Book Notes: Sönke Ahrens — How to Take Smart Notes

Take your notes to the next level

The Book

Ahrens, S. (2017). How to Take Smart Notes: One Simple Technique to Boost Writing, Learning and Thinking — for Students, Academics and Nonfiction Book Writers. Scotts Valley, CA: CreateSpace LLC.

Review

The book describes a personal knowledge management system based on the workflow of the prolific German sociologist Niklas Luhmann, called the Zettelkasten or slip-box. The systems consists of summary notes that are linked to each other. The book introduces this systems and elaborates how this system is not only a way to organise notes but also a tool to develop thoughts. I found this approach interesting and refreshingly different compared to many other approaches to academic productivity. However, I also found the way in which it is presented in this book quite annoying. It is like reading a 300-page infomercial. The same arguments are repeated again and again and the description of the method is embedded in meandering prose. I think this would have been a much more valuable resource if it had been condensed to about 10 pages. The focus also seems to be quite narrowly applied to disciplines that work with literature. I was missing more information about how the Zettelkasten system could expanded to contain…