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Over the holidays, I started reading “How to Take Smart Notes.”
https://www.amazon.com/How-Take-Smart-Notes-Nonfiction-ebook/dp/B06WVYW33Y
As someone who loves reading but is often aimlessly highlighting books only to never turn to them again, I was intrigued by the promise of this book. Some early takeaways:
https://www.amazon.com/How-Take-Smart-Notes-Nonfiction-ebook/dp/B06WVYW33Y
As someone who loves reading but is often aimlessly highlighting books only to never turn to them again, I was intrigued by the promise of this book. Some early takeaways:
Taking Smart Notes is less about the note and more about the learning. As we read, it's not about highlighting what resonates, but writing down why that resonated and anything that personally comes to mind. We're growing our understanding through the act of reading.
The Smart Notes framework is the writing world's "Getting Things Done (GTD)" methodology. It's a simple and trusted framework intended to fade to the background in order to elevate our focus on comprehension, idea generation, and writing.
Smart Notes places a focus on emergent ideas in thought and our own writing. Rather than starting with a blank page and brainstorming from scratch, we have a trusted system we use on a daily basis to capture all thoughts, ideas, questions, and more from what we read and think.
The framework itself is incredibly simple with an emphasis on capturing fleeting ideas or notes from our readings and processing them into finalized thoughts for our long-term "slip-box." Over time, new ideas and insights may emerge from this!
While the framework is simple, you can go deeper into it as the Zettelkasten Method. Honestly, this is where I started last year in exploring Smart Notes and I wish I hadn't: it doesn't do the foundational principles justice in the brief way the book does.
I'm really excited about experimenting with applying this framework to my own learning structure in 2021 and beyond. Growth requires that we're always exploring and generating insight for what could be next — and this framework is crafted for just that.
