Process
Status Items Highlights Done See section below Claims None Questions None Output None
Highlights
Location 288
“I only do what is easy. I only write when I immediately know how to do it. If I falter for a moment, I put the matter aside and do something else.”
📖 (Location 288)
Location 295
The best way to maintain the feeling of being in control is to stay in control. And to stay in control, it’s better to keep your options open during the writing process rather than limit yourself to your first idea. It is in the nature of writing, especially insight-oriented writing, that questions change, the material we work with turns out to be very different from the one imagined or that new ideas emerge, which might change our whole perspective on what we do. Only if the work is set up in a way that is flexible enough to allow these small and constant adjustments can we keep our interest, motivation and work aligned–which is the precondition to effortless or almost effortless work.
📖 (Location 295)
Location 778
The advice to think about what to write about before you write comes both too early and too late. Too late, as you already have passed up the chance to build up written resources when you face the white sheet of paper or the blank screen, but also too early, if you try to postpone every serious content-related work until you have made a decision on the topic. If something comes too early and too late at the same time, it is not possible to fix it by rearranging the order as the fictional linearity is the problem in itself. Taking smart notes is the precondition to break with the linear order.
📖 (Location 778)
Location 788
problems and frustrations they promise to solve. How can you not have trouble finding a topic if you believe you have to decide on one before you have done your research, have read and learned about something? How can you not feel threatened by an empty page if you have literally nothing at hand to fill it with? Who can blame you for procrastinating if you find yourself stuck with a topic you decided on blindly and now have to stick with it as the deadline is approaching? And how can anyone be surprised that students feel overwhelmed with writing assignments when they are not taught how to turn months and years of reading, discussing and research into material they can really use?
📖 (Location 788)
Location 797
accumulate substantial material just by doing what they most feel like doing. The material will cluster around the questions they returned to most often, so they don’t risk too far of a departure from their interest. If your first chosen topic turns out to be not as interesting, you will just move on and your notes will cluster around something else. Maybe you will even note down the reasons why the first question is not interesting and turn that into an insight valuable enough to make public. When it finally comes to the decision on what to write about, you will already have made the decision–because you made it on every single step along the way, again and again every day, improving it gradually. Instead of spending your time worrying about finding the right topic, you will spend your time actually working on your already existing interests and doing what is necessary to make informed decisions–reading, thinking and writing. By doing the work, you can trust that interesting questions will emerge. You might not know where you will end up (and you don’t need to), but you can’t force insight into a preconceived direction anyway. You minimise both the risk of losing interest in a topic you have once chosen ill-informed and the risk of having to start all over again.
📖 (Location 797)
Location 849
As the feedback loops are usually smaller than one big chunk of feedback at the end, they are also much less scary and easier to embrace.
📖 (Location 849)
Location 866
Working with it is less about retrieving specific notes and more about being pointed to relevant facts and generating insight by letting ideas mingle. Its usability grows with its size, not just linearly but exponentially. When we turn to the slip-box, its inner connectedness will not just provide us with isolated facts, but with lines of developed thoughts. Moreover, because of its inner complexity, a search thought the slip-box will confront us with related notes we did not look for.
📖 (Location 866)
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Additional highlights taken manually
it is so much easier to remember things we understand than things we
don’t. It is not that we have to choose to focus either on learning or
understanding. It is always about understanding – and if it is only for the
sake of learning. Things we understand are connected, either through
rules, theories, narratives, pure logic, mental models or explanations. And
deliberately building these kinds of meaningful connections is what the
slip-box is all about.
Every
step is accompanied by questions like: How does this fact fit into my idea of
…? How can this phenomenon be explained by that theory? Are these two ideas
contradictory or do they complement each other? Isn’t this argument similar to
that one? Haven’t I heard this before? And above all: What does x mean for y?
These questions not only increase our understanding, but facilitate learning as
well. Once we make a meaningful connection to an idea or fact, it is difficult
not to remember it when we think about what it is connected with.
Note: Why the whole connecting ideas thing is important
break down the amorphous task of “writing” into smaller pieces
of different tasks that can be finished in one go. The second step is to
make sure we always write down the outcome of our thinking, including possible
connections to further inquiries. As the outcome of each task is written down
and possible connections become visible, it is easy to pick up the work any
time where we left it without having to keep it in mind all the time
Note: Quick summary of the process
To get a good paper written, you only have to rewrite a good draft; to
get a good draft written, you only have to turn a series of notes into a continuous
text. And as a series of notes is just the rearrangement of notes you already
have in your slip-box, all you really have to do is have a pen in your
hand when you read.
Note: Makes it sound so easy, but this really is a good outline or process of steps that I already mostly do.
Collecting only one-sided ideas wouldn’t be
very enriching. Yes, we have to be selective, but not in terms of pros and
cons, but in terms of relevant or irrelevant.
Rereading is especially dangerous because of the mere-exposure effect:
The moment we become familiar with something, we start believing we also
understand it. On top of that, we also tend to like it more
The attempt to
rephrase an argument in our own words confronts us without mercy with all the
gaps in our understanding.
Working
with the slip-box, therefore, doesn’t mean storing information in there instead
of in your head, i.e. not learning. On the contrary, it facilitates real,
long-term learning. It just means not cramming isolated facts into your brain
The slip-box
takes care of details and references and is a long-term memory resource that
keeps information objectively unaltered. That allows the brain to focus on the
gist, the deeper understanding and the bigger picture, and frees it up to be
creative. Both the brain and the slip-box can focus on what they are best at
Experienced
academic readers usually read a text with questions in mind and try to relate
it to other possible approaches, while inexperienced readers tend to adopt the
question of a text and the frames of the argument and take it as a given. What
good readers can do is spot the limitations of a particular approach and see
what is not mentioned in the text
Note: This is the difference between good and bad reading
collect de-contextualised quotes from a text – probably the worst possible
approach to research imaginable. This makes it almost impossible to understand
the actual meaning of information. Without understanding information within its
context, it is also impossible to go beyond it, to reframe it and to think
about what it could mean for another question.
Note: Pure highlighting is wasteful.. Always add context and relations
it is not possible to think systematically without writing
Note: Thinking and working is done in tandem between brain and writing.. Writing is not the final product.
I
took some literature notes collecting reasons how and why humans act so very differently
when they experience scarcity. This was step one, done with an eye towards the
argument of the book. I had questions in mind like: Is this convincing? What
methods do they use? Which of the references are familiar?
Note: Step 1 in reading a book.. Take content notes based on its premise and with related questions in mind.
But
the first question I asked myself when it came to writing the first permanent
note for the slip-box was: What does this all mean for my own research and the
questions I think about in my slip-box? This is just another way of asking: Why
did the aspects I wrote down catch my interest?
Note: Step 2 in reading a book.. Create personal notes that tie this to my own archive of thoughts and notes and debates.
Just
by writing down these questions and making possible connections explicit in writing
are the concepts and theories being investigated. Their limitations become as
visible as their particular angle on a problem. By explicitly writing down how
something connects or leads to something else, we force ourselves to clarify
and distinguish ideas from each other.
Note: Ask why questions.. Make connections.. State what interesting ideas are triggered..
The slip-box forces us to ask
numerous elaborating questions: What does it mean? How does it connect to … ?
What is the difference between … ? What is it similar to? That the slip-box is
not sorted by topics is the precondition for actively building connections
between notes. Connections can be made between heterogeneous notes – as long as
the connection makes sense
should not be used as an archive,
where we just take out what we put in, but as a system to think with, the
references between the notes are much more important than the references from
the index to a single note. Focusing exclusively on the index would basically
mean that we always know upfront what we are looking for – we would have to
have a fully developed plan in our heads. But liberating our brains from the
task of organizing the notes is the main reason we use the slip-box in the
first place.
Note: This is the hardest thing to grok and apply. I want it to be about index to single note, and they’re advocating about relation between notes only.
So it shouldn’t be a tag of “characters” and having all notes related to that? Why not?
A
truly wise person is not someone who knows everything, but someone who is able
to make sense of things by drawing from an extended resource of interpretation
schemes.
Note: This has been said a few times. Wisdom isn’t knowing random facts; it’s having the ability to interpret data around you into knowledge. Wisdom is a good knowledge management system that converts raw data into context and knowledge based on a variety of interpretation models.
without intense elaboration on what we already know, we would have trouble
seeing its limitations, what is missing or possibly wrong. Being intimately
familiar with something enables us to be playful with it, to modify it, to spot
new and different ideas without running the risk of merely repeating old ideas believing
they are new. This is why it feels in the beginning that familiarity makes it
harder to come up with new ideas. We just didn’t know that most of the ideas we
had are actually not that innovative. But while the belief in our own ingenuity
decreases with expertise, we become more able to actually make a genuine new
contribution.
Note: Experience in reading, generating ideas and thoughts, working on them and going thru that cycle helps:
-
overcome the false belief of novice ingenuity (since we will more and more come across ideas we thought of and had considered novel)
-
gain enough familiarity to actually uncover gaps, variations and novel updates to old ideas.
It is
much easier to get started if the next step is as feasible as “writing a note,”
“collect what is interesting in this paper” or “turning this series of notes
into a paragraph” than if we decide to spend the next days with a vague and
ill-defined task like “keep working on that overdue paper.”
Note: Several things here, but the core is: break the main objective into smaller measurable tasks that can each be done in one go.
Don’t break it up into variable and vague phases (i.e. topic generation, reading, writing, editing). Each of those will balloon and meander and change and can never be planned and timed accurately.
Instead, if you just focus on writing a handful of notes, or converting two articles into notes, or turning notes into a paragraph.. those kinds of tasks actually happen faster because the finish line is very clear and apparent and can be tackled in one go.