#Taking smart notes how to#

A key feature of the system is that permanent notes are limited to a single idea per index card.

These temporary notes are carefully considered: if the temporary note is deemed sufficiently interesting it is rewritten-with future utility and retrieval in mind-and archived in the zettelkasten as a permanent note (temporary notes that don’t warrant saving are discarded). First, the practitioner generates temporary notes while thinking, learning, and reading. Ahrens describes the process in detail in Chapter 2. The zettelkasten method is relatively straight-forward. Zettelkasten is designed for the capture, processing, and publication of ideas. Zettelkasten shares some qualities of the GTD methodology (particularly where it comes to offloading or freeing up mental capacity by recording important information), but the target audience for the book is the academic researcher, doctoral student and non-fiction writer. Mind you, the zettelkasten is not a productivity system in the way that David Allen’s Getting Things Done system is. It provides a way of saving ideas by writing them down as notes, creating connections between those ideas, and using your accumulated notes to write productively (articles, dissertations, books, etc.). Zettelkasten is a simple but powerful way of recording, organizing and generating insights from what we read and learn.

#Taking smart notes how to#

How to Take Smart Notes by Sönke Ahrens (2017) is a book that lays out the rationale and the methods behind the zettelkasten note-taking system (also referred to as the “slip box” method).