How to Take Smart Notes
#1103 of 2,654 all-time
How to Take Smart Notes
Sönke Ahrens
6 people recommended it in 5 threads, 2020–2022.
What people on Hacker News said
Where GTD(above) does this for well-defined tasks/work, this book does it for open-ended work, giving you an amazing workflow for introducing "Thinking by Writing", which is frankly a superpower. This lets you see things your friends/colleagues simply won't, lets you deconstruct your feelings better, learn new/deeper subjects faster, and connect thoughts in a way to produce real insight.
The content may not be super relevant immediately, but the book and (really simple) methodology of taking notes on these readings and graphing relationships between concepts means you're slowly building a network of knowledge that grows and becomes more powerful over time.
The idea of a slip box to capture, refine, and connect information sounds fun.
For me it was "How to Take Smart Notes" by Sönke Ahrens. This may be a little cliche answer, but to me it was very surprising to discover a person who reached such high productivity in Academic Publishing with the help of a smart system.
Where it comes up
- Ask HN: What are the best books for professional effectiveness? 2021 · 2 recommendations
- Ask HN: Do you recall any book or course that made a topic finally click? 2022 · 1 recommendation
- Ask HN: What's the best book you read in 2021? 2021 · 1 recommendation
- Books that changed my career as a software engineer 2021 · 1 recommendation
- Ask HN: Best books under 200 pages for developers? 2020 · 1 recommendation