How to Take Smart Notes is a great book that gets delayed by its name.
When I first saw the title of the book, How to Take Notes Intelligently, what came to my mind was: How to use Cornell notes, how to take notes in class and so on. In addition, there is no official Chinese translation of this book, so that the reputation is not obvious.
In fact, this book is as good as how to Read a Book and Sense of Style. Rather than teaching the reader how to take notes, it defines a scientific learning process. In this age of lifelong learning, this “meta-skill” is sorely needed.
The only thing you need to do in this learning process is take notes, but the way you take notes is very different from what you already have. Think about how much effort and time you spent sorting your notes. How many of these notes are reproduced in whole sentences, paragraphs or even entire passages? The book points out that it is a mistake to take notes and categorize them.
The mistake of taking notes is that only when you translate the knowledge you have received into your own words can you truly understand it. To translate the words of others into our own, the process of thinking is the process of learning.
The mistake with categorizing notes is that learning is not about remembering the facts, but about being able to connect related facts when needed. But sorting can isolate the notes from each other.
Carefully sorted notes are like treasures guarded by dragons, glittering but useless.
The learning process described in the book is divided into four steps:
- Record everything: the flashes of light in your head, the knowledge learned through various channels;
- Organize daily: Once a day, organize your notes from the previous step and think about how they relate to your research, thinking, or interests;
- Deliberate development: Over time, the notes develop enough to form a topic to write about;
- Compose: Assemble these notes into a coherent draft and form your thesis. This process exposes holes in your argument and prompts you to actively gather more ideas to fill in the holes or modify your argument.
Record all
There are only two kinds of everything. Because most people grow their knowledge in one of two ways:
- Inspiration generated in daily work and life. Maybe it was an accidental remark from a colleague that inspired you, or the answer to a question at work.
- When you read, something you don’t want to forget, something you may use in future thinking and writing. Be sure to use your own words to avoid direct copying.
Every day to sort out
It is important to note that we do not record everything to collect, but to contribute to the development of our knowledge network. So take notes from the previous step every day and ask yourself:
- Does the new information contradict existing information?
- Does it support or supplement existing information?
- Does this idea combine with other ideas to produce something new?
Organize each thought into a single note, just as you would in formal writing: use full sentences, disclose sources, provide references, and be as precise, clear, and brief as possible.
Give notes a fixed number to permanently identify them. The numbering rule is, if this is a new note, add one to the latest number. If this note is related to an existing note, for example, note 22. Call it 22A to establish a connection between notes (this is cumbersome, so we need some software).
Deliberately development
Over time, reading, discussing, and thinking guided by interest, curiosity, and intuition will lead to a lot of notes. As long as you keep doing things that interest you, you can keep accumulating them. Then you’ll find that these interconnected notes develop a theme.
For example, you are interested in hair loss recently, so you follow dermatologists on Weibo and Zhihu, some beauty bloggers, and go to hospitals to consult and communicate with friends who are also interested in hair loss. During this process, you will receive a lot of information: the type of hair loss, the cause of hair loss, treatment methods, the latest drugs and equipment, and even hair loss jokes. Just jot down the information in the first two steps and your hair loss knowledge network is formed.
As you dig deeper into hair loss, you’ll find holes in the knowledge web: a hair loss device, for example, works differently for different bloggers. You’ll come up with your own ideas: the downside of a particular treatment, a device that can be used to circumvent it, etc.
Of course, don’t wait for these notes to develop naturally and get everything together. Instead, take the initiative to look for missing content, superfluous content, contradictory content, complete or adjust the structure and perspective of the topic.
Elaborate combination
It’s great that you have a bunch of notes in your hand, and some of them are so closely related that they could form an essay! It’s really easy, because you write them down in your own words, and they grow in your head. Obviously, this excellent article will greatly expand your personal influence and motivate you to write your next article. A beautiful virtuous circle has formed.
Now, do you realize the subtlety of this approach?
It forces us to take the right path, to think about the connections between knowledge rather than isolating them with categorization.
It can play the role of brainstorming, let your knowledge and ideas blend, and then generate ideas.
It helps build networks of knowledge rather than remembering isolated facts. The larger the network, the easier it is to capture new knowledge. Commonly known as snowball.
The name of this method is slide box note-taking (a confusing name, but one of the reasons it didn’t catch on). Flomo is one of the best software for implementing slide box note-taking. Don’t worry, you don’t need to replace your current note-taking software.
There are four types of notes:
- Inspiration notes: Used to record fleeting ideas.
- Reading Notes: Used to record your reading notes.
- Project notes: Use to record your project notes.
- Permanent notes: Notes that are used to record permanence and help you write.
Inspiration Notes are perfect for flOMO because FLOMO minimizes the cost of taking a note: it offers a very simple format (bold, underlined, list, uploaded images), easy typing, and labels without folder categories.
The first home of reading notes is more suitable for MarginNote and wechat reading. Read in depth on MarginNote and quickly read a few pages on wechat at any time, anywhere. The first home of project notes is better suited for ticking lists, which are always deeply coupled to the various items on the to-do list.
However, their second hometown should still be FLOMO. After sorting out the notes in MaginNote, Wechat reading and tick list and importing them into FLOMO, the first step of the sliding box note-taking method is really completed: recording everything. The annotation and label functions provided by FLOMO enable the third step of the sliding box note-taking method: “deliberate development”. Use notes and labels to keep related notes coming together as your interests and experiences evolve.
Permanent notes should be the result of step 4 of the slide box note-taking method: a new essay composed from the notes in FLOMO. You can choose any note-taking software you like to record them. Evernote, Bear, notion, etc.
At this point, I think I’ve explained why you don’t need to replace your current note-taking software.
If these notes are permanent, they should remain in place.
If these notes are not permanent notes, what are they? In other words, are they notes that have been thought through and integrated into your own cognitive network? For these notes, you should really digest them, turn them into your own knowledge, and inject them into flomo to generate sparks of inspiration.