Many books I read are interesting, but not all are “life changing”. This recent book certainly has the potential to fall in the latter category.

Overall, I like books that fall in the “productivity” category, but not all offer a leap forward in my way of working. Getting Things Done (GTD) by David Allen was a transformative book for me. It had so many good ideas bound together by a common sense process. I don’t apply it all religiously, but have benefited enormously from the book.

This latest book by Sonke Ahrens called How to Take Smart Notes is a book similar to GTD: good ideas bound together by a common sense process. Rather than focusing on personal productivity, this book’s topic is more related to knowledge management. The processes described in the book facilitate processing information and helping to advance your thinking.

The system described in the book is based on the Zettelkasten system developed by a German social scientist called Niklas Luhmann in the 20th century. He systematically processed information and included it in his second brain where he developed his thinking. This second brain was the Zettelkasten, or slip box in English.

Both GTD and Zettelkasten have things in common: the brain is great for having ideas, but very poor at holding them, and they need to be externalised into a system. For any system to work, you need to intuitively trust it. In order to intuitively trust it, it needs to be common sense and easy enough to use.

So what is a Zettelkasten system? It is composed of 3 parts:

1. Ubiquitous capture tool (which GTD also has) for fleeting notes (thoughts that come in your mind throughout the day that are interesting enough to revisit later)
2. A reference system to keep track of what you have read / seen / listened to and their related notes (1 note per source)
3. The slip box system itself for all permanent thoughts and insights, together with its index.

So how do you work with such a system?

1. Make fleeting notes, whenever they come up
2. Make reading / reference notes
3. Make permanent notes based on the fleeting notes and the recent reading/reference notes to advance your thinking and insights ( develop ideas, arguments and discussions). 1 idea per note, written in full sentences, disclosing sources, making the necessary references and being brief/precise.
4. Add permanent notes to slip box. Create an index with entry points to the slip box. For every new note, make sure it can be found by either linking to it from the index or linking to it from another note that is used as an entry point to a discussion or topic itself and is linked to the index.

The eventual objective is to develop your topics, questions and research projects bottom up from within the slip box system, following what you already have in it and adding to it.

In my experience, it is trickier to apply than GTD, but also potentially more transformative, I feel. So, I am giving it a shot and will try to revisit the topic based on progress I make.

If you are interested, I am leaving you here the link to the book on GoodReads.