kuhree.com

Recently

Smart Notes

3 min read

up:: jump:: zettelkasten down::

Smart Notes

What are smart notes?

A knowledge system that keeps your ideas small, are easy to add to and modify, and highly linked with easy discovery.

Based on the method devised by Niklas Luhmann, a 20th-century German sociologist who used a slip box to contain all his notes. We refer to this slip box as the zettelkasten --- German for “slip box”

Niklas was able to create almost 90,000 notes and was well organized enough that he was able to create a huge body of work that even other were able to use after his death. He published over 70 books and 400 scholarly articles.

Smart notes consist of three different types of notes:

  • Permanent (second brain, final organization of your notes)
  • Literature (books, podcasts, yt videos, etc and the ideas that come from them)
  • Fleeting (shower thoughts, quick ideas, things of interest)

Permanent notes

  • Should contain 1 idea
  • Should be easy to understand in isolation
  • Should be linked to other notes that create new insights
  • Models the way a brain stores fact and creates connections
  • Not categorized rigidly so that ideas can freely link together

Benefits

  1. You can do your thinking in a smart note system. This allows you to not have to “remember” everything and use the system to discover insights.
  2. You can ask your notes system questions, to find insights that help support or appease the arguments of your research.
  3. Creating new writing never start from zero as you can bring the notes that have your ideas and research all ready to go --- it should practically write the work for you.

Principles of Smart Notes

Smart notes are different from regular notes in that they are not the result of thinking but a place where thinking can occur.

It focuses on writing where you are producing content to consolidate, test, and verify your thinking.

You never have to start from scratch because as your vault grows, you have access to all of your thinking, insights and records at your fingertips. This allows more connections and updates to be made.

This works by creating a workflow for capturing your fleeting thoughts and literature notes around the organization of your permanent notes. this results in lifting the burden of the system and allowing free flow and creativity.

By working on multiple projects at a time, they can be published frequently after only writing for a short time.

Organize by context and not by topic. This allows for interesting connection to be made across topics and through the lens of context.

Curiosity is the ultimate driver of the system and allows you to discover and follow new interesting paths to new insights and ideas. You’re literally connecting you thinking in a non-linear way. This allows you to explore contradictory ideas rather than having to exclude them because they don’t ‘fit’ your mental model.

When to use smart notes?

  • If you want to create a second brain that allows you to think through writing
  • If you want to be a writer exploring new insights and ideas
  • If you want to capture your knowledge from studying in a way that is highly discoverable and highly reusable.

See Also

Graph View

Backlinks