend it on seeming luxuries like take-away food. From the
outside, it would make more sense to do one thing at a time, or buy food in
bulk and cook for yourself. The book is interesting, because the authors don’t
question this behavior rhetorically or even in a judgemental way, but
investigate it as a universal human phenomenon.

I
took some literature notes collecting reasons how and why humans act so very differently
when they experience scarcity. This was step one, done with an eye towards the
argument of the book. I had questions in mind like: Is this convincing? What
methods do they use? Which of the references are familiar?

But
the first question I asked myself when it came to writing the first permanent
note for the slip-box was: What does this all mean for my own research and the
questions I think about in my slip-box? This is just another way of asking: Why
did the aspects I wrote down catch my interest?

If
I were a psychologist, this book would interest me for completely different
reasons than if I were a politician or a debt adviser, or if I had bought it
out of personal interest. As someone with a sociological perspective on
political questions and an interest in the project of a theory of society, my
first note reads plainly: “Any comprehensive analysis of social inequality must
include the cognitive effects of scarcity. Cf. Mullainathan and Shafir 2013.”
This immediately triggers further questions, which I can discuss on following
notes, starting with: “Why?”

Now,
I already have two notes in my slip-box, based on the literature notes I took
while reading the book, but written along the lines of my own thinking. One
note states the relevance of the book for my own thinking and one explains my
idea in more detail. Here I could draw from my literature notes as a source of
valuable facts and insight. Even though the answers to the question of why
scarcity is relevant to the study of social inequality are all in the book,
they are not just there to be copied. They need to be made explicit. That means
to think about how the insight into cognitive effects of scarcity
affects the analysis of social inequality.

While
I am writing these notes, it becomes obvious that the answer to the question
“why” has already triggered more follow-up questions, like: Isn’t this already
discussed in theories of social inequality? If yes: Who discussed it? If not:
Why not? And where do I turn to, to find answers to these questions? Correct:
The first choice for further inquiry is the slip-box. Maybe there is already
something on social inequality that helps me to answer these questions, or at
least an indication of where to look.

By
skimming through the slip-box, I might discover that these ideas could also be
helpful for another topic I haven’t thought about. One example is the question
of personal responsibility, which is discussed on the example of obesity and
the influence of hormones as a sub-topic to a philosophical discussion on free
will. None of it needs to be discussed right away, especially as most of these
ideas would require more research and reading. But there is also no reason not
to write down these possible connections and come back to them later, if my
research points me back to them. The more notes the slip-box contains, the more
interesting and prolific this step will become and the more research questions
will be triggered.

Just
by writing down these questions and making possible connections explicit in writing
are the concepts and theories being investigated. Their limitations become as
visible as their particular angle on a problem. By explicitly writing down how
something connects or leads to something else, we force ourselves to clarify
and distinguish ideas from each other.

11.3   Learn
by not Trying

“Selection
is the very keel on which our mental ship is built. And in this case of memory
its utility is obvious. If we remembered everything, we should on most
occasions be as ill off as if we remembered nothing. It would take as long for
us to recall a space of time as it took the original time to elapse, and we
should never get ahead with our thinking.” (William James 1890, 680).

We have seen in the first step that elaboration through taking
smart literature notes increases the likelihood that we will remember what we
read in the long term. But this was only the first step. Transferring these
ideas into the network of our own thoughts, our latticework of theories,
concepts and mental models in the slip-box brings our thinking to the next
level. Now we elaborate these ideas within different contexts and connect them
with other ideas in a durable fashion. The literature notes are going to be
archived, which means the ideas would be lost in the reference system if we
didn’t do something with them. That is why we transfer them into our
external memory, the slip-box, with which we have an ongoing dialogue and where
they can become part of our active set of ideas.

Transferring
ideas into the external memory also allows us to forget them. And even though
it sounds paradoxical, forgetting actually facilitates long-term learning. It
is important to understand why, because there are still many students who shy
away from using an external memory. They fear that they would have to choose
between remembering things in their heads (which wouldn’t require an external
memory) or in the external memory (which then would be forgotten in the
internal memory). That this is a false choice becomes obvious as soon as we
understand how our memory truly works.

To
be able to remember everything and not having to resort to any external memory
sounds great initially. But you might think differently if you are familiar
with the story of a man who was really able to remember almost everything. The
reporter Solomon Shereshevsky (Lurija 1987) is one of the most famous figures
in the history of psychology. When his supervisor saw that he didn’t take any
notes during their meetings, he first doubted Shereshevsky’s dedication to the
job, but shortly after, it was rather his own sanity that he doubted.

When
he confronted Shereshevsky with what seemed to him like lazy behaviour,
Shereshevsky started to recount every single word that was spoken during the
meeting and continued to recount verbatim all the meetings they had ever had.
His colleagues were astonished, but the person most astonished was Shereshevsky
himself. It was the first time he realised that everyone else seemed to have
forgotten almost everything. Even those who had taken notes couldn’t remember
even a fraction of what seemed normal for him.

Aleksandr
Romanovich Luria, the psychologist who subsequently tested him in all
conceivable ways, couldn’t find any of the usual restrictions people normally
have in their memories. But it also became clear that this advantage came at a
huge cost: It wasn’t just that Shereshevsky was able to remember so much, he
had trouble forgetting anything. The important things got lost under a pile of
irrelevant details that involuntarily came to his mind. Although he was very
good at remembering facts, Shereshevsky was almost incapable of getting the
gist of something, the concepts behind the particulars and distinguishing the
relevant facts from minor details. He had great trouble relating to literature
or poetry. He could repeat a novel word by word, but the greater meaning would
be lost on him. While Romeo and Juliet is for most of us a story of love
and tragedy, for him it would be the story of “Two households, both alike in
dignity, In fair Verona where we lay our scene, From ancient grudge break to
new mutiny, Where civil blood makes civil hands unclean...” It should be
obvious that for academic thinking and writing, the gift of being able to
remember everything is a serious liability.

The
science of learning is still undecided on the question of whether we all share
Shereshevsky’s ability to memorise virtually everything we ever have
encountered, but are only better at suppressing it. After all, sometimes we
suddenly remember scenes from the past in great detail, triggered by a cue like
the scent of a madeleine in Proust’s recherche. These moments of involuntary
memory might be like small cracks in the mental barrier through which we can
catch a glimpse of all the memories we have collected over our lifetimes, but
might never again have access to.

Forgetting,
then, would not be the loss of a memory, but the erection of a mental barrier
between the conscious mind and our long-term memory. Psychologists call this
mechanism active inhibition (cf. MacLeod, 2007). It is easy to understand what
it is good for: Without a very thorough filter, our brains would constantly be
flooded by memories, making it impossible to focus on anything in our
surroundings. That is what Shereshevsky struggled with in his life: There were
moment where he tried to buy an ice cream, but some random word of the vendor
triggered such an enormous amount of associations and memories that he would
have to leave the shop, so overwhelming was this experience.

We
are very dependent on a subconscious mechanism that reliably inhibits almost
every memory every moment except the very, very few that are truly helpful in a
situation. Unfortunately, we cannot just consciously pluck from our memory what
we need like from a folder in an archive. That would require the memory we can
choose from to be already in our conscious mind, which would render the
mechanism of remembering redundant. Remembering is the very mechanism to bring
a memory back into our conscious mind. Therefore, Shereshevsky might not have
had an ability most of us do not possess, but lacked an ability we all
possess: The ability to forget systematically – to inhibit most irrelevant
information from being remembered.

Shereshevsky
was still capable of inhibiting information, but even being much less
fine-tuned can have serious consequences. Being too often overwhelmed by
memories, associations and synesthetic experiences made it difficult for him to
stay in a job and enjoy many of the things we highly value. Above all, it made
it almost impossible for him to think in abstract terms.

Robert
and Elizabeth Ligon Bjork from the University of California suggest
distinguishing between two different measurements when it comes to memory:
Storage strength and retrieval strength (Bjork 2011). They speculate that
storage strength, the ability to store memories, only becomes greater over
one’s lifetime. We add more and more information to our long-term memory. Just
by looking at the physical capacity of our brains, we can see that we could
indeed probably store a lifetime and a bit of detailed experiences in it (Carey
2014, 42).

It
is difficult, if not impossible, to verify this claim, but it does make sense
to shift the attention from storage strength to retrieval strength. Learning
would be not so much about saving information, like on a hard disk, but about
building connections and bridges between pieces of information to circumvent
the inhibition mechanism in the right moment. It is about making sure that the
right “cues” trigger the right memory, about how we can think strategically to
remember the most useful information when we need it.

This
is far from self-evident. If we look at the current state of education,
especially the learning strategies most students employ, we see that the vast
majority of all learning still aims to improve “storage strength,” even though
it cannot be improved. It is still mostly about remembering isolated facts and
not so much about building connections. This is what learning psychologists
have rightfully given the derogative term “cramming:” the attempt to reinforce
and solidify information in the brain by repetition. It is basically hammering
facts into the brain as if they were carvings on an ancient stone tablet. Using
fancy words and describing it as a “strengthening of the connections between
neurons” does not change the fact that this attempt is futile.

If
we instead focus on “retrieval strength,” we instantly start to think
strategically about what kind of cues should trigger the retrieval of a memory.
There are no natural cues: Every piece of information can become the trigger
for another piece of information. These can be associations like the scent of a
sweet, as the madeleine triggered childhood memories for Proust, but this kind
of flashback is called “involuntary memory” for a reason: we can’t retrieve it
on purpose. Then there are the accidental cues that become attached to
information when we learn something in a particular environment. It is, for
example, easier to remember something we have learned in school if we are
tested for it in the same room with the same noise in the background (Bjork
2011, 14). Likewise, sometimes it is difficult to remember something from
school when we are not sitting in the classroom where we learned it.

Obviously,
we don’t want to have to rely on cues in the environment. This is not only
impractical, but highly misleading: If we test ourselves repeatedly in the same
context and environment in which we have learned something, it would make us
overconfident in terms of learning success, because we would not be able to
discount the environmental cues that probably won’t exist in the context in
which we want to remember what we learned.

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.

Mistaking
learning with cramming is still very much ingrained in our educational culture.
When Hermann Ebbinghaus, the godfather of learning theory, tried to understand
the basics of learning and measuring learning progress, he deliberately used
meaningless bits of information like random letter combinations and made sure
they bore no accidental meaning. From his understanding, meaning would distract
from the actual learning process. But he didn’t realise that he was stripping
the learning process from the very thing that is learning, which is
making meaningful connections.

From
the standpoint of evolution, it makes sense that our brains have a built-in
preference to learn meaningful information and a disregard for meaningless
letter combinations. But Ebbinghaus laid the foundation for a long-lasting and
influential tradition of learning theories that separates understanding from
learning.

Our
fascination with memory artists can also be explained by this tradition. There
is nothing interesting about the capability of a normal person to remember
thousands of words, countless facts, numerous subjects, the names of
celebrities, friends, family members and colleagues over a long period of time.
But when someone is able to remember a series of twenty or thirty seemingly
meaningless bits of information almost instantly, it fascinates us and reminds
us of our struggles at school.

The
trick, of course, is not to learn like Ebbinghaus thought we would learn: by
banging the information into our heads. Memory artists instead attach meaning
to information and connect it to already known networks of connections in a
meaningful way. One piece of information can become the cue for another and
strings or networks of cues can be built. Those kinds of memory techniques are
great in case you need to learn information that bears no meaning in itself or
has no logical or meaningful connection to other things you already know. But
why would you want to learn something like that – except when you happen to be
a memory artist?

Memory
techniques are the fix for a rather artificial situation. When it comes to
academic writing, we don't have the need for this trick, as we can choose to
build and think exclusively within meaningful contexts. Abstract information
like bibliographic references can be stored externally – there is no benefit in
knowing them by heart. Everything else better bear meaning.

The
challenge of writing as well as learning is therefore not so much to learn, but
to understand, as we will already have learned what we understand. The problem
is that the meaning of something is not always obvious and needs to be
explored. That is why we need to elaborate on it. But elaboration is nothing
more than connecting information to other information in a meaningful
way. 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.

This
is not so different from when elaboration is recommended as a “learning
method.” As a method, it has been proven to be more successful than any other
approach (McDaniel and Donnelly 1996). This is not a new insight, either. After
looking at various studies from the 1960s until the early 1980s, Barry S. Stein
et al. summarises: “The results of several recent studies support the
hypothesis that retention is facilitated by acquisition conditions that prompt
people to elaborate information in a way that increases the distinctiveness of
their memory representations.” (Stein et al. 1984, 522)

Stein
et al. illustrate how commonsensical this is on the example of a biology novice
who learns the difference between veins and arteries: “[he] may find it difficult
at first to understand and remember that arteries have thick walls, are
elastic, and do not have valves, whereas veins are less elastic, have thinner
walls, and have valves” (ibid.). But by elaborating a little bit on this
difference and asking the right questions, like “why?” the students can connect
this knowledge with prior knowledge, like their understanding of pressure and
the function of the heart. Just by making the connection to the common
knowledge that the heart presses the blood into the arteries, they immediately
know that these walls need to sustain more pressure, which means they need to
be thicker than veins, in which the blood flows back to the heart with less
pressure. And, of course, this makes valves necessary to keep the blood from
flowing back. Once understood, the attributes and differences are almost
impossible to disentangle from the knowledge of veins and arteries.

Learned
right, which means understanding, which means connecting in a meaningful way to
previous knowledge, information almost cannot be forgotten anymore and will be
reliably retrieved if triggered by the right cues. Moreover, this new learned
knowledge can provide more possible connections for new information. If you
focus your time and energy on understanding, you cannot help but learn. But if
you focus your time and energy on learning without trying to understand, you
will not only not understand, but also probably not learn. And the effects are
cumulative.

There
is a reason why the best scientists are also often very good teachers. For
someone like Richard Feynman, everything was about understanding, regardless of
whether he was doing research or teaching. His famous Feynman diagrams are
primarily tools to make understanding easier and his lectures are famous
because they help students to really understand physics. It is not surprising,
therefore, that he was passionate about challenging traditional education
methods. He couldn’t stand textbooks full of pseudo-explanations (Feynman 1985)
and teachers who tried to make learning easier for students by using artificial
“real-life” examples instead of using their actual prior understanding as a
connection point (Feynman 1963).

Writing
notes and sorting them into the slip-box is nothing other than an attempt to
understand the wider meaning of something. The slip-box forces us to ask
numerous elaborating questions: What does it mean? How does it connect to … ?
What is the difference between … ? What is it similar to? That the slip-box is
not sorted by topics is the precondition for actively building connections
between notes. Connections can be made between heterogeneous notes – as long as
the connection makes sense. This is the best antidote to the impeding way most
information is given to us in our learning institutions. Most often, it comes
in modular form, sorted by topic, separated by disciplines and generally
isolated from other information. The slip-box is forcing us to do the exact
opposite: To elaborate, to understand, to connect and therefore to learn
seriously.

The
fact that too much order can impede learning has become more and more known
(Carey 2014). Conversely, we know that the deliberate creation of variations
and contrasts can facilitate learning. Nate Kornell and Bjork showed this when
they experimentally taught students different art styles. First, they used the
traditional approach of showing students one art style at a time using
different paintings. Then, they deliberately mixed up the styles and shuffled
the paintings around. The students who were presented paintings from different
styles in no particular order learned to distinguish styles faster and were
also much more successful at matching paintings to styles and artists they had
never seen before. This shows that elaborating on the differences and
similarities of notes instead of sorting them by topic not only facilitates
learning, but facilitates the ability to categorise and create sensible
classifications!

11.4   Adding
Permanent Notes to the Slip-Box

The next step after writing the permanent notes is to add them to the
slip-box.

1.  Add a
note to the slip-box either behind the note you directly refer to or, if you do
not follow up on a specific note, just behind the last note in the slip-box. Number
it consecutively. The Zettelkasten numbers the notes automatically. “New note”
will just add a note with a new number. If you click “New note sequence,” the
new note will be registered at the same time as the note that follows the note
currently active on the screen. But you can always add notes “behind” other
notes anytime later. Each note can follow multiple other notes and therefore be
part of different note sequences.

2.  Add
links to other notes or links on other notes to your new note.

3.  Make
sure it can be found from the index; add an entry in the index if necessary or
refer to it from a note that is connected to the index.

4.  Build
a Latticework of Mental Models

12   Develop
Ideas

“Every
note is just an element in the network of references and back references in the
system, from which it gains its quality.” (Luhmann 1992)

Ideally, new notes are written with explicit reference to already
existing notes. Obviously, this is not always possible, especially in the
beginning when the slip-box is still in its infancy, but it will very soon
become the first option most of the time. Then you can put the new note
“behind” an existing, related note straight away. Luhmann, working with pen and
paper, would put a note behind an existing one and number it accordingly. If
the existing note bore the number 21, he numbered the new note 22. If note
number 22 already existed, he would still add it behind 21, but number it 21a.
By alternating numbers and letters, he was able to branch out into an infinite
number of sequences and sub-sequences internally with no hierarchical order.

An
initial subsequence that attracts more and more follow-up notes can easily
become a main topic with many subtopics over time (Schmidt 2013, 172). The
digital Zettelkasten makes things easier: numbers are assigned automatically,
note sequences can be constructed any time later and one note can become the
follow-up note to different notes at the same time.

These
note sequences are the backbone of text development. They combine the advantages
of an abstract with a topic-related order. A pure topic-related order would
have to be organised top down and requires a hierarchical order up front. A
pure abstract order would not allow idea clusters and topics to be built bottom
up. The individual notes would stay mostly independent and isolated with only
one-dimensional references – pretty much like a one-person Wikipedia stripped
of the knowledge and fact-checking abilities of the community.

But
a loose order of sequences allows freedom to change course when necessary and
provides enough structure to build up complexity. Notes are only as valuable as
the note and reference networks they are embedded in.

Because
the slip-box is not intended to be an encyclopaedia, but a tool to think with,
we don’t need to worry about completeness. We don’t need to write anything down
just to bridge a gap in a note sequence. We only write if it helps us with our
own thinking. The gaps we do need to concern ourselves with are the gaps in the
arguments in the final manuscript – but these gaps will only become obvious in
the next step, when we take the relevant notes for an argument out of the
network of the slip-box and sort them into the linear order for the rough
draft.

As
the slip-box is not a book with just one topic, we don’t need to have an
overview of it. On the contrary, we are much better off accepting as early as
possible that an overview of the slip-box is as impossible as having an
overview of our own thinking while we are thinking. As an extension of
our own memory, the slip-box is the medium we think in, not something we
think about. The note sequences are the clusters where order emerges
from complexity. We extract information from different linear sources and mix
it all up and shake it until new patterns emerge. Then, we form these patterns
into new linear texts.

12.1   Develop
Topics

After adding a note to the slip-box, we need to make sure it can be
found again. This is what the index is for. Luhmann wrote an index with a
typewriter on index cards. In the Zettelkasten, keywords can easily be added to
a note like tags and will then show up in the index. They should be chosen
carefully and sparsely. Luhmann would add the number of one or two (rarely
more) notes next to a keyword in the index (Schmidt 2013, 171). The reason he
was so economical with notes per keyword and why we too should be very
selective lies in the way the slip-box is used. Because it should not be used
as an archive, where we just take out what we put in, but as a system to think
with, the references between the notes are much more important than the
references from the index to a single note. Focusing exclusively on the index
would basically mean that we always know upfront what we are looking for – we
would have to have a fully developed plan in our heads. But liberating our
brains from the task of organizing the notes is the main reason we use the
slip-box in the first place.

The
file-box can do much more than just hand out what we request. It can surprise
and remind us of long-forgotten ideas and trigger new ones. This crucial
element of surprise comes into play on the level of the interconnected notes,
not when we are looking for particular entries in the index. Most notes will be
found through other notes. The organisation of the notes is in the network of
references in the slip-box, so all we need from the index are entry points. A
few wisely chosen notes are sufficient for each entry point. The quicker we get
from the index to the concrete notes, the quicker we move our attention from
mentally preconceived ideas towards the fact-rich level of interconnected
content, where we can conduct a fact-based dialogue with the slip-box.

Even
though we will not get an overview of the whole slip-box (as we certainly will
never get an overview of our whole internal memory), we can get an overview of
a specific topic. But because the structure of topics and subtopics is not a
given, but the outcome of our thinking, they too are subject to ongoing
considerations and alteration. The consideration of how to structure a topic,
therefore, belongs on notes as well – and not on a meta-hierarchical level. We
can provide ourselves with a (temporarily valid) overview over a topic or
subtopic just by making another note. If we then link from the index to such a
note, we have a good entry point. If the overview on this note ceases to
correctly represent the state of a cluster or topic, or we decide it should be
structured differently, we can write a new note with a better structure and
update the respective link from the index. This is important: Every
consideration on the structure of a topic is just another consideration on a
note – bound to change and dependent on the development of our understanding.

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.

Let’s
assume I want to add a short note that says: “Tversky/Kahneman (1973) showed in
an experiment that people are more likely to overestimate the likelihood of an
event to happen if they are able to conceive it well and in detail than if it
were abstract.” If you think in terms of archiving, you might feel keywords
like “misjudgements,” “experimental psychology” or “experiment” would be
fitting. In this case, you would think in general categories like “subject,”
“discipline” or “method.” It is rather unlikely that you will ever think of
writing an article based on all notes to “experimental psychology” or see the
need for retrieving all notes filed under “experiment.” Maybe you will think
about a book that collects “misjudgements,” but it is unlikely that you could
turn any of these piles of notes into a structured argument.

As
writers, we approach the question of keywords differently. We look at our
slip-box for already existing lines of thought and think about the questions
and problems already on our minds to which a new note might contribute.

If
you are an economist working on decision-making, you might think of the
preferences management often shows for projects with an easy-to-visualise
outcome over more profitable ones. A fitting keyword would then be “capital
allocation problems.” By assigning the keyword alone, the note is already put
into a specific context, which gives it a particular meaning and triggers context-specific
questions like: If this is a systematic effect, can it be measured? Has someone
already measured it? Does the effect show up in available data, like the market
value of publicly listed companies, and if so, is it that companies with
products that are easy to visualise have richer valuations than those who offer
services or products that are rather difficult to grasp? And if not: Is it
because the experimental findings cannot be extrapolated or is it because the
knowledge is already publicly available and therefore priced in? If not, is it
another argument against the Efficient Market hypothesis or just a good way to
stack the odds in the stock market in your favour?

By
assigning this keyword, you might stumble upon already existing notes on capital
allocation, which either help to answer these questions or trigger new ones.
But maybe you are a political scientist and read this note as an answer to the
question of why certain topics are discussed during an election and others not,
or why it could be politically more sensible to promote easy-to-visualise
solutions over solutions that really work. Fitting keywords here might be
“political strategies,” “elections” or “dysfunctionalities, political.”

Keywords
should always be assigned with an eye towards the topics you are working on or
interested in, never by looking at the note in isolation. This is also why this
process cannot be automated or delegated to a machine or program – it requires
thinking. 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. Good keywords are
usually not already mentioned as words in the note. Assume I have the note “A
sudden increase of ad-hoc theories is for Kuhn a sign that a normal-science
phase might be in crisis (Kuhn 1967, 96).” A fitting keyword might be “paradigm
change,” but that phrase is not in the note and therefore would not be
suggested by the program.

Assigning
keywords is much more than just a bureaucratic act. It is a crucial part of the
thinking process, which often leads to a deeper elaboration of the note itself
and the connection to other notes.

12.2   Make
Smart Connections

In the digital version of the Zettelkasten, all we need to do is to
click on “Links” and add the number of the note we want to refer to. It then
automatically adds a backlink to the note we refer from. Even though the
Zettelkasten makes suggestions here, too, for example based on joint literature
references, making good cross-references is a matter of serious thinking and a
crucial part of the development of thoughts.

Luhmann
used four basic types of cross-references in his file-box (Schmidt 2013, 173f;
Schmidt 2015, 165f). Only the first and last are relevant for the digital
Zettelkasten, the other two are merely compensating for restrictions of the
analogue pen and paper version. You don’t need to concern yourself with them if
you use the digital program.

1.  The
first type of links are those on notes that are giving you the overview of a
topic. These are notes directly referred to from the index and usually used as
an entry point into a topic that has already developed to such a degree that an
overview is needed or at least becomes helpful. On a note like this, you can
collect links to other relevant notes to this topic or question, preferably
with a short indication of what to find on these notes (one or two words or a
short sentence is sufficient). This kind of note helps to structure thoughts
and can be seen as an in-between step towards the development of a manuscript.
Above all, they help orientate oneself within the slip-box. You will know when
you need to write one. Luhmann collected up to 25 links to other notes on these
kind of entry notes. They don’t have to be written in one go as links can be
added over time, which again shows how topics can grow organically. What we
think is relevant for a topic and what is not depends on our current
understanding and should be taken quite seriously: It defines an idea as much
as the facts it is based on. What we regard as being relevant for a topic and
how we structure it will change over time. This change might lead to another
note with a different, more adequate topic structure, which then can be seen as
a comment on the previous note. Thankfully, it won’t make all the other notes
redundant. As mentioned before: All we have to do is to change the entry in the
index to this new note and/or indicate on the old note that we now consider a
new structure more fitting.

2.  A
similar though less crucial kind of link collection is on those notes that give
an overview of a local, physical cluster of the slip-box. This is only necessary
if you work with pen and paper like Luhmann. While the first type of note gives
an overview of a topic, regardless of where the notes are located within the
slip-box, this type of note is a pragmatic way of keeping track of all the
different topics discussed on the notes that are physically close together. As
Luhmann put notes between notes to internally branch out subtopics and
sub-subtopics, original lines of thoughts were often interrupted by hundreds of
different notes. This second type of note keeps track of the original lines of
thought. Obviously, we don’t need to worry about this if we work with the
digital version.

3.  Equally
less relevant for the digital version are those links that indicate the note to
which the current note is a follow-up and those links that indicate the note
that follows on the current note. Again, this is only relevant to see which
notes follow each other, even if they don’t physically stand behind each other
anymore. The digital Zettelkasten automatically adds these kinds of backlinks
and presents you the relevant notes in a note sequence.

4.  The
most common form of reference is plain note-to-note links. They have no
function other than indicating a relevant connection between two individual
notes. By linking two related notes regardless of where they are within the
slip-box or within different contexts, surprising new lines of thought can be
established. These note-to-note links are like the “weak links” (Granovetter
1973) of social relationships we have with acquaintances: even though they are
usually not the ones we turn to first, they often can offer new and different
perspectives.

These links can help us to find surprising connections and similarities
between seemingly unrelated topics. Patterns might not become visible right
away, but they might emerge after multiple note-to-note links between two
topics have been established. It is no coincidence that one of the main
features of Luhmann’s theory of social systems is its discovery of structural
patterns that could be found in very different parts of society. For example,
he was able to show how vastly different things like money, power, love, truth
and justice can be seen as social inventions that solve structurally similar
problems (they all can be seen as media that make the acceptance of certain
communication offers more likely, cf. Luhmann 1997, chapter 9–12). Observations
like these could never be done nor explained by someone who is working with a
system that keeps things neatly separated by preconceived themes and topics.

It
is important to always keep in mind that making these links is not a chore, a
kind of file-box maintenance. The search for meaningful connections is a
crucial part of the thinking process towards the finished manuscript. But here,
it is dealt with in a very concrete way. Instead of figuratively searching our
internal memory, we literally go through the file-box and look for connections.
By dealing with actual notes, we are also less prone to imagine connections
where there aren’t any, as we can see in black and white if something makes
sense or not.

As
we are making these connections, we build up an internal structure of the
slip-box, which is shaped by our thinking. While this structure builds up
externally and independently of our limited memory, it will, in return, shape
our thinking as well and help us to think in a more structured way. Our ideas
will be rooted in a network of facts, thought-through ideas and verifiable
references. 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?

12.3   Compare,
Correct and Differentiate

If you use the slip-box for a while, you will inevitably make a sobering
discovery: The great new idea you are about to add to the slip-box turns out to
be already in there. Even worse, chances are this idea wasn’t even yours, but
someone else’s. 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. If we forget about an idea and have it again, our brains get
as excited as if we are having it the first time. Therefore, working with the
slip-box is disillusioning, but at the same time it increases the chance that
we actually move forward in our thinking towards uncharted territory, instead
of just feeling like we are moving forward.

Sometimes,
the confrontation with old notes helps to detect differences we wouldn’t have
noticed otherwise. What seems to be the same idea sometimes turns out to be
slightly, but crucially, different. We then can explicitly discuss this
difference on another note. This is especially helpful when two authors use the
same concept in slightly different ways. The clarification of differences in
the use of words and concepts is a major part of every serious academic work
anyway – but it is so much easier if you have a nit-picking partner like the
slip-box. If we had written just excerpts or notes that we had kept in separate
places, these differences would only become obvious if we had all the relevant
notes on our minds at the same time. It is much easier to detect these small
but crucial differences when we literally have our notes in front of our eyes,
comparing them during our attempts to connect them. The brain is very good at
making associations and spotting patterns and similarities between seemingly
different things and also very good in spotting differences between seemingly
similar things, but it needs to have them presented objectively and externally.
It is much easier to see differences and similarities than to detect
them by mere thinking.

Comparing
notes also helps us to detect contradictions, paradoxes or oppositions –
important facilitators for insight. When we realise that we used to accept two
contradicting ideas as equally true, we know that we have a problem – and
problems are good because we now have something to solve. A paradox can be a
sign that we haven’t thought thoroughly enough about a problem or, conversely,
that we exhausted the possibilities of a certain paradigm. Finally, oppositions
help to shape ideas by providing contrast. Albert Rothenberg suggests that the
construction of oppositions is the most reliable way of generating new ideas
(Rothenberg 1971; 1996; 2015).

The
constant comparing of notes also serves as an ongoing examination of old notes
in a new light. I am surprised how often the addition of one note leads to a
correction, a complementation or an improvement of old ideas. Sometimes, we
discover that the source given in a text is not the actual source. Sometimes,
we discover that the interpretation of a study conflicts with another
interpretation, making us realise that the study is so vague that it can be
used as proof for two contradicting interpretations. Sometimes, we find two
unrelated studies that give proof to the same point, which is not a correction,
but an indication that we are on to something. Adding new notes to old notes
and being forced to compare them leads not only to a constant improvement of
one’s own work, but often discloses weaknesses in the texts we read. We have to
compensate for that by being extra critical as readers and careful with
extracting information from texts, and we always have to check the original
source of a claim.[34]

The
slip-box not only confronts us with dis-confirming information, but also helps
with what is known as the feature-positive effect (Allison and Messick 1988;
Newman, Wolff, and Hearst 1980; Sainsbury 1971). This is the phenomenon in
which we tend to overstate the importance of information that is (mentally)
easily available to us and tilts our thinking towards the most recently
acquired facts, not necessarily the most relevant ones. Without external help,
we would not only take exclusively into account what we know, but what is on
top of our heads.[35]
The slip-box constantly reminds us of information we have long forgotten and
wouldn’t remember otherwise – so much so, we wouldn’t even look for it.

12.4   Assemble
a Toolbox for Thinking

Just by working with the slip-box, we retrieve old ideas and facts on an
irregular basis and connect them with other bits of information – very much how
experts recommend we learn (Bjork 2011, 8; Kornell and Bjork 2008). This is
also the idea behind flashcards. But even though flashcards are much more
effective than cramming or reviewing information within the context of a
textbook, they also have a downside: The information on flashcards is neither
elaborated on nor embedded in some form of context. Each flashcard stays
isolated instead of being connected with the network of theoretical frames, our
experiences or our latticework of mental models. This not only makes it much
more difficult to learn, but also difficult to understand the implications and
the meaning of information (cf. Birnbaum et al., 2013). A scientific term or
concept only becomes meaningful within the context of a theory – otherwise it
would just be a word.

The
same is true for everyday situations. Our ability to read a situation or to interpret
information depends on our broader knowledge and how we make sense of it.
Science and everyday life are in this regard not so different; both are
intertwined. Scientific work is much more pragmatic and less determined by
theory than outsiders would expect (Latour and Woolgar 1979). At the same time,
we use scientific knowledge and theories to make sense of our surroundings
every day. And some theories or theoretical models are surprisingly versatile,
which is why it makes sense to assemble a toolbox of useful mental models
(Manktelow and Craik 2004) that could help with our daily challenges and make
sense of the things we learn and encounter.

Charlie
Munger, Warren Buffett’s partner and vice chairman of Berkshire Hathaway,
stresses the importance of having a broad theoretical toolbox – not to be a
good academic, but to have a good, pragmatic grip on reality. He regularly
explains to students which mental models have proven most useful to help him
understand markets and human behaviour. 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.” The importance is to have not
just a few, but a broad range of mental models in your head. Otherwise, you
risk becoming too attached to one or two and see only what fits them. You would
become the man with a hammer who sees nails everywhere (cf. Maslow, 1966, 15).

Munger
writes: “Well, the first rule is that you can’t really know anything if you
just remember isolated facts and try and bang ’em back. If the facts don’t hang
together on a latticework of theory, you don’t have them in a usable form.
You’ve got to have models in your head. And you’ve got to array your
experience, both vicarious and direct, on this latticework of models. You may
have noticed students who just try to remember and pound back what is
remembered. Well, they fail in school and in life. You’ve got to hang
experience on a latticework of models in your head.” (Munger 1994).

A
truly wise person is not someone who knows everything, but someone who is able
to make sense of things by drawing from an extended resource of interpretation
schemes. This stands in harsh contrast to the common but not-so-wise belief
that we need to learn from experience. 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.

When
we delegate the storage of knowledge to the slip-box and at the same time focus
on the principles behind an idea while we write, add and connect notes, when we
look for patterns and think beyond the most obvious interpretation of a note,
when we try to make sense of something, combine different ideas and develop
lines of thought, we do exactly that: we build up a “latticework of mental
models” instead of just “remembering isolated facts and try and bang ’em back.”

The
beauty of this approach is that we co-evolve with our slip-boxes: we build the
same connections in our heads while we deliberately develop them in our
slip-box – and make it easier to remember the facts as they now have a
latticework we can attach them to. If we practice learning not as a pure
accumulation of knowledge, but as an attempt to build up a latticework of
theories and mental models to which information can stick, we enter a virtuous
circle where learning facilitates learning.

Helmut
D. Sachs puts it like this:

“By
learning, retaining, and building on the retained basics, we are creating a
rich web of associated information. The more we know, the more information
(hooks) we have to connect new information to, the easier we can form long-term
memories. […] Learning becomes fun. We have entered a virtuous circle of
learning, and it seems as if our long-term memory capacity and speed are
actually growing. On the other hand, if we fail to retain what we have learned,
for example, by not using effective strategies, it becomes increasingly
difficult to learn information that builds on earlier learning. More and more
knowledge gaps become apparent. Since we can’t really connect new information
to gaps, learning becomes an uphill battle that exhausts us and takes the fun
out of learning. It seems as if we have reached the capacity limit of our brain
and memory. Welcome to a vicious circle. Certainly, you would much rather be in
a virtuous learning circle, so to remember what you have learned, you need to
build effective long-term memory structures.” (Sachs 2013, 26)

His recommendations for learning read almost like instructions for the
slip-box:

1.  Pay
attention to what you want to remember.

2.  Properly
encode the information you want to keep. (This includes thinking about suitable
cues.)

3.  Practice
recall. (Ibid., 31)

We learn something not only when we connect it to prior knowledge and
try to understand its broader implications (elaboration), but also when we try
to retrieve it at different times (spacing) in different contexts (variation),
ideally with the help of chance (contextual interference) and with a deliberate
effort (retrieval). The slip-box not only provides us with the opportunity to
learn in this proven way, it forces us to do exactly what is recommended just
by using it. We have to elaborate on what we read just to be able to write it
down and translate it into different contexts. We retrieve information from the
slip-box whenever we try to connect new notes with old notes. Just by doing
this, we mix up contexts, shuffle notes and retrieve the information in
irregular intervals. And along the way, we further elaborate on the
information, which we always retrieve deliberately.

12.5   Use
the Slip-Box as a Creativity Machine

“Creativity
is just connecting things. When you ask creative people how they did something,
they feel a little guilty because they didn’t really do it, they just saw
something.” (Steve Jobs)

Many exciting stories from scientific history make us believe that great
insight comes in a flash. There is the sudden insight of Watson and Crick that
DNA would have to have the form of a double helix or the story of Friedrich
August Kekulé, who allegedly dreamed of a snake biting its own tail and
suddenly saw the structure of benzene in front of his eyes.

But
the reason why Watson and Crick or Kekulé had these insights and not a random
person on the street is that they already had spent a very long time thinking
hard about the problems, tinkered with other possible solutions and tried
countless other ways of looking at the problem. Our fascination with these
stories clouds the fact that all good ideas need time. Even sudden
breakthroughs are usually preceded by a long, intense process of preparation.

Being
experienced with a problem and intimately familiar with the tools and devices
we work with, ideally to the point of virtuosity, is the precondition for
discovering their inherent possibilities, writes Ludwik Fleck, a historian of
science (Fleck 2012, 126). This is true even for purely theoretical work. Here,
too, we need experience until we can “feel our way” around the problems and
questions we deal with, even if these things are words, concepts and notes in a
file system. What we learn in practice is always much more thorough and complex
than what we could put into words. That is why even purely theoretical work
cannot be reduced to explicit knowledge, which is consciously available. This
is especially true for the use of a slip-box. It is the intuition that comes
from the intimate knowledge of a practice that can lead us to new insights. We
might not be able to explicitly state why it is more promising to follow one
idea instead of another, but being experienced, we somehow know – which is
enough. Experimental scientists regularly describe their decision-making
process as being based on intuition (Rheinberger 1997), and there is no reason
why it should be different in the social sciences. Maybe it is just harder to accept
in the social sciences as we try so hard to be more like natural scientists,
who seem to do without something as vague as intuition. But 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 (cf. Ahrens 2014).

Steven
Johnson, who wrote an insightful book about how people in science and in
general come up with genuine new ideas, calls it the “slow hunch.” As a
precondition to make use of this intuition, he emphasises the importance of
experimental spaces where ideas can freely mingle (Johnson 2011). A laboratory
with open-minded colleagues can be such a space, much as intellectuals and artists
freely discussed ideas in the cafés of old Paris. I would add the slip-box as
such a space in which ideas can mingle freely, so they can give birth to new
ones.

Most
often, innovation is not the result of a sudden moment of realization, anyway,
but incremental steps toward improvement. Even groundbreaking paradigm shifts
are most often the consequence of many small moves in the right direction
instead of one big idea. This is why the search for small differences is key.
It is such an important skill to see differences between seemingly similar
concepts, or connections between seemingly different ideas. This even used to
be the meaning of the word “new.” “Novus,” in Latin, used to mean “different,”
“unusual,” not so much “genuinely new” in the meaning of “unheard” (Luhmann,
2005, 210). To have concrete notes in front of our eyes and be able to compare
them directly makes differences, even small ones, much easier to spot. (This is
an advantage of the original paper slip-box, as you can spread out multiple notes
on a desk instead of just seeing them on a computer screen.) The neurobiologist
James Zull points out that comparing is our natural form of perception,
where our cognitive interpretation is in lockstep with our actual eye
movements. Therefore, comparing should be understood quite literally.

We
even compare when we focus on one thing: “Paying attention does not mean
unrelenting attention on one focal point. Our brains evolved to notice details
by shifting focus from one area to another, by repeatedly scanning the
surroundings. [...] The brain is more likely to notice details when it scans
than when it focuses.” (Zull 2002, 142f) This is one of the reasons why
thinking works so much better when we have the very things we think about in
front of our eyes. It is in our nature.

12.6   Think
Inside the Box

“[C]reative
people are better at recognizing relationships, making associations and
connections and seeing things in an original way—seeing things that others
cannot see“ (Andreasen 2014).

Comparing, differentiating and connecting notes are the basis of good
academic writing, but playing and tinkering with ideas is what leads to insight
and exceptional texts.

To
be able to play with ideas, we first have to liberate them from their original
context by means of abstraction and re-specification. We did this when we took
literature notes and translated them into the different contexts within the
slip-box. Abstraction does not have a good reputation at the moment. It is the
tangible, the concrete that is cheered for. Abstraction should indeed not be
the final goal of thinking, but it is a necessary in-between step to make
heterogeneous ideas compatible. If Darwin had never abstracted from his
concrete observations of sparrows, he would never have found an abstract, a
general principle of evolution across different species, and he would never
have been able to see how evolution works in other species as well. Abstraction
is also not for theoretical-academic processes of insight only. We need to
abstract from concrete situations every day. Only by abstraction and
re-specification can we apply ideas in the singular and always different
situations in reality (Loewenstein, 2010).

Even
very personal, intimate experiences, like encounters with art, require
abstraction. If the story of Romeo and Juliet touches us, it is certainly not
because we are all members of one of two feuding families in Verona. We
abstract from time and place, from the particular circumstances until we can
meet the protagonists of this story on a general level where our own emotional
life can resonate with what we see on stage. The tendency to juxtapose
abstraction with being worldly or to associate it with intellectualism and
juxtapose it with being solution-orientated is very misleading indeed.

Studies
on creativity with engineers show that the ability to find not only creative,
but functional and working solutions for technical problems is equal to the
ability to make abstractions. The better an engineer is at abstracting from a
specific problem, the better and more pragmatic his solutions will be – even
for the very problem he abstracted from (Gassmann and Zeschky, 2008, 103).
Abstraction is also the key to analyse and compare concepts, to make analogies
and to combine ideas; this is especially true when it comes to
interdisciplinary work (Goldstone and Wilensky 2008).

Being
able to abstract and re-specify ideas is, again, only one side of the equation.
It is not good for anything if we don’t have a system in place that allows us
to put this into practice. Here, it is the concrete standardization of notes in
just one format that enables us to literally shuffle them around, to add one
idea to multiple contexts and to compare and combine them in a creative way
without losing sight of what they truly contain.

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. It also helps
to keep in mind some creativity-inducing ideas about problem-solving that might
be counterintuitive. It is worth it to dwell on this subject a little bit
before we move on to the next step: the preparation of the rough draft of the
manuscript.

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. For
obvious reasons, I do not recommend “thinking outside the box”. On the
contrary, we can turn the slip-box into a tool for breaking out of our own
thinking habits.

Our
brains just love routines. Before new information prompts our brains to think
differently about something, they make the new information fit into the known
or let it disappear completely from our perception. Usually, we don’t even
notice when our brains modify our surroundings to make it fit its expectations.
We need therefore a bit of a ruse to break the power of thinking routines. In
their book with the showy title “The 5 Elements of Effective Thinking”, the
mathematicians Edward B. Burger and Michael Starbird collected different
strategies to do that (2012). Some are already technically implemented in the
slip-box, others are good to keep in mind.

For
example, they emphasise the importance of feedback loops and the need to find
ways to confront ourselves with our errors, mistakes and misunderstandings.
This is a built-in feature of the slip-box. Another habit of the effective
thinkers they highlight is their ability to focus on the main ideas behind the
details, to grasp the gist of something. This, too, is something the slip-box
nudges us to do.

Another
piece of advice is not a feature of the slip-box and might sound banal, but it
is crucial: Make sure that you really see what you think you see and describe
it as plainly and factually as possible. Double-check if necessary. That this
isn’t as obvious as it sounds will become clearer by the fact that the ability
to truly see what is in front of one’s eyes is often listed as a trait of
experts. And that is easily explained by the fact that our perception does not
follow the order of seeing first and interpreting second. It does both at the
same time: We always perceive something as something – our interpretation is
instantaneous. This is why we have so much trouble not falling for an optical
illusion: If we look at a three-dimensional drawing, we cannot see it just as
an arrangement of lines and shapes – unless we are highly trained to do so. We
don’t even notice objectively missing parts in our perception, like the blind
spot in the middle of everything we see. We need a trick to see what we don’t
see. As we always immediately see a whole picture of something, everything
else, including the reinterpretation of it or the detection of missing bits, is
a step that follows.

The
same is true when we read: We don’t see lines on a paper first, then realise
that these are words, then use them to build sentences and finally decipher the
meaning. We immediately read on the level of meaningful understanding. To really
understand a text is therefore a constant revision of our first
interpretation. We have to train ourselves to get used to seeing this
difference and to hold back our ingrained urge to jump to conclusions. To be able
to see what we see instead of what we expect to see is indeed a skill in
itself, not like a character trait of being “open-minded.” Those who think of
themselves as being open-minded are often even more prone to stick to their
first understanding as they believe to be without natural prejudices and
therefore don’t see the need to counterbalance them. If we think we can “hold
back” an interpretation, we are fooling ourselves.

While
the constant comparison of notes can help us to detect differences, no technique
can help us see what is missing. But we can make it a habit to always ask what
is not in the picture, but could be relevant. This, too, does not come
naturally to us.

One
of the most famous figures to illustrate this skill is the mathematician Abraham
Wald (Mangel and Samaniego 1984). During World War II, he was asked to help the
Royal Air Force find the areas on their planes that were most often hit by
bullets so they could cover them with more armour. But instead of counting the
bullet holes on the returned planes, he recommended armouring the spots where
none of the planes had taken any hits. The RAF forgot to take into account what
was not there to see: All the planes that didn’t make it back.

The
RAF fell for a common error in thinking called survivorship bias (Taleb 2005).
The other planes didn’t make it back because they were hit where they should
have had extra protection, like the fuel tank. The returning planes could only
show what was less relevant.

Product
developers make the same mistake on such a regular basis, one has to wonder if
they do it on purpose. As marketing expert Robert McMath assembled the
biggest-ever collection of supermarket products, he realised midway it was
becoming almost exclusively a collection of failed products because they make
up the vast majority of all products ever produced. He thought a museum would
be a great place for product developers to see what already proved not to work
so they didn’t have to repeat the same mistake. Alas, rarely does a product developer
show any interest in learning from the experience of others. Often, companies
don’t even keep track of their own failed attempts, providing McMath with whole
series in which one kind of mistake was made in multiple variations, sometimes
from each generation of developers in the same company (McMath and Forbes
1999).

In
his beautifully titled book “The Antidote: Happiness for People Who Can’t Stand
Positive Thinking,” Oliver Burkeman describes how much our culture is focused
on success and how we neglect the important lessons from failure (Burkeman
2013). Manager biographies are a good example: Even though all of them contain
some anecdotes about setbacks, these are always embedded in a bigger story
about success (failed managers unfortunately rarely write biographies). If we
try to extract a lesson from all these books, we might end up believing that
persistence and charisma are paramount for success, even though these are
exactly the same ingredients needed to screw a project up big time (Burkeman is
referring to Jerker Denrell here). Obviously, the same is true in research: It
is very good to know what has already proven to not work if we try to come up
with new ideas that do work.

One
possibility to deal with this tendency is to ask counterfactual questions, like
“what if?” (Markman, Lindberg, Kray and Galinsky, 2007). It is easier to learn
about the function of money in a society if we wonder how strangers would
exchange goods without using money than if we just focus on the obvious
problems we have in a society based on money exchange. 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.

Problems
rarely get solved directly, anyway. Most often, the crucial step forward is to
redefine the problem in such a way that an already existing solution can be
employed. The first question should always be directed towards the question
itself: What kind of answer can you expect from asking a question in this
particular way? What is missing?

Another
seemingly banal tip relates to a distinguishing feature of extraordinary
thinkers: Taking simple ideas seriously. Consider, for example, the idea of
buying stocks low and selling them high. I am sure everyone can grasp that
idea. But grasping an idea is not the same as understanding it. If you go and
buy stocks on that “insight,” all you can do is to hope that a stock goes up
after you buy it, which makes this knowledge about as useful as the tip on the
next colour to choose on a roulette table.

The
next level of understanding is reached when you realise what you buy if you buy
a stock: a part of a company. Nobody would sign a contract for a house and
believe it is the contract he owns now. But many people treat a stock exactly
like this. They don’t really think about what they get for the price they pay:
they just assume they made a good deal when the price is lower than the day
before. But the only thing Warren Buffett thinks about it is the relationship
between price and value – he doesn’t even look at the price from yesterday. He
understands that simple is not the same as easy, and that the worst thing you
can do is to make a simple task unnecessarily complicated. A stock is a share
in a company. The price is set by the market, which means by supply and demand,
which touches on the rationality of market participants as well as the question
of valuation, which means you have to understand something about the business
you are considering investing in, including competition, competitive
advantages, technological developments, etc.

Making
things more complicated than they are can be a way to avoid the underlying
complexity of simple ideas. This is what happened during the financial crisis
of 2008: Economists developed hugely complicated products, but did not take
into account the simple fact that price and value are not necessarily the same.
There is a reason why Buffett is not only a great investor, but also a great
teacher: He not only has a vast knowledge about everything related to business,
he can also explain it all in simple terms.

Sometimes
the breakthrough in a scientific process is the discovery of a simple principle
behind a seemingly very complicated process. Burger and Starbird remind us of
the long history of human attempts to fly: We tried to emulate birds by
flapping wing-like apparatuses with feathers and all, but in the end, it was
about not getting distracted by details and discovering that the subtle bending
of the wing is the only thing that counts.

Simple
ideas can be tied together into consistent theories and build up enormous
complexity. This just doesn’t work with complicated ideas. By using the
slip-box on a daily basis, we train these important intellectual skills
deliberately: We check if what we understood from a text is really in the text
by having our understanding in written form in front of our eyes. We learn to
focus on the gist of an idea by restricting ourselves in terms of space. We can
make it a habit to always think about what is missing when we write down our
own ideas. And we can practice asking good questions when we sort our notes
into the slip-box and connect them with other notes.

12.7   Facilitate
Creativity through Restrictions

The slip-box imposes quite a few restrictions on its user. Instead of
having the choice between all kinds of fancy notebooks, papers or writing
formats, or being able to employ the whole range of productivity tools
available for note-taking, learning and academic or nonfiction writing,
everything is reduced to a single plain-text format and collected in a single
simple slip-box system with no frills or features. Even the computer program
basically just emulates a wooden box filled with plain, consecutively numbered
paper. And even though the digital program lifts the physical restrictions on
the length of a note, I highly recommend treating a digital note as if the
space were limited. By restricting ourselves to one format, we also restrict
ourselves to just one idea per note and force ourselves to be as precise and
brief as possible. The restriction to one idea per note is also the
precondition to recombine them freely later. Luhmann choose notes in the format
A6. A good rule of thumb for working with the program is: Each note should fit
onto the screen and there should be no need of scrolling.

Standardised
is also the way we treat literature and our own thoughts: Instead of using
different kinds of notes or techniques for different kinds of texts or ideas,
the approach here is always the same, simple one. Literature is condensed on a
note saying, “On page x, it says y,” and later stored with the reference in one
place. Ideas and thoughts are captured on the slip-box notes and connected to
other notes always in the same way in the same place. These standardizations
make it possible that the technical side of note-taking can become automatic.
Not having to think about the organisation is really good news for brains like
ours – the few mental resources we have available, we need for thinking about
the actual relevant questions: those concerning the contents.

This
kind of self-imposed restriction is counterintuitive in a culture where more
choice is usually regarded as a good thing and more tools to choose from seen
as better than having less at hand. But not having to make decisions can be
quite liberating. In his book “The Paradox of Choice,” Barry Schwartz used
numerous examples, from shopping to career options to romance, to show that
less choice can not only increase our productivity, but also our freedom and
make it easier to be in the moment and enjoy it (Schwartz, 2007). Not having to
make choices can unleash a lot of potential, which would otherwise be wasted on
making these choices. Academic writing should definitely be added to Schwartz’
list of examples in which less choice is better.

The
formal standardization of the slip-box might seem to be at odds with our search
for creativity. But here, too, it is more likely the opposite is true. Thinking
and creativity can flourish under restricted conditions and there are plenty of
studies to back that claim (cf. Stokes 2001; Rheinberger 1997). The scientific
revolution started with the standardization and controlling of experiments,
which made them comparable and repeatable (cf. Shapin, 1996). Or think of poetry:
It imposes restrictions in terms of rhythm, syllables or rhymes. Haikus give
the poet very little room for formal variations, but that doesn’t mean they are
equally limited in terms of poetic expressiveness. On the contrary: It is the
strict formalism that allows them to transcend time and culture.

Language
in itself is extremely standardised and limited in many ways. We are restricted
to the use of only 26 letters, but what that enables us to do! We can write
novels, theories, love letters or court orders – just by rearranging these 26
letters. This is certainly not possible despite the restriction to 26 letters,
but because of it. Nobody will open a book and wish it contains more
types of letters or be disappointed because it is, again, just another
variation of the same alphabet.[36]

A
clear structure allows us to explore the internal possibilities of something.
Even the act of breaking with convention depends on it. The limitation of the
canvas does not make the artistic expressions of painters seem limited, but
opens up the possibility of an artist like Lucio Fontana to cut into the canvas
instead of painting on it. It is not even true that a more complex structure
provides more possibilities. Quite the contrary. The binary code is radically
more limited than the alphabet as it contains only two states, one or zero, but
it opened up a range of creative possibilities that is unprecedented.

The
biggest threat to creativity and scientific progress is therefore the opposite:
a lack of structure and restrictions. Without structure, we cannot
differentiate, compare or experiment with ideas. Without restrictions, we would
never be forced to make the decision on what is worth pursuing and what is not.
Indifference is the worst environment for insight. And the slip-box is,
above all, a tool for enforcing distinctions, decisions and making differences
visible. One thing is for sure: the common idea that we should liberate
ourselves from any restrictions and “open ourselves up” to be more creative is
very misleading indeed (Dean 2013, 201).

13   Share
Your Insight

“Writing
itself makes you realise where there are holes in things. I’m never sure what I
think until I see what I write. And so I believe that, even though you’re an
optimist, the analysis part of you kicks in when you sit down to construct a
story or a paragraph or a sentence. You think, ‘Oh, that can’t be right.’ And
you have to go back, and you have to rethink it all.” (Carol Loomis)[37]

Since writing is nothing more than the revision of a rough draft, which
is nothing more than turning a series of notes into a continuous text, which
are written on a day-to-day basis, connected and indexed in the slip-box, there
is no need to worry about finding a topic to write about. Just look into your
slip-box and see where clusters have been built up. These clusters are what
caught your interest again and again, so you already know that you have found
material to work with. Now you can spread out these notes on your desktop or
use the outliner of the Zettelkasten, outline your argument and construct a
preliminary order of sections, chapters or paragraphs. This will make questions,
which are not answered, obvious, and it will show the gaps in the argument that
need to be filled and make visible which parts still need some work.

The
perspective changes another time: Now, it is not about understanding something
in the context of another author’s argument, and it is also not about looking
for multiple connections in the slip-box, but about developing one argument and
bringing it into the linearity of a manuscript. Instead of widening the
perspective to find as many possible lines of thought to which an idea might
contribute, it is now about narrowing the perspective, making a decision on one
topic only and cutting out everything that does not directly contribute to the
development of the text and support the main argument.

13.1   From
Brainstorming to Slip-box-Storming

“Remember
the lesson: ‘An idea or a fact is not worth more merely because it is easily
available to you.’” (Charles T. Munger)

Whenever someone struggles with finding a good topic to write about,
someone else will recommend brainstorming. It still has a modern sound to it,
even though it was described in 1919 by Alex Osborn and introduced to a broader
audience in 1958 in the book “Brainstorming: The Dynamic New Way to Create
Successful Ideas” from Charles Hutchison Clark. For many people, it is still
the best method to generate new ideas. I suggest to see it rather as an
expression of an outdated fixation on the brain, which is mirrored in the
fixation of our educational system to learn things by heart – which means to
think without external tools. Testing students for memorised knowledge does not
give much indication about their understanding, and the fact that someone came
up with a lot of ideas during a brainstorming session does not give much
indication about their quality.

While
we want to find topics that are important, interesting and can be dealt with
using the material we have available, the brain prioritises ideas that are easily
available in the moment. This, obviously, does not equal relevant. The brain
more easily remembers information that it encountered recently, which has
emotions attached to it and is lively, concrete or specific. Ideally, it rhymes
as well (cf. Schacter, 2001; Schacter, Chiao and Mitchell, 2003). Everything
that is rather abstract, vague, emotionally neutral or does not even sound good
is far down on its list of priorities – not exactly the best criteria for an
intellectual endeavour.

It
makes things worse that we tend to like our first ideas the best and are very
reluctant to let go of them, irrespective of their actual relevance (Strack and
Mussweiler 1997). And before you now wonder if it would be a good idea to
overcome the limitations of brainstorming by assembling a group of friends to
brainstorm together, forget it: More people in a brainstorming group usually
come up with less good ideas and restrict themselves inadvertently to a
narrower range of topics (Mullen, Johnson, and Salas 1991).[38]

But
finding the right topic to write about is mostly a problem for those who
treated writing as a separate task from others, anyway – not for those of us
who work with the slip-box. Those who rely on their brains will first ask
themselves, then their supervisor: I read so much, but what should I write
about? On the other hand, we who have already accompanied our studies by
writing and collecting notes in a smart way simply don’t have the need for
brainstorming anymore. We can just look into our slip-box instead. If we had a
good idea before (and it is certainly more likely that we will come up with a
good idea over the course of several months rather than within a couple of
minutes), it will be in there. It might even already have proved itself worthy
of following up on, in which case it is already connected to supporting
material. It is so much easier to see what worked than to predict what might
work.

We
don’t need to worry about the question of what to write about because we have
answered the question already – many times on a daily basis. Every time we read
something, we make a decision on what is worth writing down and what is not.
Every time we make a permanent note, we also made a decision about the aspects
of a text we regarded as relevant for our longer-term thinking and relevant for
the development of our ideas. We constantly make explicit how ideas and
information connect with each other and turn them into literal connections
between our notes. By doing this, we develop visible clusters of ideas that are
now ready to be turned into manuscripts.

The
process is self-reinforcing. A visibly developed cluster attracts more ideas
and provides more possible connections, which in return influence our choices
on what to read and think further. They become signposts for our daily work and
orient us to what is worth thinking about. Topics grow bottom up and gain
traction along the way. As soon as the slip-box has grown a bit, we can replace
our thoughts on what is interesting and what we think is relevant
with a pragmatic look into the slip-box, where we can plainly see what
truly proved to be interesting and where we found material to work with.

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. It is now less about finding a topic to write about and more about
working on the questions we generated by writing.

By
generating questions in the course of our everyday work, we bring the law of
large numbers on our side. The truth is that few questions are suitable to be
answered within an article, a thesis or a book. Some are too broad, some are
too narrow, some are impossible to answer with knowledge we can reasonably
acquire, but for most, we just don’t have the material to work with. Those who
start with a plan and an idea about what to write will probably encounter that
truth somewhere along the way. They then might be able to correct an
unfortunate choice once or twice, but will have to stick with what they have
chosen at one point, otherwise they will never finish their project.

If
we, on the other hand, let questions arise from the slip-box, we know that they
are tried and tested among dozens or even hundreds of other possible questions.
The vast majority of questions might have been answered quickly or disappeared
as no notes were drawn to them, either because of a lack of interest or a lack
of material. This is how evolution works: by trial and error, not planning.

Good
questions are in the sweet spot of being relevant and interesting, not too easy
to answer but possible to tackle with material that is available or at least
within our reach. When it comes to finding good questions, it is therefore not
enough to think about it. We have to do something with an idea
before we know enough about it to make a good judgement. We have to work,
write, connect, differentiate, complement and elaborate on questions – but this
is what we do when we take smart notes.

13.2   From
Top Down to Bottom Up

Developing topics and questions from what we have has a huge advantage.
The ideas we decide on are not taken out of thin air, but are already embedded
in a content-rich context and come with material that we can use. Starting with
what we have also comes with another, unexpected advantage: We become more open
to new ideas.

It
seems counterintuitive that we become more open to new ideas the more familiar
we are with ideas we have already encountered, but historians of science will
happily confirm this (Rheinberger 1997). It makes sense when you think about
it: without intense elaboration on what we already know, we would have trouble
seeing its limitations, what is missing or possibly wrong. Being intimately
familiar with something enables us to be playful with it, to modify it, to spot
new and different ideas without running the risk of merely repeating old ideas believing
they are new. This is why it feels in the beginning that familiarity makes it
harder to come up with new ideas. We just didn’t know that most of the ideas we
had are actually not that innovative. But while the belief in our own ingenuity
decreases with expertise, we become more able to actually make a genuine new
contribution.

Jacob
Warren Getzels and Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi showed that this is also true in
art: New, groundbreaking work is rarely created on a whim by some accidental
artist who believes himself to be amazingly innovative. On the contrary: The
more time an artist devotes to learning about an aesthetic “problem,” the more
unexpected and creative his solution will be regarded later by art experts
(Getzels and Csikszentmihalyi 1976).

If
open-mindedness is all that is needed, the best artists and scientists were
hobbyists. Jeremy Dean, who has written extensively on routines and rituals and
suggests seeing old ways of thinking as thinking routines, puts it well when he
writes that we cannot break with a certain way of thinking if we are not even
aware that it is a certain way of thinking (Dean, 2013).

13.3   Getting
Things Done by Following Your Interests

It is not surprising that motivation is shown to be one of the most
important indicators for successful students – next to the feeling of being in
control of one’s own learning course. When even highly intelligent students
fail in their studies, it’s most often because they cease to see the meaning in
what they were supposed to learn (cf. Balduf 2009), are unable to make a
connection to their personal goals (Glynn et al. 2009) or lack the ability to
control their own studies autonomously and on their own terms (Reeve and Jan,
2006; Reeve, 2009).

These
findings are an important argument for academic freedom. Nothing motivates us
more than seeing a project we can identify with moving forward, and nothing is
more demotivating than being stuck with a project that doesn’t seem to be worth
doing.

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. We can mitigate this
risk considerably by applying a flexible organisation scheme that allows us to
change course whenever necessary.

If
we accompany every step of our work with the question, “What is interesting
about this?” and everything we read with the question, “What is so relevant about
this that it is worth noting down?” we do not just choose information according
to our interest. By elaborating on what we encounter, we also discover aspects
we didn’t know anything about before and therefore develop our interests along
the way. It would be quite sad if we did not change our interests during
research.

The
ability to change the direction of our work opportunistically is a form of
control that is completely different from the attempt to control the
circumstances by clinging to a plan. The beginning of the research project that
led to the discovery of DNA’s structure was the application for a grant. The
grant was not to discover DNA’s structure, but find a treatment for cancer. If
the scientists had stuck to their promises, not only would they probably not
have found a cure for cancer, but they definitely would not have discovered the
structure of DNA. Most likely, they would have lost interest in their work.
Luckily, they did not stick to their plan, but followed their intuition and
interest and took the most promising path to insight whenever one opened up.
The actual research program developed along the way (Rheinberger 1997). One
could say they finished the plan on what to do the very moment they finished
the whole project.

The
ability to keep control over our work and change course if necessary is made
possible by the fact that the big task of “writing a text” is broken down into
small, concrete tasks, which allows us practically to do exactly what is needed
at a certain time and take the next step from there. It is not just about
feeling in control, it is about setting up the work in a way that we really are
in control. And the more control we have to steer our work towards what we
consider interesting and relevant, the less willpower we have to put into
getting things done. Only then can work itself become the source of motivation,
which is crucial to make it sustainable.

“When
people experienced a sense of autonomy with regard to the choice, their energy
for subsequent tasks was not diminished. An important question that deserved
empirical attention concerns the potential for autonomous choice to vitalise or
enhance self-regulatory strength for subsequent tasks. What, for example, are
the conditions that will lead autonomous choice to enhance people’s motivation
for new tasks? We suggest that among the factors that are likely to affect
whether choice will be vitalizing is the nature of the options being provided
to the person. If a person is offered choice among options that he or she does
not value, that are trivial or irrelevant, the choice is unlikely to be
vitalizing and may be depleting, even if there is no subtle pressure toward a
particular option. On the other hand, having autonomous choice among options
that do have personal value may indeed be quite energizing.” (Moller, 2006,
1034)

Organizing the work so we can steer our projects in the most promising
direction not only allows us to stay focused for longer, but also to have more
fun – and that is a fact (Gilbert 2006).[39]

13.4   Finishing
and Review

There is not much left to say about the last two steps because the main
work is already done.

A
key point: Structure the text and keep it flexible. While the slip-box was very much
about experimenting with and generating new ideas, we now need to bring our
thoughts into a linear order. The key is to structure the draft visibly.
It is not so much about deciding once and for all what to write in which
chapter or paragraph, but what does not need to be written in a
particular part of the manuscript. By looking at the (always preliminary)
structure, you can see if information will be mentioned in another part.

The
problem in this stage is almost exactly the opposite of the “blank screen.”
Instead of not knowing how to fill the pages, we have so much at hand that we
have to curb our impulse to mention everything at the same time.

The
desktop function of the Zettelkasten is the place to sort your notes for a
particular project. It helps with developing a rough structure, but it also
allows you to keep it flexible. The structure of an argument is part of it and
therefore will change during the process of developing it – it is not a vessel
to be filled with content. As soon as the structure no longer changes much, we
can happily call it a “table of contents.” But even then, it helps to see it as
a structural guideline and not a prescription. It is not unusual to change the
order of chapters at the very end.

Another
key point: Try working on different manuscripts at the same time. While the slip-box is already
helpful to get one project done, its real strength comes into play when we
start working on multiple projects at the same time. The slip-box is in some
way what the chemical industry calls “verbund.” This is a setup in which the
inevitable by-product of one production line becomes the resource for another,
which again produces by-products that can be used in other processes and so on,
until a network of production lines becomes so efficiently intertwined that
there is no chance of an isolated factory competing with it anymore.[40]

The
process of reading and writing inevitably produces a lot of unintended
by-products. Not all ideas can fit into the same article, and only a fraction
of the information we encounter is useful for one particular project.

If
we read something that is interesting, but not directly relevant to our current
project, we can still use it for another project we are working on or might
work on. Everything that enriches our slip-box has the potential to end up in a
text we might write. By taking smart notes, we collect en passant the material
for our future writings in one place. The projects we work on can be in
completely different stages of completion. Some of them might not even have
come to our attention. This is advantageous not only because we make progress
on the next papers or books while we are still working on the current one, but
also because it allows us to switch to other projects whenever we get stuck or
bored.

Remember:
Luhmann’s answer to the question of how one person could be so productive was
that he never forced himself to do anything and only did what came easily to
him. “When I am stuck for one moment, I leave it and do something else.” When
he was asked what else he did when he was stuck, his answer was: “Well, writing
other books. I always work on different manuscripts at the same time. With this
method, to work on different things simultaneously, I never encounter any
mental blockages.” (Luhmann, Baecker, and Stanitzek 1987, 125–55) It is like
martial arts: If you encounter resistance or an opposing force, you should not
push against it, but redirect it towards another productive goal. The slip-box
will always provide you with multiple possibilities.

13.5   Becoming
an Expert by Giving up Planning

One inconvenient truth in the end: The planning skills of students are
pathetic.

The
psychologists Roger Buehler, Dale Griffin and Michael Ross asked a group of
students to:

1.  Estimate
realistically the time they would need to finish a paper.

2.  Estimate
additionally how long they think they would need

a.
if everything goes as smoothly as possible or

b.
if everything that could go wrong would go wrong.

Interestingly, the majority of the student’s
“realistic” estimates were not so different from their estimates for writing
under perfect conditions. This alone should have given them pause for thought.
But when the researchers checked how much time the students really needed, it
was much, much longer than they estimated. Not even half of the students
managed to finish their papers in the time they thought they would need under
the worst possible conditions (Buehler, Griffin and Ross 1994). The
researchers did not assume that half of the students suddenly faced calamities
beyond their imagination.

In
another study a year later, the psychologists looked more closely at this
phenomenon, which still puzzled them because the students could have answered
any way they liked – there was no benefit in giving overly optimistic answers.
They asked the students to give them time ranges in which they were either 50%,
70% or 99% sure to finish their paper.

Again:
They were free to give any answer. But, sure enough, only 45% managed to
get their papers done within the time they were sure they had a 99% likelihood
to finish it under any condition they regarded as possible (Buehler, Griffin,
and Ross 1995). Now, you might think it would make a difference to remind them
about their not-so-perfect guesses last time. The researchers thought so, but
the students proved them wrong: Experience doesn’t seem to teach students
anything.

But
there is one consolation: It has nothing to do with being a student. It has
something to do with being human. Even the people who study this phenomenon,
which is called the overconfidence bias, admit that they too fall for it
(Kahneman 2013, 245ff).

The
lesson to draw is to be generally sceptical about planning, especially if it is
merely focused on the outcome, not on the actual work and the steps required to
achieve a goal. While it doesn’t help to imagine oneself the great author of a
successful and timely finished paper, it does make a difference if we have a
realistic idea about what needs to be done to get there in our minds. We know
from sports that it doesn’t help when athletes imagine themselves as winners of
a race, but it makes a big difference if they imagine all the training that is
necessary to be able to win. Having a more realistic idea in mind not only
helps them to perform better, it also boosts their motivation (Singer et al.
2001). We know today that this is not only true for athletes, but for any work
that needs effort and endurance (Pham and Taylor 1999). Writing definitely
belongs in this category.

The
other lesson is not that we can’t learn from our experiences, but that we can
only learn from our experiences if feedback follows shortly afterwards – and maybe
more than once in a while. Disassembling the big challenge of “writing a paper”
into small, manageable tasks helps to set realistic goals that can be checked
on a regular basis. If someone starts from the unrealistic assumption that a
paper can be written by following a linear plan of finding a topic first, doing
literature research second, followed by separable stages of reading, thinking,
writing and proof-reading, then it is no surprise that any time planning that
is based on this assumption will be unrealistic as well. Once we do some
research, we may discover that our initial idea was not as good as we thought;
once we read something, it is likely that we will discover something else to
read, because that is how we discover literature; once we start writing down
our arguments, it is likely that we will realise that we need to take something
else into account, change our initial ideas or go back to an article we might
not have understood well enough. None of this is unusual, but all of this will
mess up any grand plans.

If
we instead set out to write, say, three notes on a specific day, review one
paragraph we wrote the day before or check all the literature we discovered in
an article, we know exactly at the end of the day what we were able to accomplish
and can adjust our expectations for the next day. Getting hundreds of these
cases of feedback over the course of a year will make us much more likely to
learn from them and to become more realistic about our productivity than if we
just miss a deadline once in a while, which, of course, will not happen again –
until next time.

The
problem with the linear model is not just that one phase might need longer than
planned, but that it is highly unlikely that we will finish a phase sooner than
planned. If the whole problem was just an error in judgement, we would on
average overestimate the time we need as often as we underestimate it, but
unfortunately, that is not how it works. According to the famous law of
Parkinson, every kind of work tends to fill the time we set aside for it, like
air fills every corner of a room (Parkinson 1957).

While
this is almost a universal law for longer time frames, the opposite is true for
tasks that can be completed in one go. This is partly due to the aforementioned
Zeigarnik effect (Zeigarnik 1927), in which our brains tend to stay occupied
with a task until it is accomplished (or written down). If we have the finish
line in sight, we tend to speed up, as everyone knows who has ever run a
marathon. That means that the most important step is to get started. Rituals
help, too (Currey 2013).

But
the biggest difference lies in the task you are facing to start with. It is
much easier to get started if the next step is as feasible as “writing a note,”
“collect what is interesting in this paper” or “turning this series of notes
into a paragraph” than if we decide to spend the next days with a vague and
ill-defined task like “keep working on that overdue paper.”

13.6   The
Actual Writing

Ernest Hemingway was once asked how often he rewrote his first draft.

His
answer: “It depends. I rewrote the ending of ‘A Farewell to Arms,’ the last
page of it, thirty-nine times before I was satisfied.”

“Was
there some technical problem there? What was it that had stumped you?” the
interviewer asked.

“Getting
the words right,” Hemingway replied (Paris Review, 1956).

If
there is one piece of advice that is worth giving, it is to keep in mind that
the first draft is only the first draft. Slavoj Žižek said in an interview[41] that he wouldn’t be able to write a
single sentence if he didn’t start by convincing himself he was only writing
down some ideas for himself, and that maybe he could turn it into something
publishable later. By the time he stopped writing, he was always surprised to
find that the only thing left to do was revise the draft he already had.

One
of the most difficult tasks is to rigorously delete what has no function within
an argument – “kill your darlings.”[42]
This becomes much easier when you move the questionable passages into another
document and tell yourself you might use them later. For every document I
write, I have another called “xy-rest.doc,” and every single time I cut
something, I copy it into the other document, convincing myself that I will
later look through it and add it back where it might fit. Of course, it never
happens – but it still works. Others who know a thing or two about psychology
do the same (cf. Thaler, 2015, 81f).

14   Make
It a Habit

“It is a
profoundly erroneous truism, repeated by all copybooks and by eminent people
when they are making speeches, that we should cultivate the habit of thinking
of what we are doing. The precise opposite is the case. Civilization advances
by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without
thinking about them.” (Whitehead)[43]

The most reliable predictor of our behaviour in the immediate future is
– surprise, surprise – the intention to do it. If we decide to go to the gym
now, the chance is that we really do go to the gym now. But this is,
unfortunately, only true for the very immediate future. When it comes to the
long run, researchers struggle to find any measurable connection between our
intentions and our actual behaviour (Ji and Wood 2007; Neal et al. 2012). There
is one exception, though: we most certainly act according to our intention if
we happen to intend to do exactly what we used to do before.

It
is really easy to predict the behaviour of people in the long run. In all
likelihood, we will do in a month, a year or two years from now exactly what we
have done before: eat as many chocolates as before, go to the gym as often as
before, and get ourselves into the same kinds of arguments with our partners as
before. To put it differently, good intentions don’t last very long, usually.

We
have the best chance to change our behaviour over the long term if we start
with a realistic idea about the difficulties of behavioural change (Dean 2013).
And that is not so easy, because the more we are used to doing something in a
particular way, the more in control we feel about it, even though we are less
in control of it. (This is in part also due to the aforementioned mere-exposure
error.)

“Those
with the strongest habits who were the least successful in predicting their
behaviour over the coming week were the most confident in their predictions.
The finding is striking because it hints at one of the dark sides of habits.
When we perform an action repeatedly, its familiarity seems to bleed back into
our judgments about that behavior. We end up feeling we have more control over
precisely the behaviours that, in reality, we have the least control over. It’s
another example of our thought processes working in the opposite way to our
intuitive expectations.” (Dean 2013, 22)

The trick is not to try to break with old habits and also not to use
willpower to force oneself to do something else, but to strategically build up
new habits that have a chance to replace the old ones. The goal here is to get
into the habit of fetching pen and paper whenever we read something, to write
down the most important and interesting aspects. If we manage to establish a
routine in this first step, it becomes much easier to develop the urge to turn
these findings into permanent notes and connect them with other notes in the
slip-box. It is not so difficult to get used to thinking within an external
memory of notes, as the advantages become obvious quite quickly. As soon as we
have developed a new routine, we can do what intuitively feels right, which
requires no effort. Watching others reading books and doing nothing other than
underlining some sentences or making unsystematic notes that will end up
nowhere will soon be a painful sight.

Afterword

The Take Smart Notes principle works. Many successful writers, artists
and academics use some form of a slip-box. This book is also written with the
help of the slip-box. It was, for example, a note on “technology, acceptance
problems” that pointed out to me that an answer to the question why some people
struggle to implement the slip-box could be found in a book on the history of
the shipping container. I certainly would not have looked for that
intentionally – doing research for a book on effective writing! This is just
one of many ideas and connections the slip-box pointed out to me. That it is
not just a tool to write more efficiently, but also a training device for
serious long-term learning, should have been obvious to me, but wasn’t. Only when
I was taking smart notes on more recent learning experiments did it dawn on me
that I am in the middle of putting exactly into practice what is proven to work
best. I want to point out, though, that I sometimes have ideas all by myself.

The
particular technique presented in this book enabled Niklas Luhmann to become
one of the most productive and innovative social theorists of the last century.
There are increasing numbers of academics and nonfiction writers taking notice.[44] But it is still not an easy sell for the
majority of students and writers. There are different reasons for this. First
of all, the long-term, cross-topic organization of notes, which is guided only
by one’s own understanding and interest, is very much at odds with the modular,
compartmentalised and top-down approach in which the curricula of universities
and colleges are organised. Teaching is still set up for review, and students
are not really encouraged to independently build a network of connections
between heterogeneous information – despite the radical change in our
understanding on how our memory and learning works. There is a lot of talk
about innovative approaches. But without changing the actual workflow, this
talk is idle. Some seemingly innovative ideas, like the “learner-centred”
approach, often do more harm than good, as they still neglect the need for an
external scaffolding to think in. It is not the learner who should be the focus
of attention.

The
slip-box does not put the learner in the centre. Quite the contrary: It allows
the learner to let his or her own thinking become decentralised within a
network of other ideas. Learning, thinking and writing should not be about
accumulating knowledge, but about becoming a different person with a different
way of thinking. This is done by questioning one’s own thinking routines in the
light of new experiences and facts.

The
prevalence of linear and learner-centred approaches also lead to the common
misunderstanding about the use of the slip-box as a tool that can be used
without changing the work routines around it. It is then often used simply as
an archive where you just take out what you put in earlier. This, of course,
will lead to disappointment. If we are just storing information, there would be
no need to use a slip-box. To reap its benefits, we need to change our working
routines. And the basis for that is a deep understanding on how and why it
works and how the different steps and tasks of writing fit together. This is
why a book, not just a manual, is needed to explain the principle and ideas
behind it.

Another
reason why this technique is still a hard sell is that most students only
realise the need for a good system when they already struggling with their
writing, typically towards the end of the university program, when a
bachelor’s, master’s or doctoral thesis needs to be written. It certainly still
helps, but it would have helped much more if one started earlier – very much
like saving for retirement. It is also difficult to change behaviour in times
of stress. The more pressure we feel, the more we tend to stick to our old
routines – even when these routines caused the problems and the stress in the
first place. This is known as the tunnel effect (Mullainathan and Shafir 2013).
But Mullainathan and Shafir, who examined this phenomenon thoroughly, also
found a way out of it: Change is possible when the solution appears to be
simple.

And
that is the very good news at the end. The slip-box is as simple as it gets.
Read with a pen in your hand, take smart notes and make connections between
them. Ideas will come by themselves and your writing will develop from there.
There is no need to start from scratch. Keep doing what you would do anyway:
Read, think, write. Just take smart notes along the way.

If you want to kick-start your new note-taking
efforts with a one-on-one coaching session or would like some help clarifying
your thoughts on a piece you are writing, check out my offers on
http://takesmartnotes.com

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Index

Introduction

1     Everything You Need to Know

1.1   Good Solutions are Simple – and
Unexpected

1.2   The Slip-box

1.3   The slip-box manual

2     Everything You Need to Do

2.1   Writing a paper step by step

3     Everything You Need to Have

3.1   The Tool Box

4     A Few Things to Keep in Mind

The
Four Underlying Principles

5     Writing Is the Only Thing That
Matters

6     Simplicity Is Paramount

7     Nobody Ever Starts From Scratch

8     Let the Work Carry You Forward

The
Six Steps to Successful Writing

9     Separate and Interlocking Tasks

9.1   Give Each Task Your Undivided
Attention

9.2   Multitasking is not a good idea

9.3   Give Each Task the Right Kind of
Attention

9.4   Become an Expert Instead of a
Planner

9.5   Get Closure

9.6   Reduce the Number of Decisions

10       Read for Understanding

10.1 Read With a
Pen in Hand

10.2 Keep an
Open Mind

10.3 Get the Gist

10.4 Learn to
Read

10.5 Learn by
Reading

11       Take Smart Notes

11.1 Make a
Career One Note at a Time

11.2 Think
Outside the Brain

11.3 Learn by
not Trying

11.4 Adding
Permanent Notes to the Slip-Box

12       Develop Ideas

12.1 Develop
Topics

12.2 Make Smart
Connections

12.3 Compare,
Correct and Differentiate

12.4 Assemble a
Toolbox for Thinking

12.5 Use the
Slip-Box as a Creativity Machine

12.6 Think
Inside the Box

12.7 Facilitate
Creativity through Restrictions

13       Share Your Insight

13.1 From Brainstorming
to Slip-box-Storming

13.2 From Top
Down to Bottom Up

13.3 Getting
Things Done by Following Your Interests

13.4 Finishing
and Review

13.5 Becoming an
Expert by Giving up Planning

13.6 The Actual
Writing

14       Make It a Habit

Afterword

Bibliography

Index

[1]     Cf. for
example the writing guide of the University of Toronto:
http://www.writing.utoronto.ca/advice

[2]     The
research on willpower or “ego depletion” is in a bit of turmoil at the moment.
But it is safe to say that using willpower is a terrible strategy to get things
done in the long run. For an overview:
https://replicationindex.wordpress.com/2016/04/18/is-replicability-report-ego-depletionreplicability-report-of-165-ego-depletion-articles/

[3]     The introduction
to his theory was published in 1987 in the form of a book with the title “Social Systems” and the book series number “666.” Those who were not aware of his
note-taking system might have been tempted to think that this was not by
chance, as his productivity could only have been explained by a deal with the
devil.

[4]
https://youtu.be/qRSCKSPMuDc?t=37m30s (all links are on takesmartnotes.com)

[5]     On the back
of his notes, you will find not only manuscript drafts, but also old bills or
drawings by his children.

[6]     In the
program Zettelkasten, the desktop is where you can bring notes into
project-specific order. Each project should have its own desktop. If you use
pen and paper, use your actual desktop.

[7]     This
problem is known as Meno’s paradox (Plato, Meno 80e, Grube translation).

[8]     SQ3R is the
acronym for “Survey, Question, Read, Recite, Review,” developed by psychology
professor Francis Pleasant Robinson for the U.S. Army during World War II
(Robinson, 1978).

[9]     SQ4R,
“Survey, Question, Read, Reflect, Recite, Review” will most certainly be
replaced soon by SQ5R – whatever that will stand for.

[10] While there are no official apps
for smartphones available at the moment, there are multiple third-party
solutions for both Android and iOS.

[11]    Google Monty
Python “How to Play the Flute”.

[12]    Unfortunately
most of it is in German: http://www.uni-bielefeld.de/soz/luhmann-archiv/

[13] Whenever no published English
version of a German text is available, the translation is by myself.

[14]    Guide to Academic
Writing, English and American Studies, University of Bayreuth.

[15]    Writing and Style
Guide for University Papers and Assignments, First version prepared by
François-Pierre Gingras (1998), School of Political Studies, Faculty of Social
Sciences, University of Ottawa.

[16]    And, of course,
it is addressing the “fear of the blank page” (Kruse 2005).

[17]    Ryfe and
Kemmelmeier not only show that this development goes much further back into the
past and first appeared in newspapers (the quotes of politicians got almost
halved between 1892 and 1968), but also posed the question if this can maybe
also be seen as a form of increased professionalism of the media as they do not
just let politicians talk as they wish (Ryfe and Kemmelmeier 2011). Craig
Fehrman also pointed out the irony in the reception of this rather nuanced
study – it was itself reduced to a soundbite in the media (Fehrman 2011).

[18]    As much as
Csikszentmihalyi’s concept of flow became part of everyday language, it was
never thoroughly examined. In the 1960’s, some studies in the Soviet Union
focused on “postvoluntary attention,” which basically means the same thing – an
attention without effort that is neither involuntary nor voluntary. But almost
all of the study results are only available in Russian and never found their
way into the international psychological discourse. (Cf. Bruya 2010, 4 with
reference to Dobrynin 1966).

[19]    Flyvbjerg
describes this experiment and example not only with reference to the book of
Dreyfus and Dreyfus, but also with reference to extensive talks with them. I
therefore stick with the description in Flyvbjerg 2001.

[20]    This is even true
for highly specialised surgeons (Gawande 2002).

[21] Here 11 95 82 19 62 31 96 64 19 70
51 97 4 becomes 1. 1958 2. 1962 3. 1966 4. 1970 5. 1974

[22]    It is almost
impossible to overstate the importance of taking care of the little things. Not
only are we easily distracted by mundane thoughts, we also routinely forget
small but important things when we don’t externalise them. This is why
checklists are so important wherever something serious is at stake (cf. Gawande
2010).

[23]    Even though this
is not a new discovery, it is now confirmed by neuroscientists and experimental
psychologists alike (Doyle and Zakrajsek 2013 ref. Tambini, A., Ketz, N., and
Davachi, L. 2010).

[24]    Neuroscientists
would call it long-term potentiation (Bliss, Collingridge, and Morris 2004).

[25]    There is plenty
of proof that sleeping aids in memorization (cf. for example Wagner et al.
2004) and can help to find solutions to problems (Wamsley et al. 2010).

[26]    Franklin 1840, 250.

[27]    Here is an
example: http://ds.ub.uni-bielefeld.de/viewer/

toc/ZK_digital/1/#LOG_0000

[28]    Cf. Wolfe and Britt,
2008.

[29]    They claim this
quote is from (Jang et al. 2012), but I couldn’t find it there. Anyway: It is a
good way to put it.

[30]    According to
different personal encounters.

[31]    About $30,000
adjusted for inflation.

[32]    About $200,000 if
you take the 7% the S&P500 achieved historically adjusted for inflation.

[33]    “Genius: The Life
And Science of Richard Feynman,” James Gleick, Pantheon Books, 1992 (see pg.
409).

[34]    Just for fun,
check a few references in the aforementioned book from Doyle and Zakrajsek. I
bet you won’t have to search long to find surprising results (Doyle and
Zakrajsek 2013).

[35]    You are less
prone to make this error in judgement if you know about it (Rassin 2014). You
are welcome.

[36]    An exception
might be the author of my favourite TripAdvisor review. He wrote of a museum I
visited (and enjoyed): “There’s really not much to see in this museum. Just
several buildings with paintings hanging on the walls.” (Google: User Ondska
Museum Puri Lukisan)

[37]
http://longform.org/posts/longform-podcast-152-carol-loomis

[38]    You can avoid
that, though, by letting all members brainstorm for themselves and compiling
the results afterwards.

[39]    If that doesn’t
convince you, then maybe the fact that the feeling of being in control
lengthens your life (Langer and Rodin 1976; Rodin and Langer 1977). That is
equally as well understood as the opposite: The loss of control has a negative
effect on your health (M. G. Marmot et al. 1997). As a short overview, cf.
Michael G. Marmot 2006.

[40]    The first and
most developed “verbund” is located in Ludwigshafen, Germany. It belongs to
BASF, the world’s biggest chemical company and one of the most consistently profitable,
despite being located in a highly developed country with high wages and social
security costs.

[41]    In the movie
Žižek! (USA 2005; Astra Taylor).

[42]    The quote is
variably attributed to William Faulkner, Allen Ginsberg, Oscar Wilde, Stephen
King and others. It seems that the critic Arthur Quiller-Couch mentioned it
first when he told his students at Cambridge in 1914: “If you here require a
practical rule of me, I will present you with this: Whenever you feel an
impulse to perpetrate a piece of exceptionally fine writing, obey
it—wholeheartedly—and delete it before sending your manuscript to press. Murder
your darlings.” (Quiller-Couch 2006, 203)

[43]    Alfred North
Whitehead, 1911, 61.

[44]    Cf. the
discussions in the forum for the program zettelkasten.de