How to Take Smart Notes to improve your Personal Productivity?

9 min readMay 5, 2022

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Key Points

Smart note-taking will save you a lot of time by correctly storing the information when you learn a subject.
Smart note-taking will make you remember things you read in the correct context.
Smart note-taking will allow you to create thought links between topics that will help you do things much more efficiently and productively.
Based on the work of the highly productive — Niklas Luhmann and a system called Zettelkasten.
Adapting the Zettelkasten system to modern-day technology.

How to take smart notes — Zettelkasten Niklas Luhmann

We have all been there, you have a subject you need to present to your employees/manager/board or you are working on a task that requires some background material that you need to learn on — you are familiar with the subject, you just need to get into more details, and you know, you just know that you have read these things before, you just didn’t store/learn/remember them…

And this was my story that broke me, I was trying to find a new methodology for SW development to improve the processes my engineers were using.

I got online and started researching, reading web pages, and articles, and watching videos of new methodologies. I got the job done but I wasted 3 days learning a topic I came by with many times, I read again the same web pages I read in the past, only this time I learned the content, I watched the same videos I saw back then but this time I was summarizing the key points.

It frustrated me a lot, it was a waste of time, finding the good content, compiling my ideas, and modification on things that I have already read.

And this frustration pushed me to find a better way.

I hit the online bookshelf and found an excellent book called “How to take smart notes” by Sonke Ahrens.

I also went through several interviews and podcasts he gave to better understand the key points.

Why do you need to take Smart Notes?

There are a few points to answering this question:

Efficiently Storing information

The example in the preview should be enough to understand why this will result in making better use of your time by saving you the need to relearn and research past topics.

At your Job you are constantly learning new things, there is a reason we in the high tech industry are called knowledge workers…, most of what you come by is not for immediate use but you need to have a system to store information in a good and effective way, to quickly extract it — so when you will need that information you will quickly get it and not have to go through the laboring and annoying process of going through your files, and notes looking for it.

More information on how to organize your notes is in this Blog Post.

Remember what you have learned in Context

Taking smart notes is not just to Copy-Paste information to your note-taking app — that is the wrong way.

The reason for that is that smart notes taking is done by writing the information you have learned in your language, summarizing the information and giving it additions from other things you have learned, and combining it with other sources of information.

This entire process of thinking, rewriting, and combining is what causes you to remember the information better.

It tells your brain that it’s important.

Connect and link Ideas

This process also creates links in your brain to other sources of information so that when next time, when you will come by something related to this topic, your brain will pop this bit of information in the correct context.

That is extremely important for connecting different ideas, adding your touch, and creating new ideas and methods as a result.

What is a Zettelkasten? Where did this Smart Note-Taking system come from?

Niklas Luhmann, Was a German man who lived in the 1960s, his spare time passion was reading.

While reading he took notes and stored them in his Zettelkasten, a German name for a slip-box.

In his case, a real wooden box set.

He used these smart notes to become super productive, and to reach a list of amazing achievements:

He wrote his thesis and became a professor in less than a year, Wrote over 60 books in his lifetime and hundreds of articles.

Many people regarded Luhmann as a genius.

But studies of his methods show that his success wasn’t the result of inordinately vast intelligence. It was the result of smart note-taking.

Luhmann knew exactly how to use his notes, to tackle exactly the problems that note-taking solves — Storing, remembering in context, and linking ideas together.

There are 4 problems why people are not using his method today:

The studies are in German.
People think that the workflow is too time-consuming — it’s not if you are doing it right.
The idea is simple — people don’t think that getting such results is possible with a simple process and dismiss it.
It was not adapted to a technological solution and nobody uses notes and wooden boxes these days.

So let me try and tackle the problems and explain them easily…

How to take Smart Notes?

You should have 2 types of Notes and the actual Slip-Box:

Fleeting Notes

These are notes of things you tackle in your day-to-day.

Usually today — this step is the last step people take — web clip important parts.

Your fleeting notes do not even go into your slip-box, they are just stored for later review.

The later review is better when it happens daily when things are still fresh — I will explain shortly what this review means.

You can use every app that is there for quick notes taking and web capturing: Obsidian, Notion, Google Keep, OneNote, etc.

Research Notes

A lot of the media we consume today is done also by videos, online lectures, blog posts, and online courses — so “literature notes” didn’t seem fit, so I changed it to “research notes”.

In this Slip-box you put notes that you have taken while learning new material.

It is important to not copy-paste content here, when you learn a section, just rewrite it in your own words.

This will make you embed the information better in your brain.

“Read with a pen in hand. And, while reading, enter in a little book short hints of what you feel that is common or that may be useful.” Benjamin Franklin.

Permanent Notes Slip-Box

This is the important part of your Zettelkasten.

These emerge from your Fleeting notes and your Research notes.

As you review these notes, you go to your Permanent notes and augment the note on that subject.

There is one note on each subject and it contains all the information you have on that subject.

When you write and add to that Permanent note, remember that you are not just collecting information:

You are seeking to develop your permanent note idea and arguments.
Ask Yourself:
How is this new information you are storing adds to your existing notes?
Does it contradict what you previously wrote and learned, does it correct your ideas or support them?
Do new ideas come to mind as a result of that? New links are formed between subjects?
Does it raise any new questions that need to be explored and researched?

Remember to reference where you got this information and also remember to create links to other notes.

With a slip-box, the reason for your reading and note-taking is perfectly clear: to build on your previous permanent notes and arguments.

The critical part of the Permanent notes Slip-Box

The next step is crucial, Store the notes together in your slip box in a hierarchal way that makes sense, in a way that one note’s information and context lead to the next note’s information and context, and they are all intertwined in the same idea.

If one idea connects to another idea, link them together.

Luhmann did it by placing the paper notes one after the other according to topics and numbering each note, if a note to a topic was marked as #320 and then he got another note relating to that subject but the information shouldn’t be on the same to #320 note he added a note behind #320 and marked it as #320a.

In today’s digital era you can just place that note in the directory related to that topic and create a tag or a link between two notes/files which are from different topics.

What to do when you have a subject you need to research or learn about?

If you are keeping your Zettelkasten in order and according to the rules — then really deep-diving into a new subject will be easy.

Just:

Open the note on that subject and review it.
See if you have any holes that you need to fill according to what you are working on specifically.
See if you wrote any questions that you would like to explore more on the subject and follow up on them.
And add information from the notes linked to it.

As time passes and your Zettelkasten will get filled with good content — You will never need to look on a blank Page/PPT/DOC when you start working on a subject.

What note-taking app should I use? and how to organize my note’s main topics?

As every good answer starts: “It depends on you”.

Different people use different note-taking apps for their different needs.

I am using Obsidian as my note-taking app — you can read about the benefits of this app here — Obsidian Review.

Besides being free, have tons of community plugins, easy search, easy tagging, have every possible feature other notes taking app has — combined, it has a graphical view of the links between notes that helps a lot to understand links and create new ones.

And the method that I am using to store the notes is the P.A.R.A Method.

Are digital notes better than paper notes?

I don’t recommend using paper/any hardcopy on any of your note-taking needs …

Not for book summaries, not for things I, capture online, and not for key points I take during the day when I learn.

I agree that using paper notes has a fun feeling to it and the research does say that writing on paper lingers more in your memory, but at the end of the day, searching in digital notes, looking at relations with Tags in a graphical way, images you find online and can easily add to notes and the sheer ability to take you Zettelkasten with you where ever you go in your pocket is a list of things I cannot live without in the case of paper notes.

We all have our cellphone at our side all day long — if you need to take fleeting notes quickly, use one of the quick tools every phone has built-in today whether it’s Android or iOS, or use an app to write it down quickly (Obsidian, Notion, Google Keep, OneNote …) or better yet — record it.

I listen to a lot of podcasts and audiobooks when I drive.

Obviously, I cannot write down each fleeting/research note I need to take — so what I do is take a fleeting note by recording it, and later on move it to the permanent section after some processing.

How many notes should I take?

There is no definitive answer with a number to this question.

If a topic is important to you, and somewhat relates to your life — take a note.

If you are working in digital software, the cost is nothing.

Better to have a note on a topic than later on researching everything again.

Just make sure you keep it as a permanent note on a topic and not just a bunch of fleeting notes.

How to take smart notes Summary

Notes-taking is a very important part of your day-to-day.

If you do it wisely you are able to save a lot of time when you need to learn a subject, it will make you remember things you read in the correct context and allow you to create links between topics that will help you do things much more efficiently and productively.

In this article, I surveyed the Zettelkasten method and adapted it to modern technological times.

I highly recommend that if you found the notes in this section interesting and relevant and you think that digging deeper into them will help you take smarter notes and become more productive, read this book: