Writing is not what follows research, learning or studying, it is the medium of all this work. — *location: 72* ^ref-34188 --- What can we do differently in the weeks, months or even years before we face the blank page that will get us into the best possible position to write a great paper easily? — *location: 87* ^ref-53330 --- That is why good, productive writing is based on good note-taking. Getting something that is already written into another written piece is incomparably easier than assembling everything in your mind and then trying to retrieve it from there. To sum it up: The quality of a paper and the ease with which it is written depends more than anything on what you have done in writing before you even made a decision on the topic. — *location: 94* ^ref-40312 --- What does make a significant difference along the whole intelligence spectrum is something else: how much self-discipline or self-control one uses to approach the tasks at hand (Duckworth and Seligman, 2005; Tangney, Baumeister, and Boone, 2004). — *location: 103* ^ref-40079 --- The bad news is that we do not have this kind of control over ourselves. Self-discipline or self-control is not that easy to achieve with willpower alone. Willpower is, as far as we know today,1 a limited resource that depletes quickly and is also not that much up for improvement over the long term (Baumeister, Bratslavsky, Muraven, and Tice, 1998; Muraven, Tice, and Baumeister, 1998; Schmeichel, Vohs, and Baumeister, 2003; Moller, 2006). And who would want to flog oneself to work, anyway? — *location: 108* ^ref-65472 --- Luckily, this is not the whole story. We know today that self-control and self-discipline have much more to do with our environment than with ourselves (cf. Thaler, 2015, ch. 2) – and the environment can be changed. — *location: 112* ^ref-52240 --- Having a meaningful and well-defined task beats willpower every time. Not having willpower, but not having to use willpower indicates that you set yourself up for success. This is where the organisation of writing and note-taking comes into play. — *location: 116* ^ref-51896 --- This book aims to change that. It will present you with the tools of note-taking that turned the son of a brewer into one of the most productive and revered social scientists of the 20th century. But moreover, it describes how he implemented them into his workflow so he could honestly say: “I never force myself to do anything I don’t feel like. Whenever I am stuck, I do something else.” — *location: 119* ^ref-10912 --- A good structure is something you can trust. It relieves you from the burden of remembering and keeping track of everything. If you can trust the system, you can let go of the attempt to hold everything together in your head and you can start focusing on what is important: The content, the argument and the ideas. — *location: 123* ^ref-58715 --- A good structure enables flow, the state in which you get so completely immersed in your work that you lose track of time and can just keep on going as the work becomes effortless (Csikszentmihalyi, 1975). — *location: 127* ^ref-29061 --- Having a clear structure to work in is completely different from making plans about something. If you make a plan, you impose a structure on yourself; it makes you inflexible. To keep going according to plan, you have to push yourself and employ willpower. This is not only demotivating, but also unsuitable for an open-ended process like research, thinking or studying in general, where we have to adjust our next steps with every new insight, understanding or achievement – which we ideally have on a regular basis and not just as an exception. — *location: 133* ^ref-12037 --- Having read more does not automatically mean having more ideas. Especially in the beginning, it means having fewer ideas to work with, because you know that others have already thought of most of them. — *location: 150* ^ref-62966 --- Most people try to reduce complexity by separating what they have into smaller stacks, piles or separate folders. They sort their notes by topics and sub-topics, which makes it look less complex, but quickly becomes very complicated. Plus, it reduces the likelihood of building and finding surprising connections between the notes themselves, which means a trade-off between its usability and usefulness. — *location: 173* ^ref-18922 --- Sull, Donald and Eisenhardt, Kathleen M. 2015. Simple Rules: How to Thrive in a Complex World. Boston; New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. — *location: 2678* ^ref-29642 >See this reference for simple rules. Relate to E. starlings, agent based models --- Only when all the related work becomes part of an overarching and interlocked process, where all bottlenecks are removed, can significant change take place (which is why none of the typical “10 mind-blowing tools to improve your productivity” tips you can find all over the internet will ever be of much help). The importance of an overarching workflow is the great insight of David Allen’s “Getting Things Done” (Allen, 2001). — *location: 194* ^ref-28321 --- His productivity is, of course, impressive. But what is even more impressive than the sheer number of publications or the outstanding quality of his writing is the fact that he seemed to achieve all this with almost no real effort. He not only stressed that he never forced himself to do something he didn’t feel like, he even said: “I only do what is easy. I only write when I immediately know how to do it. If I falter for a moment, I put the matter aside and do something else.” (Luhmann et al., 1987, 154f.)3 — *location: 275* ^ref-26766 --- Studies on highly successful people have proven again and again that success is not the result of strong willpower and the ability to overcome resistance, but rather the result of smart working environments that avoid resistance in the first place (cf. Neal et al. 2012; Painter et al. 2002; Hearn et al. 1998). — *location: 292* ^ref-29717 --- We need a reliable and simple external structure to think in that compensates for the limitations of our brains. — *location: 354* ^ref-21707 --- Writing is, without dispute, the best facilitator for thinking, reading, learning, understanding and generating ideas we have. — *location: 386* ^ref-16331 --- Write exactly one note for each idea and write as if you were writing for someone else: Use full sentences, disclose your sources, make references and try to be as precise, clear and brief as possible. Throw away the fleeting notes from step one and put the literature notes from step two into your reference system. You can forget about them now. All that matters is going into the slip-box. — *location: 414* ^ref-20143 --- Luhmann’s slip-box is currently the object of a long-term research project at the Bielefeld University, and their first results have already given us a comprehensive understanding about how Luhmann really worked with it. You can look up for yourself some of his notes on their website.10 Soon, you will be able to access the whole digitalised slip-box online. — *location: 529* ^ref-9573 --- The first system is designed to find things you deliberately search for, putting all the responsibility on your brain. The slip-box is designed to present you with ideas you have already forgotten, allowing your brain to focus on thinking instead of remembering. — *location: 656* ^ref-64714 >Hierarchy costs twice: once to save the note and again to find it --- Project notes, which are only relevant to one particular project. They are kept within a project-specific folder and can be discarded or archived after the project is finished. — *location: 666* ^ref-24047 --- Fleeting notes, which are only reminders of information, can be written in any kind of way and will end up in the trash within a day or two. — *location: 662* ^ref-62847 --- Permanent notes, which will never be thrown away and contain the necessary information in a permanently understandable way. They are always stored in the same way in the same place, either as literature notes in the reference system or written as if for print, in the slip-box. — *location: 664* ^ref-10802 --- The more you learn and collect, the more beneficial your notes should become, the more ideas can mingle and give birth to new ones – and the easier it should be to write an intelligent text with less effort. — *location: 689* ^ref-29894 --- As proper note-taking is rarely taught or discussed, it is no wonder that almost every guide on writing recommends to start with brainstorming. If you haven’t written along the way, the brain is indeed the only place to turn to. On its own, it is not such a great choice: it is neither objective nor reliable – two quite important aspects in academic or nonfiction writing. The promotion of brainstorming as a starting point is all the more surprising as it is not the origin of most ideas: The things you are supposed to find in your head by brainstorming usually don’t have their origins in there. Rather, they come from the outside: through reading, having discussions and listening to others, through all the things that could have been accompanied and often even would have been improved by writing. — *location: 775* ^ref-24624 --- Sometimes we feel like our work is draining our energy and we can only move forward if we put more and more energy into it. But sometimes it is the opposite. Once we get into the workflow, it is as if the work itself gains momentum, pulling us along and sometimes even energizing us. This is the kind of dynamic we are looking for. — *location: 813* ^ref-63585 --- Only if the work itself becomes rewarding can the dynamic of motivation and reward become self-sustainable and propel the whole process forward (DePasque and Tricomi, 2015). — *location: 821* ^ref-8246 >Another helper pushing the flywheel --- The ability to express understanding in one’s own words is a fundamental competency for everyone who writes – and only by doing it with the chance of realizing our lack of understanding can we become better at it. — *location: 858* ^ref-59895 >GenAI cannot help --- The same goes for writing permanent notes, which have another feedback loop built-in: Expressing our own thoughts in writing makes us realise if we really thought them through. The moment we try to combine them with previously written notes, the system will unambiguously show us contradictions, inconsistencies and repetitions. While these built-in feedback loops do not make redundant the feedback from your peers or supervisor, they are the only ones that are always available and can help us to improve a little bit, multiple times every single day. — *location: 863* ^ref-7259 --- But we know today that the more connected information we already have, the easier it is to learn, because new information can dock to that information. Yes, our ability to learn isolated facts is indeed limited and probably decreases with age. But if facts are not kept isolated nor learned in an isolated fashion, but hang together in a network of ideas, or “latticework of mental models” (Munger, 1994), it becomes easier to make sense of new information. That makes it easier not only to learn and remember, but also to retrieve the information later in the moment and context it is needed. — *location: 875* ^ref-7260 --- As we are the authors of all the notes, we learn in lockstep with the slip-box. This is another big difference from using an encyclopaedia like Wikipedia. We use the same mental models, theories and terms to organise our thoughts in our brains as in our slip-box. That the slip-box generates an excess of possibilities enables it to surprise and inspire us to generate new ideas and develop our theories further. It is not the slip-box or our brains alone, but the dynamic between them that makes working with it so productive. — *location: 880* ^ref-42294 --- While most of you will implement the idea of the Zettelkasten with the help of software and without the need for Luhmann’s quaint numbering system, it is important to realise what crucial thing it prompts us to do: look for existing threads within the system to expand on. It encourages us to continue a dialogue by adding to existing note sequences instead of collecting isolated snippets. Note sequences occupy the sweet spot between isolated facts/ideas and continuous text. They are what the Zettelkasten is all about. Therefore: Make sure a new note is written, whenever possible, in direct response to an existing note, continuing the dialogue. — *location: 2429* ^ref-10893 --- Having a page with a top-level overview of the major themes and topics you are working on can be very helpful, especially in the beginning. But in contrast to a folder setup, this is in itself an idea among others. It is an idea about the structure on a note and therefore open to change. The same is true for midlevel “entry notes” into particular topics or “Maps of Content.” Whenever complexity has built up, it makes sense to give yourself an overview of the different aspects of a topic on such a note. This, too, is not about imposing structure onto the system, but making an implicit idea about structure explicit and therefore open to change. It is worth repeating here: How we structure a topic is how we think about a topic and therefore a thought in itself. It belongs in the slip-box as a note, becoming therefore something to be tested, questioned and discussed. — *location: 2441* ^ref-13051 --- Letting the inner critic interfere with the author isn’t helpful, either. Here we have to focus our attention on our thoughts. If the critic constantly and prematurely interferes whenever a sentence isn’t perfect yet, we would never get anything on paper. We need to get our thoughts on paper first and improve them there, where we can look at them. Especially complex ideas are difficult to turn into a linear text in the head alone. If we try to please the critical reader instantly, our workflow would come to a standstill. We tend to call extremely slow writers, who always try to write as if for print, perfectionists. Even though it sounds like praise for extreme professionalism, it is not: A real professional would wait until it was time for proofreading, so he or she can focus on one thing at a time. While proofreading requires more focused attention, finding the right words during writing requires much more floating attention. — *location: 958* ^ref-2290 --- Oshin Vartanian compared and analysed the daily workflows of Nobel Prize winners and other eminent scientists and concluded that it is not a relentless focus, but flexible focus that distinguishes them. “Specifically, the problem-solving behavior of eminent scientists can alternate between extraordinary levels of focus on specific concepts and playful exploration of ideas. This suggests that successful problem solving may be a function of flexible strategy application in relation to task demands.” (Vartanian 2009, 57) — *location: 984* ^ref-1156 --- To be flexible, we need an equally flexible work structure that doesn’t break down every time we depart from a preconceived plan. One can be the best driver with the quickest reactions, able to adjust flexibly to different street and weather conditions. None of that will help a bit if the driver is stuck on rails. And it does not help us to have great insight into the necessity of being flexible in our work if we are stuck in a rigid organisation. Unfortunately, the most common way people organise their writing is by making plans. Although planning is almost universally recommended by study guides, it’s the equivalent of putting oneself on rails. Don’t make plans. Become an expert. — *location: 993* ^ref-37023 --- The moment we stop making plans is the moment we start to learn. It is a matter of practice to become good at generating insight and write good texts by choosing and moving flexibly between the most important and promising tasks, judged by nothing else than the circumstances of the given situation. — *location: 1003* ^ref-9127 --- Similarly, no one would ever learn the art of productive academic writing just by following plans or linear, multistep prescripts – one would learn only to follow plans or prescripts. The widespread praise for planning rests on the misconception that a process like writing an academic text, which is highly dependent on cognition and thinking, can rely on conscious decision-making alone. But academic writing is an art, as well, which means it is something we can become better at with experience and deliberate practice. — *location: 1008* ^ref-53812 --- In an experiment, beginner and expert paramedics and their teachers were shown scenes of CPR performed by either experienced paramedics or those who had just finished their training (Flyvbjerg 2001).17 As you might expect, the experienced paramedics were able to spot their kind correctly in almost all cases (~90%), while the beginners were more or less just guessing (~50%). So far, so good. But when the teachers watched the videos, they systematically mistook the beginners for experts and the experts for beginners. They were wrong in most of the cases (and only right in about a third of all the cases). Hubert and Stuart Dreyfus, researchers on expertise, have a simple explanation: Teachers tend to mistake the ability to follow (their) rules with the ability to make the right choices in real situations. Unlike the expert paramedics, they did not look at the unique circumstances and check if the paramedics in the videos did the best thing possible in each individual situation. Instead, they focused on the question of whether the people in the videos acted according to the rules they taught. — *location: 1021* ^ref-9231 >Not great news for the academics --- The workflow around the slip-box is not a prescription that tells you what to do at what stage of writing. On the contrary: It gives you a structure of clearly separable tasks, which can be completed within reasonable time and provides you with instant feedback through interconnected writing tasks. It allows you to become better by giving you the opportunity for deliberate practice. The more experience you gain, the more you will be able to rely on your intuition to tell you what to do next. — *location: 1044* ^ref-45517 --- Flyvbjerg writes unambiguously, don’t make plans (Flyvbjerg 2001, 19). — *location: 1050* ^ref-58962 --- Attention is not our only limited resource. Our short-term memory is also limited. We need strategies not to waste its capacity with thoughts we can better delegate to an external system. — *location: 1052* ^ref-57813 --- Every step is accompanied by questions like: How does this fact fit into my idea of …? How can this phenomenon be explained by that theory? Are these two ideas contradictory or do they complement each other? Isn’t this argument similar to that one? Haven’t I heard this before? And above all: What does x mean for y? These questions not only increase our understanding, but facilitate learning as well. Once we make a meaningful connection to an idea or fact, it is difficult not to remember it when we think about what it is connected with. — *location: 1071* ^ref-1325 >Similar to my mental process of fitting concepts into my mentaL models --- This is why Allen’s “Getting Things Done” system works: The secret to having a “mind like water” is to get all the little stuff out of our short-term memory. And as we can’t take care of everything right now, the only way to do that is to have a reliable external system in place where we can keep all our nagging thoughts about the many things that need to be done and trust that they will not be lost. — *location: 1088* ^ref-2596 --- Here, we have to thank Soviet psychologist Bluma Zeigarnik for her insight and observational skills. The story goes that she went for lunch with her colleagues and was very impressed by the waiter’s ability to remember correctly who ordered what without the need to write anything down. It is said that she had to go back to the restaurant to get the jacket she left there. Much to her surprise, the waiter she admired just minutes ago for his great memory didn’t even recognise her. Questioned about what seemed to her a contradiction, he explained that all the waiters had no problem remembering the orders and matching them with the guests at the table. But the very second diners left the restaurant, the waiters all forgot them completely and focused on the next group. Zeigarnik successfully reproduced what is now known as the Zeigarnik effect: Open tasks tend to occupy our short-term memory – until they are done. That is why we get so easily distracted by thoughts of unfinished tasks, regardless of their importance. But thanks to Zeigarnik’s follow-up research, we also know that we don’t actually have to finish tasks to convince our brains to stop thinking about them. All we have to do is to write them down in a way that convinces us that it will be taken care of. That’s right: The brain doesn’t distinguish between an actual finished task and one that is postponed by taking a note. By writing something down, we literally get it out of our heads. This is why Allen’s “Getting Things Done” system works: The secret to having a “mind like water” is to get all the little stuff out of our short-term memory. And as we can’t take care of everything right now, the only way to do that is to have a reliable external system in place where we can keep all our nagging thoughts about the many things that need to be done and trust that they will not be lost. — *location: 1077* ^ref-56742 --- All this enables us to later pick up a task exactly where we stopped without the need to “keep in mind” that there still was something to do. That is one of the main advantages of thinking in writing – everything is externalised anyway. — *location: 1100* ^ref-9077 --- Conversely, we can use the Zeigarnik effect to our advantage by deliberately keeping unanswered questions in our minds. We can ruminate about them, even when we do something that has nothing to do with work and ideally does not require our full attention. Letting thoughts linger without focusing on them gives our brains the opportunity to deal with problems in a different, often surprisingly productive way. While we have a walk or a shower or clean the house, the brain cannot help but play around with the last unsolved problem it came across. And that is why we so often find the answer to a question in rather casual situations. By taking into account these little insights into how our brains work, we can make sure that we will not get distracted by thoughts of what we need from the supermarket when we sit at the desk. Rather, we may solve a crucial problem while we run errands. — *location: 1102* ^ref-18934 --- Next to the attention that can only be directed at one thing at a time and the short-term memory that can only hold up to seven things at once, the third limited resource is motivation or willpower. — *location: 1109* ^ref-38295 --- “We use the term ego depletion to refer to a temporary reduction in the self’s capacity or willingness to engage in volitional action (including controlling the environment, controlling the self, making choices, and initiating action) caused by prior exercise of volition.” (Baumeister et al., 1998, 1253) — *location: 1115* ^ref-33960 --- In the way we organise our research and writing, we too can significantly reduce the number of decisions we have to make. While content-related decisions have to be made (on what is more and less important in an article, the connections between notes, the structure of a text, etc.), most organisational decisions can be made up front, once and for all, by deciding on one system. By always using the same notebook for making quick notes, always extracting the main ideas from a text in the same way and always turning them into the same kind of permanent notes, which are always dealt with in the same manner, the number of decisions during a work session can be greatly reduced. That leaves us with much more mental energy that we can direct towards more useful tasks, like trying to solve the problems in question. — *location: 1133* ^ref-49918 >Note the progress since 2019 in creating one place, and the strong pull to create one streamlined system since --- It is mainly a matter of having an extensive latticework of mental models or theories in our heads that enable us to identify and describe the main ideas quickly (cf. Rickheit and Sichelschmidt, 1999). — *location: 1181* ^ref-11671 --- Confirmation bias is a subtle but major force. As the psychologist Raymond Nickerson puts it: “If one were to attempt to identify a single problematic aspect of human reasoning that deserves attention above all others, the confirmation bias would have to be among the candidates for consideration” (Nickerson 1998, 175). Even the best scientists and thinkers are not free from it. What sets them apart is the mere fact that they are aware of the problem and do something about it. The classic role model would be Charles Darwin. He forced himself to write down (and therefore elaborate on) the arguments that were the most critical of his theories. “I had [...] during many years followed a golden rule, namely, that whenever a published fact, a new observation or thought came across me, which was opposed to my general results, to make a memorandum of it without fail and at once; for I had found by experience that such facts and thoughts were far more apt to escape from the memory than favorable ones. Owing to this habit, very few objections were raised against my views, which I had not at least noticed and attempted to answer.” (Darwin 1958, 123) — *location: 1230* ^ref-34362 --- Developing arguments and ideas bottom-up instead of top-down is the first and most important step to opening ourselves up for insight. — *location: 1249* ^ref-9578 --- One of the most important habitual changes when starting to work with the slip-box is moving the attention from the individual project with our preconceived ideas towards the open connections within the slip-box. — *location: 1261* ^ref-10187 --- “Nonage [immaturity] is the inability to use one’s own understanding without another’s guidance. This nonage is self-imposed if its cause lies not in lack of understanding but in indecision and lack of courage to use one’s own mind without another’s guidance. Dare to know! (Sapere aude.) ‘Have the courage to use your own understanding,’ is therefore the motto of the Enlightenment.” (Kant 1784) — *location: 1291* ^ref-31719 --- Permanent notes, too, are directed towards an audience ignorant of the thoughts behind the text and unaware of the original context, only equipped with a general knowledge of the field. The only difference is that the audience here consists of our future selves, which will very soon have reached the same state of ignorance as someone who never had access to what we have written about. — *location: 1320* ^ref-12393 --- “The principle is that you must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool,” Feynman stressed in a speech to young scientists (Feynman 1985, 342). — *location: 1328* ^ref-49592 --- While it is obvious that familiarity is not understanding, we have no chance of knowing whether we understand something or just believe we understand something until we test ourselves in some form. — *location: 1332* ^ref-11530 --- Consciously, we probably would all choose the same, but what really matters are the many small, implicit choices we have to make every day, and they are most often made unconsciously. — *location: 1350* ^ref-20554 >See Slight Edge, relates to philosophy --- The slip-box takes care of storing facts and information. Thinking and understanding is what it can’t take off your shoulders, which is why it makes sense to focus on this part of the work. — *location: 1393* ^ref-491 >Can any tool for thought offload understanding? --- Working with the slip-box, therefore, doesn’t mean storing information in there instead of in your head, i.e. not learning. On the contrary, it facilitates real, long-term learning. It just means not cramming isolated facts into your brain – something you probably wouldn’t want to do anyway. The objection that it takes too much time to take notes and sort them into the slip-box is therefore short-sighted. Writing, taking notes and thinking about how ideas connect is exactly the kind of elaboration that is needed to learn. Not learning from what we read because we don’t take the time to elaborate on it is the real waste of time. — *location: 1397* ^ref-31679 --- There is a clear division of labour between the brain and the slip-box: The slip-box takes care of details and references and is a long-term memory resource that keeps information objectively unaltered. That allows the brain to focus on the gist, the deeper understanding and the bigger picture, and frees it up to be creative. Both the brain and the slip-box can focus on what they are best at. — *location: 1401* ^ref-13977 >is the brain dominant? Can another person use my slipbox? --- The technique of writing a certain amount every day was perfected by Anthony Trollope, one of the most popular and productive authors of the 19th century: He would start every morning at 5:30 a.m. with a cup of coffee and a clock in front of him. Then he would write at least 250 words every 15 minutes. This, he writes in his autobiography: “allowed me to produce over ten pages of an ordinary novel volume a day, and if kept up through ten months, would have given as its results three novels of three volumes each in the year” (Trollope, 2008, 272). And that, mind you, was before breakfast. — *location: 1427* ^ref-26301 >I struggle with and sympathize with the seinfeld/king approach. 1 hour a day yes but not 1000 words 6 pages or 1 joke per day --- Academic or nonfiction texts are not written like this because in addition to the writing, there is the reading, the research, the thinking and the tinkering with ideas. And they almost always take significantly more time than expected: If you ask academic or nonfiction writers, students or professors how much time they expect it would take them to finish a text, they systematically underestimate the time they need – even when they are asked to estimate the time under the worst-case scenario and if the real conditions turned out to be quite favourable (Kahneman 2013, 245ff). On top of that: half of all doctoral theses will stay unfinished forever (Lonka, 2003, 113). Academic and nonfiction writing is not as predictable as a Trollope novel and the work it involves certainly can’t be broken down to something like “one page a day.” — *location: 1431* ^ref-21638 --- Putting notes into the slip-box, however, is like investing and reaping the rewards of compounded interest (which would in this example almost pay for the whole flat).28 — *location: 1445* ^ref-61720 >Slight Edge --- And likewise, the sum of the slip-box content is worth much more than the sum of the notes. More notes mean more possible connections, more ideas, more synergy between different projects and therefore a much higher degree of productivity. Luhmann’s slip-box contains about 90,000 notes, which sounds like an incredibly large number. But it only means that he wrote six notes a day from the day he started to work with his slip-box until he died. — *location: 1447* ^ref-31173 --- You could therefore measure your daily productivity by the number of notes written. — *location: 1454* ^ref-4031 --- Richard Feynman once had a visitor in his office, a historian who wanted to interview him. When he spotted Feynman’s notebooks, he said how delighted he was to see such “wonderful records of Feynman’s thinking.” “No, no!” Feynman protested. “They aren’t a record of my thinking process. They are my thinking process. I actually did the work on the paper.” “Well,” the historian said, “the work was done in your head, but the record of it is still here.” “No, it’s not a record, not really. It’s working. You have to work on paper, and this is the paper.”29 — *location: 1476* ^ref-23748 --- Philosophers, neuroscientists, educators and psychologists like to disagree in many different aspects on how the brain works. But they no longer disagree when it comes to the need for external scaffolding. Almost all agree nowadays that real thinking requires some kind of externalization, especially in the form of writing. “Notes on paper, or on a computer screen [...] do not make contemporary physics or other kinds of intellectual endeavour easier, they make it possible” is one of the key takeaways in a contemporary handbook of neuroscientists (Levy 2011, 290) Concluding the discussions in this book, Levy writes: “In any case, no matter how internal processes are implemented, insofar as thinkers are genuinely concerned with what enables human beings to perform the spectacular intellectual feats exhibited in science and other areas of systematic enquiry, as well as in the arts, they need to understand the extent to which the mind is reliant upon external scaffolding.” (Ibid.) — *location: 1483* ^ref-47770 >This is the problem. We cant have quantum physics under the Socratic method --- In our system, the scaffolding is done explicitly by connecting the thoughts within the external memory of the slip-box. Luhmann writes: “Somehow one has to mark differences, keep track of distinctions, either explicitly or implicitly in concepts,” because only if the connections are somehow fixed externally can they function as models or theories to give meaning and continuity for further thinking (Luhmann, 1992, 53). — *location: 1490* ^ref-22289 >This too must suffer under the limitations of human cognition --- Robert and Elizabeth Ligon Bjork from the University of California suggest distinguishing between storage capacity and retrieval capacity (Bjork 2011). They speculate that while our ability to retrieve information is severely limited, the storage capacity, our brain’s ability to store memories, could be considered virtually unlimited. — *location: 1572* ^ref-50073 --- Learning would be not so much about saving information, like on a hard disk, but about building connections and bridges between pieces of information to enable circumventing the inhibition mechanism in the right moment. It is about making sure that the right “cues” trigger the right memory, about how we can think strategically to remember the most useful information when we need it. — *location: 1579* ^ref-49657 >This is key --- What does help for true, useful learning is to connect a piece of information to as many meaningful contexts as possible, which is what we do when we connect our notes in the slip-box with other notes. Making these connections deliberately means building up a self-supporting network of interconnected ideas and facts that work reciprocally as cues for each other. — *location: 1598* ^ref-18665 >Repeated point: connect to latticework of mental models. Related: many model thinking. Children and scientists both build up models of the world see gleick on Feynman --- After looking at various studies from the 1960s until the early 1980s, Barry S. Stein et al. summarises: “The results of several recent studies support the hypothesis that retention is facilitated by acquisition conditions that prompt people to elaborate information in a way that increases the distinctiveness of their memory representations.” (Stein et al. 1984, 522) Stein et al. illustrate how commonsensical this is in the example of a biology novice who learns the difference between veins and arteries: “[he] may find it difficult at first to understand and remember that arteries have thick walls, are elastic, and do not have valves, whereas veins are less elastic, have thinner walls, and have valves” (ibid.). But by elaborating a little bit on this difference and asking the right questions, like “why?” the students can connect this knowledge with prior knowledge, like their understanding of pressure and the function of the heart. Just by making the connection to the common knowledge that the heart presses the blood into the arteries, they immediately know that these walls need to sustain more pressure, which means they need to be thicker than veins, in which the blood flows back to the heart with less pressure. And, of course, this makes valves necessary to keep the blood from flowing back. Once understood, the attributes and differences are almost impossible to disentangle from the knowledge of veins and arteries. — *location: 1624* ^ref-40997 >See previous note on children andx scientists --- Learned right, which means understanding, which means connecting in a meaningful way to previous knowledge, information almost cannot be forgotten anymore and will be reliably retrieved if triggered by the right cues. Moreover, this new learned knowledge can provide more possible connections for new information. If you focus your time and energy on understanding, you cannot help but learn. But if you focus your time and energy on learning without trying to understand, you will not only not understand, but also probably not learn. And the effects are cumulative. — *location: 1634* ^ref-20254 >cumulative in terms of free scaffolding and graph connections --- That the slip-box is not sorted by topics is the precondition for actively building connections between notes. Connections can be made between heterogeneous notes – as long as the connection makes sense. — *location: 1646* ^ref-40795 >No folders! --- Notes are only as valuable as the note and reference networks they are embedded in. — *location: 1680* ^ref-1644 --- Because the slip-box is not intended to be an encyclopaedia, but a tool to think with, we don’t need to worry about completeness. We don’t need to write anything down just to bridge a gap in a note sequence. We only write if it helps us with our own thinking. — *location: 1681* ^ref-9487 --- The note sequences are the clusters where order emerges from complexity. We extract information from different linear sources and mix it all up and shake it until new patterns emerge. Then, we form these patterns into new linear texts. — *location: 1688* ^ref-40314 --- The file-box can do much more than just hand out what we request. It can surprise and remind us of long-forgotten ideas and trigger new ones. This crucial element of surprise comes into play on the level of the interconnected notes, not when we are looking for particular entries in the index. Most notes will be found through other notes. The organisation of the notes is in the network of references in the slip-box, so all we need from the index are entry points. A few wisely chosen notes are sufficient for each entry point. The quicker we get from the index to the concrete notes, the quicker we move our attention from mentally preconceived ideas towards the fact-rich level of interconnected content, where we can conduct a fact-based dialogue with the slip-box. — *location: 1698* ^ref-17272 --- We can provide ourselves with a (temporarily valid) overview over a topic or subtopic just by making another note. If we then link from the index to such a note, we have a good entry point. If the overview on this note ceases to correctly represent the state of a cluster or topic, or we decide it should be structured differently, we can write a new note with a better structure and update the respective link from the index. This is important: Every consideration on the structure of a topic is just another consideration on a note – bound to change and dependent on the development of our understanding. — *location: 1707* ^ref-47928 >Hub notes --- Assigning keywords is much more than just a bureaucratic act. It is a crucial part of the thinking process, which often leads to a deeper elaboration of the note itself and the connection to other notes. — *location: 1741* ^ref-2936 >Research more. I dont understand keywords in the slipbox --- The first type of links are those on notes that are giving you the overview of a topic. These are notes directly referred to from the index and usually used as an entry point into a topic that has already developed to such a degree that an overview is needed or at least becomes helpful. On a note like this, you can collect links to other relevant notes to this topic or question, preferably with a short indication of what to find on these notes (one or two words or a short sentence is sufficient). This kind of note helps to structure thoughts and can be seen as an in-between step towards the development of a manuscript. Above all, they help orientate oneself within the slip-box. You will know when you need to write one. Luhmann collected up to 25 links to other notes on these kind of entry notes. — *location: 1748* ^ref-2300 --- The most common form of reference is plain note-to-note links. They have no function other than indicating a relevant connection between two individual notes. By linking two related notes regardless of where they are within the slip-box or within different contexts, surprising new lines of thought can be established. These note-to-note links are like the “weak links” (Granovetter 1973) of social relationships we have with acquaintances: even though they are usually not the ones we turn to first, they often can offer new and different perspectives. — *location: 1768* ^ref-40936 --- As we are making these connections, we build up an internal structure of the slip-box, which is shaped by our thinking. While this structure builds up externally and independently of our limited memory, it will, in return, shape our thinking as well and help us to think in a more structured way. Our ideas will be rooted in a network of facts, thought-through ideas and verifiable references. The slip-box is like a well-informed but down-to-earth communication partner who keeps us grounded. If we try to feed it some lofty ideas, it will force us to check first: What is the reference? How does that connect to the facts and the ideas you already have? — *location: 1782* ^ref-60938 --- And some theories or theoretical models are surprisingly versatile, which is why it makes sense to assemble a toolbox of useful mental models (Manktelow and Craik 2004) that could help with our daily challenges and make sense of the things we learn and encounter. — *location: 1831* ^ref-40015 >Check referene --- Helmut D. Sachs puts it like this: “By learning, retaining, and building on the retained basics, we are creating a rich web of associated information. The more we know, the more information (hooks) we have to connect new information to, the easier we can form long-term memories. […] Learning becomes fun. We have entered a virtuous circle of learning, and it seems as if our long-term memory capacity and speed are actually growing. On the other hand, if we fail to retain what we have learned, for example, by not using effective strategies, it becomes increasingly difficult to learn information that builds on earlier learning. More and more knowledge gaps become apparent. Since we can’t really connect new information to gaps, learning becomes an uphill battle that exhausts us and takes the fun out of learning. It seems as if we have reached the capacity limit of our brain and memory. Welcome to a vicious circle. Certainly, you would much rather be in a virtuous learning circle, so to remember what you have learned, you need to build effective long-term memory structures.” – Sachs 2013, 26 — *location: 1855* ^ref-26906 --- We learn something not only when we connect it to prior knowledge and try to understand its broader implications (elaboration), but also when we try to retrieve it at different times (spacing) in different contexts (variation), ideally with the help of chance (contextual interference) and with a deliberate effort (retrieval). — *location: 1867* ^ref-8264 --- Many exciting stories from scientific history make us believe that great insight comes in a flash. There is the sudden insight of Watson and Crick that DNA would have to have the form of a double helix, or the story of Friedrich August Kekulé, who allegedly dreamed of a snake biting its own tail and suddenly saw the structure of benzene in front of his eyes. But the reason why Watson and Crick or Kekulé had these insights and not a random person on the street is that they already had spent a very long time thinking hard about the problems, tinkered with other possible solutions and tried countless other ways of looking at the problem. Our fascination with these stories clouds the fact that all good ideas need time. Even sudden breakthroughs are usually preceded by a long, intense process of preparation. — *location: 1876* ^ref-46261 --- To be able to play with ideas, we first have to liberate them from their original context by means of abstraction and re-specification. We did this when we took literature notes and translated them into the different contexts within the slip-box. — *location: 1914* ^ref-63189 --- One of the most famous figures to illustrate this skill is the mathematician Abraham Wald (Mangel and Samaniego 1984). During World War II, he was asked to help the Royal Air Force find the areas on their planes that were most often hit by bullets so they could cover them with more armour. But instead of counting the bullet holes on the returned planes, he recommended armouring the spots where none of the planes had taken any hits. The RAF forgot to take into account what was not there to see: All the planes that didn’t make it back. The RAF fell for a common error in thinking called survivorship bias (Taleb 2005). The other planes didn’t make it back because they were hit where they should have had extra protection, like the fuel tank. The returning planes could only show what was less relevant. — *location: 1964* ^ref-12191 --- Often, companies don’t even keep track of their own failed attempts, providing McMath with whole series in which one kind of mistake was made in multiple variations, sometimes from each generation of developers in the same company (McMath and Forbes 1999). — *location: 1975* ^ref-27697 --- A good rule of thumb for working digitally is: Each note should fit onto the screen and there should be no need of scrolling. — *location: 2020* ^ref-54377 --- Standardised is also the way we treat literature and our own thoughts: Instead of using different kinds of notes or techniques for different kinds of texts or ideas, the approach here is always the same, simple one. Literature is condensed on a note saying, “On page x, it says y,” and later stored with the reference in one place. Ideas and thoughts are captured on the slip-box notes and connected to other notes always in the same way in the same place. These standardizations mean the technical side of note-taking can become automatic. Not having to think about the organisation is really good news for brains like ours. The few mental resources we have available, we need for thinking about the actual relevant questions: those concerning the contents. — *location: 2021* ^ref-47502 --- Whenever someone struggles with finding a good topic to write about, someone else will recommend brainstorming. It still has a modern sound to it, even though it was described in 1919 by Alex Osborn and introduced to a broader audience in 1958 in the book “Brainstorming: The Dynamic New Way to Create Successful Ideas” from Charles Hutchison Clark. — *location: 2068* ^ref-49324 --- It makes things worse that we tend to like our first ideas the best and are very reluctant to let go of them, irrespective of their actual relevance (Strack and Mussweiler 1997). — *location: 2079* ^ref-11079 >Write a note about when to pass off a project because you are too invested --- And before you now wonder if it would be a good idea to overcome the limitations of brainstorming by assembling a group of friends to brainstorm together, forget it: More people in a brainstorming group usually come up with less good ideas and restrict themselves inadvertently to a narrower range of topics (Mullen, Johnson, and Salas 1991).34 — *location: 2080* ^ref-18193 --- Starting with what we have also comes with another, unexpected advantage: We become more open to new ideas. It seems counterintuitive that we become more open to new ideas the more familiar we are with ideas we have already encountered, but historians of science will happily confirm this (Rheinberger 1997). It makes sense when you think about it: without intense elaboration on what we already know, we would have trouble seeing its limitations, what is missing or possibly wrong. Being intimately familiar with something enables us to be playful with it, to modify it, to spot new and different ideas without running the risk of merely repeating old ideas believing they are new. — *location: 2114* ^ref-21550 --- The more time an artist devotes to learning about an aesthetic “problem,” the more unexpected and creative his solution will be regarded later by art experts (Getzels and Csikszentmihalyi 1976). — *location: 2123* ^ref-1698 >Problem focus --- The risk of losing interest in what we do is high when we decide up front on a long-term project without much clue about what to expect. We can mitigate this risk considerably by applying a flexible organisation scheme that allows us to change course whenever necessary. — *location: 2134* ^ref-13789 --- When even highly intelligent students fail in their studies, it’s most often because they cease to see the meaning in what they were supposed to learn (cf. Balduf 2009), are unable to make a connection to their personal goals (Glynn et al. 2009) or lack the ability to control their own studies autonomously and on their own terms (Reeve and Jan, 2006; Reeve, 2009). — *location: 2130* ^ref-5025 --- The ability to change the direction of our work opportunistically is a form of control that is completely different from the attempt to control the circumstances by clinging to a plan. The beginning of the research project that led to the discovery of DNA’s structure was the application for a grant. The grant was not to discover DNA’s structure, but find a treatment for cancer. If the scientists had stuck to their promises, not only would they probably not have found a cure for cancer, but they definitely would not have discovered the structure of DNA. Most likely, they would have lost interest in their work. Luckily, they did not stick to their plan, but followed their intuition and interest and took the most promising path to insight whenever one opened up. The actual research program developed along the way (Rheinberger 1997). One could say they finished the plan on what to do the very moment they finished the whole project. — *location: 2140* ^ref-32721 >Vphilosophy vision slight edge gyroscope when is vision bad? --- The ability to keep control over our work and change course if necessary is made possible by the fact that the big task of “writing a text” is broken down into small, concrete tasks, which allows us practically to do exactly what is needed at a certain time and take the next step from there. It is not just about feeling in control, it is about setting up the work in a way that we really are in control. And the more control we have to steer our work towards what we consider interesting and relevant, the less willpower we have to put into getting things done. Only then can work itself become the source of motivation, which is crucial to make it sustainable. — *location: 2147* ^ref-57208 >Control as antedote to will power --- “When people experienced a sense of autonomy with regard to the choice, their energy for subsequent tasks was not diminished. An important question that deserved empirical attention concerns the potential for autonomous choice to vitalise or enhance self-regulatory strength for subsequent tasks. What, for example, are the conditions that will lead autonomous choice to enhance people’s motivation for new tasks? We suggest that among the factors that are likely to affect whether choice will be vitalizing is the nature of the options being provided to the person. If a person is offered choice among options that he or she does not value, that are trivial or irrelevant, the choice is unlikely to be vitalizing and may be depleting, even if there is no subtle pressure toward a particular option. On the other hand, having autonomous choice among options that do have personal value may indeed be quite energizing.” –Moller, 2006, 1034 — *location: 2152* ^ref-31953 --- Organizing the work so we can steer our projects in the most promising direction not only allows us to stay focused for longer, but also to have more fun – and that is a fact (Gilbert 2006). — *location: 2159* ^ref-35261 --- The problem in this stage is almost exactly the opposite of the “blank screen.” Instead of not knowing how to fill the pages, we have so much at hand that we have to curb our impulse to mention everything at the same time. It is vital to have a separate, project-specific place to sort your notes for a particular project. An outliner helps with developing a rough structure, but also allows you to keep it flexible. The structure of an argument is part of it and therefore will change during the process of developing it – it is not a vessel to be filled with content. As soon as the structure no longer changes much, we can happily call it a “table of contents.” But even then, it helps to see it as a structural guideline and not a prescription. It is not unusual to change the order of chapters at the very end. — *location: 2166* ^ref-23647 --- Another key point: Try working on different manuscripts at the same time. While the slip-box is already helpful to get one project done, its real strength comes into play when we start working on multiple projects at the same time. The slip-box is in some way what the chemical industry calls “verbund.” This is a setup in which the inevitable by-product of one production line becomes the resource for another, which again produces by-products that can be used in other processes and so on, until a network of production lines becomes so efficiently intertwined that there is no chance of an isolated factory competing with it anymore. — *location: 2172* ^ref-33602 --- Remember: Luhmann’s answer to the question of how one person could be so productive was that he never forced himself to do anything and only did what came easily to him. “When I am stuck for one moment, I leave it and do something else.” When he was asked what else he did when he was stuck, his answer was: “Well, writing other books. I always work on different manuscripts at the same time. With this method, to work on different things simultaneously, I never encounter any mental blockages.” (Luhmann, Baecker, and Stanitzek 1987, 125–55) — *location: 2184* ^ref-17093 --- The psychologists Roger Buehler, Dale Griffin and Michael Ross asked a group of students to: 1. Realistically estimate the time they would need to finish a paper. 2. Estimate additionally how long they think they would need a. if everything goes as smoothly as possible or b. if everything that could go wrong would go wrong. Interestingly, the majority of the student’s “realistic” estimates were not so different from their estimates for writing under perfect conditions. This alone should have given them pause for thought. But when the researchers checked how much time the students really needed, it was much, much longer than they estimated. Not even half of the students managed to finish their papers in the time they thought they would need under the worst possible conditions (Buehler, Griffin and Ross 1994). The researchers did not assume that half of the students suddenly faced calamities beyond their imagination. In another study a year later, the psychologists looked more closely at this phenomenon, which still puzzled them because the students could have answered any way they liked – there was no benefit in giving overly optimistic answers. They asked the students to give them time ranges in which they were either 50%, 70% or 99% sure to finish their paper. Again: They were free to give any answer. But, sure enough, only 45% managed to get their papers done within the time they were sure they had a 99% likelihood to finish it under any condition they regarded as possible (Buehler, Griffin, and Ross 1995). Now, you might think it would make a difference to remind them about their not-so-perfect guesses last time. The researchers thought so, but the students proved them wrong: Experience doesn’t seem to teach students anything. But there is one consolation: It has nothing to do with being a student. It has something to do with being human. Even the people who study this phenomenon, which is called the overconfidence bias, admit that they too fall for it (Kahneman 2013, 245ff). The lesson to draw is to be generally sceptical about planning, especially if it is merely focused on the outcome, not on the actual work and the steps required to achieve a goal. — *location: 2191* ^ref-42657 >Scoping --- We know from sports that it doesn’t help when athletes imagine themselves as winners of a race, but it makes a big difference if they imagine all the training that is necessary to be able to win. Having a more realistic idea in mind not only helps them to perform better, it also boosts their motivation (Singer et al. 2001). We know today that this is not only true for athletes, but for any work that needs effort and endurance (Pham and Taylor 1999). — *location: 2211* ^ref-45045 --- If we instead set out to write, say, three notes on a specific day, review one paragraph we wrote the day before or check all the literature we discovered in an article, we know exactly at the end of the day what we were able to accomplish and can adjust our expectations for the next day. — *location: 2223* ^ref-51809 >Productivity metrics --- According to the famous law of Parkinson, every kind of work tends to fill the time we set aside for it, like air fills every corner of a room (Parkinson 1957). — *location: 2229* ^ref-39606 --- But the biggest difference lies in the task you are facing to start with. It is much easier to get started if the next step is as feasible as “writing a note,” “collect what is interesting in this paper” or “turning this series of notes into a paragraph” than if we decide to spend the next days with a vague and ill-defined task like “keep working on that overdue paper.” — *location: 2234* ^ref-61748 >Next action clearly defined. Definition plus experience for flow --- If there is one piece of advice that is worth giving, it is to keep in mind that the first draft is only the first draft. Slavoj Žižek said in an interview37 that he wouldn’t be able to write a single sentence if he didn’t start by convincing himself he was only writing down some ideas for himself, and that maybe he could turn it into something publishable later. By the time he stopped writing, he was always surprised to find that the only thing left to do was revise the draft he already had. — *location: 2242* ^ref-21100 >why overblowing things s demotivating --- For every document I write, I have another called “xy-rest.doc,” and every single time I cut something, I copy it into the other document, convincing myself that I will later look through it and add it back where it might fit. Of course, it never happens – but it still works. Others who know a thing or two about psychology do the same (cf. Thaler, 2015, 81f). — *location: 2248* ^ref-39962 --- The more pressure we feel, the more we tend to stick to our old routines – even when these routines caused the problems and the stress in the first place. This is known as the tunnel effect (Mullainathan and Shafir 2013). But Mullainathan and Shafir, who examined this phenomenon thoroughly, also found a way out of it: Change is possible when the solution appears to be simple. — *location: 2354* ^ref-20720 ---