Book review: How to Take Smart Notes (S. Ahrens)
This book has become a watershed in the way I consume information. According to the author, acquired knowledge is useless if not incorporated into your own context; it becomes just an island of pointless trivia lost in the ocean of your memory. If you try to memorize all the important facts from a book without thinking in advance how you might use it in your projects, you’re prone to either forget it in a while—or, at best, become a walking encyclopedia of isolated facts. That’s exactly what I have been doing all my life, and that goes not only for non-fiction books, but online essays, podcasts, and whatnot.
Ahrens tries to teach his readers a way to organize our knowledge base where connection between ideas is a first class citizen. Enter the Zettelkasten, a method devised by a German sociologist who published dozens of books and hundreds of papers using nothing more than a slip-box of index cards to write down his ideas. His method was nothing fancy by the time, but he proposed that ideas should be linked together to become useful. His method looked like a personal pen-and-paper wikipedia, but ideas were atomized to fit one idea per card. He labelled each of his cards with unique IDs as he wrote them down, and created a web of hand-written hyperlinks. And this is all there is to it. His method helped him both memorize things better, as well as find new connection between ideas that was otherwise unnoticeable, and become the most prolific writer of his field.
It’s really worth the shot. I can’t see myself reading technical stuff the way I used to.