I know what you’re thinking. “Why would I want to take notes? I am out of school; no more tests. I have no need to study and make sure I know the material.”
You’re right. You don’t need to study for school. You and I need to study for our own growth and improvement; to be able to make wise and profitable decisions in life; and to put current events into context.
What is the point in reading if you don’t remember what you’ve read or learn lessons from that material or use it in any capacity? As someone said, “The man who doesn’t read has no advantage over the man who can not read.” When we don’t read, we are functionally illiterate. Likewise, if you’re making the effort to read non-fiction, surely you want to use that information somewhere down the road. Today, we’re discussing the best ways to take notes to ensure you remember the important aspects of that article, book, or story, and that you have a place to store the quotes and ideas which impact you while you’re reading. We’ll start with two systems to use while reading, then move on to the best way to organize your notes.
Notes Systems
Cornell method
As I shared in the last entry, I use a combination of paper and digital notes to keep track of what I’m learning. While I am reading (or watching a documentary, etc.) I take notes on paper using the Cornell method. This method divides a piece of paper into three sections. The first is a line straight down the page, about one and one-half inches from the left side of the page. The next line is horizontal two inches up from the bottom of the page.
This will leave a large rectangle taking up most of the right side of the page, a long thin rectangle on the left and a rectangle at the bottom of the page. The largest section is for notes during reading (or watching a video or lecture). The left rectangle is for questions when you review after the initial. The bottom section is used for summarizing the above information.
While reading, take note of the key concepts the author covers. Note how each subsection relates to the main question of the piece. I suggest leaving a line of space between each topic covered during the reading. Then, you can go back and fill in information or quotes to clarify your understanding when you review your notes. Rarely will you completely understand an article or book the first pass through. Write down your questions in your notes, along with your understanding at the moment. As you read further and review the information, you develop a better grasp; as you understand more and as more information fills in the gaps, update your notes to reflect this understanding.
The left hand space is for questions written for review, after you’ve finished reading. This will help you make connections as to why the new info is relevant or how it relates to things you already know. Write in questions which will prompt you to recall the structure and most important concepts, such as the main idea of a section or the key accomplishments of a person described in a particular chapter. This is to help review and go back over the information. You can see what you paid attention to, or missed during the session, and fill in those gaps.
The bottom section is where you’ll summarize the chapters or sections – or entire piece, possibly. It’s the third pass through of the material, and it allows you to display your understanding by focusing on the main points of the material and putting them into your own words.
Highlighting
Organizing your highlighting is another great way to make sense of what you read. Most of my reading is with paper books, but do about a third of my reading on the Kindle app. The easiest way to streamline notes from various sources is to use the same highlighting system on paper and e-books. The simple system I use for all books is the color blue for main ideas and arguments of the piece; pink for supporting arguments; yellow for quotes or examples I want to use later; and orange for titles or names for further reading. I then email my Kindle highlights to my Evernote notebook and organize accordingly. When I read paper books, I still use the same structure, then just type up the notes.
I also use Liner to highlight articles online, and send the highlighted excerpts to Evernote, where I can further organize them.
Writing is Thinking. Thinking is Writing.
Note-taking is a visual representation of the knowledge you accumulate. Writing out our thoughts is not only the best way to think through new ideas, it is the best way to remember the information you’ve learned. Writing clarifies your ideas and thoughts. Writing allows you to distill a tangle of thoughts into a logical series of sentences, each with a subject and verb. You’re forced to make sense of information. Taking an essay or book and breaking it down into its most essential parts requires thinking and organization. Then, you need to organize that information into a usable system.
The smart notes system is based on the slip-box system used by German sociologist Niklas Luhmann (1927-1998). Sönke Ahrens, in How to Take Smart Notes, tells how Luhmann developed and used this system to achieve remarkable success in the 1960s. Luhhman was in administration, and unhappy with his job. After work a full day, he would study philosophy, organization theory, and sociology at home, taking copious notes. He began to realize simply taking notes was not helping him to solve problems or think differently. He overhauled his note-taking from a file where notes sat, into a system for thinking.
Luhmann would make each idea a separate note, and number each note. All the notes would then go into a slip-box. As a new note related to a previous note, he would write the related note’s number on the new note for indexing. This brought structure to his thinking, while still allowing for ideas to co-mingle. Over time, this system allowed him to develop a thesis on sociology in his leisure time. Luhmann wrote a manuscript and gave it to a famous sociologist, who suggested Luhmann should be teaching as a professor. Luhmann again used his slip-box system to develop a doctoral thesis in one year, while taking sociology classes. He was then selected to be a professor at the University of Bielefeld, a position he held for the remainder of his life. He credited his great success to his slip-box method of note-taking.
Whereas most people organize their notes by topic or the source they came from, by keeping the notes all together, and “chaining” the related ideas to one another, Luhmann’s system allows for cross-pollination. It promotes discovery of new ideas and creative thinking. As Sonke writes,
“He soon developed new categories of these notes. He realized 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.”
– Ahrens, Sönke, How to Take Smart Notes
In organizing the information by context, Luhmann increased his chances of learning and improving his thinking. Instead of only keeping the ideas he learned in the context in which he learned them, he began to apply the principles to different areas. This is creative thinking; recognizing patterns and applying them to new contexts. Let’s look at how this system works.
The How to Take Smart Notes system:
- Take physical notes
- Record bibliographical information
- Separate notes
- File notes
- Use your notes
1.Take Physical Notes
Take handwritten notes while you read. Studies show that when we write something out by hand, we remember it better. The whole point of reading and taking notes is to remember what you are reading; write your notes out by hand. It takes more effort because you are using your mind, processing the information more fully, and you have the sensory input of hearing and feeling your pen scrawl across the page. Writing by hand makes you focus more on understanding the basic concepts, since you know you don’t want to merely copy down every word. You can’t summarize if you don’t understand what is being said. All of this adds up to you remembering what you write by hand better than what you’ve typed.
Ahrens calls these “fleeting notes” as they are taken while reading or listening. They are messy and aren’t organized in a final manner. There are questions asked and sentences written which likely will need to be changed or updated in light of new information. These notes contain ideas which the reading inspired. They show connections to other, outside ideas. They will be reviewed and rewritten after a final reading and understanding, and put into a final system. This is where I use the Cornell method described above.
2.Record Bibliographical Information
Literature notes summarize the information presented. This includes quotes from the book and summaries of what was presented, as well as bibliographical information. The main questions the author sets out to answer the way she makes her case should be included, too.
Luhmann recorded the title, author, and page number on the back of each literature note. When you separate out the notes from ideas, it’s a good idea to include the reference information on each individual quote or idea. This will save from having to search for the source when you want to use the quote or reference the idea later!
3.Separate Notes into a Permanent File
Composed from your fleeting and literature notes, permanent notes contain the ideas you’re developing and thinking further about. You’ll go through the notes previously made and organize them into a final version which will go in your file system. These notes will answer questions required of any good reading material, “What was the purpose of the piece? How does the author go about that purpose? Did the author accomplish that purpose? What questions does the author leave unanswered, and are they aware of those questions left unanswered?”
4.File notes
The entire point of the note-taking system is that it helps you think. It helps you remember information, but also explore and match together dissimilar concepts, resulting in new solutions and ideas. How you file your notes will be subjective and unique to your interests, but it should remain loose enough for serendipity. You want to make finding connections between notes and ideas simple. This is why Luhmann separated his notes down to the individual ideas. He could then take each individual idea and explore how it paired with other ideas he’d learned from other places. Each note was indexed to other related notes, but he didn’t have to go through an entire framework or stack of notes to find the one idea he had in mind.
Today, technology has taken care of much of the work of putting together a note system. Evernote, Roam, and other note keeping software are fully customizable and easily searchable. I use and suggest Evernote simply because it’s what I’ve used for nine years and the system I’ve built around it works for me.
Tiago Forte of Forte Labs has created a system of organizing notes and ideas – and ultimately your life – in Evernote, called the PARA method. The PARA method organizes information according to how you use it, rather than how you found it. I use this system to organize my Evernote account, which houses everything I store long-term, and it is the most useful organizing system I’ve found. My notes on everything from books to interior design and anything that inspires me, in addition to everything important, are all organized within this system of notebooks.
5.Use your notes
The most important aspect to reading and taking notes, of course, is using what you’ve learned. All our reading, all our note-taking, all our learning is worthless if it doesn’t become action. As you’ve seen, Luhmann’s evening reading ended up earning him an opportunity to become a professor. It could be as simple as including a newly-discovered quote in an email. It could be as large as a dedicated project intended to better your community. More likely, it’s something in between. Put what you learn to work.
In our last post, we talked about reading and the necessary work of deciding whether an author has accomplished what they set out to do. The conclusion there was that if they did accomplish their intent – if they did convince you that their argument was correct – you, then, need to adjust your thinking accordingly. That is what this “use your notes” idea is about. If you’ve decided that the only way to get anything done is by taking small steps daily to change your habits, you must take small steps daily to change your habits. Act on what you learn. If you want a system for note taking, and you read about note taking, set up your system for note taking.
To summarize:
- Take physical notes.
- Record bibliographical information on the sources of those notes.
- Separate notes into a permanent system.
- File notes within the system.
- Use your notes in your writing, conversations, etc.
A key part of learning is reviewing what you’ve previously learned. This increases your familiarity with the material, gives repeated opportunities for new ideas to take shape, and ensures you have many associations with and from the material. Reviewing key concepts in one context helps build a foundation for learning new concepts or exploring new industries, as well. It’s also imperative in building connections in preparation for new information to be added.
Consider this sage advice from Charlie Munger, “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.”
Think of the knowledge you acquire as a tree. Your understanding of foundational principles forms the root system and trunks; as you explore new concepts new branches are formed; finally, as you make your way towards more technical understanding, smaller twigs and leaves complete the tree. Each time you move on to a new idea or topic, you need to build a solid foundational understanding before moving onto the more minute details. Having a commonplace book, or note-taking system serves to build this foundational trunk in a very tangible way.
Taking notes while you read and on what you read is the next step in understanding and using information. It’s a key part of our quest to end each day a bit smarter than we began.
This is the fifth in a series on using the internet as a learning device. You can read part one here, part two here, part three here, and part four here.
