12 Matching Annotations
  1. Feb 2023
    1. How to Take Smart Notes

      Which edition did you read?

    2. How to use the slip box system to write bottoms-up

      This is the second time I've seen people refer to "the 8 point summary". I don't recall seeing this in the 2017 edition. Maybe it was added in the second ed.

    3. Clusters are sequences of notes where order emerges.

      I struggled to locate this definition in the 2017 edition of the book, either because it isn't there, or because it doesn't have an index.

    1. In practical terms, he's talking about structure notes which consist of an outline of links to other existing notes.

      Structure notes is a technical term. They're "meta-notes" in that they're notes that point to other notes containing content.

      This seems to be what Ahrens means by a "sequence". I guess there's one explicit sequence defined by notes and their forward/back links, but structure notes can create used to arbitrary sequences.

      This also seems to be the key mechanism by which a linear narrative is created.

    2. I think you just need to loosen up and put notes in the dang box. It didn't make sense to me either until I started writing jokes in this form. Maybe you just need to make sure you're actually interested in the stuff you're taking notes in (or have a use for it.)I would write sequences of jokes as I thought of them. As I got to a certain number of jokes, the system itself became self sustaining. Rather than having to think of jokes, I would have loads of ideas which I could further explore (this goes back to the author's idea of not starting with a blank slate.) I could add to the end of a sequence or I could branch a sequence. At any point in any of these sequences, I could branch off a node. As the network grows bigger, then I could remix jokes by combining completely different concepts. One otherwise unrelated node connects to another otherwise unrelated node and they form a new sequence. Now I have interconnection, a real network.
    3. That's the key to understand the paragraphs you've quoted. The reason for a Zettelkasten over a Wiki is 'text production' ... because a Zettelkasten, which is designed according to Luhmann's method, also depicts the chains of thought that precede the ideas or of which they are a part. And this in turn simplifies the text production -- one simply combines the different chains of thoughts that are recalled by the notes.
    1. Smart Notes (Sönke Ahrens’ delineation of Luhmann’s method

      For my money, a lot of the magic is in the smartnote categories; knowing what fleeting, literature and permanent notes are is the basis for recognising and almost automatically doing what you should be doing now.

      This is similar to the gardening categories I use: cold compost (annual weeds), submerge (perennial weeds), stones, rubbish. You need a container on hand for each of these as they turn up at random. The benefit of this is that you eliminate the decision-making process which interferes with a gardening task and it's associated potential flow state. This is very much like the cognitive outsourcing aspect of GTD.

    2. I think it would be massively helpful if users had stronger examples of what these explicit creation workflows looked like, particularly at the longer end of creation of chapters or even book length spaces.

      This is the acid test of whether the process is working.

    3. in posting online they still seem lost in attempting to put the lowest level ideas into active practice.

      Which are the "lowest level ideas"? I wonder if there are some critical mid-level ideas being overlooked which are preventing the output process, e.g. forming critical mass by categorising notes as fleeting, permanent, or distinct (pp41-42).

    1. The appendix of the 2nd edition (PDF)

      This is interesting, but I'd also like to see examples of how permanent notes evolve from their associated fleeting and literature notes.

    1. “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.”
  2. Nov 2021
    1. . Once we get into the workflow, it is as if thework itself gains momentum, pulling us along and sometimes evenenergizing us. This is the kind of dynamic we are looking for

      taking smart notes is an endergonic reaction