How to Take Smart Notes by Sönke Ahrens

I am getting organized, like in-general organized. I am creating to-do lists, setting goals, and closely tracking my progress. I am learning some new tools and working on building new habits and I am hoping that they will help facilitate some changes for the better.

I am starting with collecting all of the notes that I have scattered across many different hard drives and the Internet, so I thought learning how to take better notes would be a good idea.

I learned about the Hoe to Take Smart Notes book while learning how to use a note taking tool called Obsidian, many of the blog posts and videos I watched referred to it and made it sound like a great book.

I bought it from Amazon to read on the Kindle and read it in a day.

The title is “How to Take Smart Notes,” but I think it would have been better served with the title, “Why Take Smart Notes and How to Use Them.” Although it does cover the “How” of smart note taking, the majority of its pages are about the “Why.”

I found the why of it interesting, but very dry.

The references throughout the book may be the best thing about it, I highlighted and saved many quotes and references for future exploring, the bibliography is a great resource.

I plan on using what I learned and applying it to my daily note taking, task management, and other writing projects.

Form the author’s website:

This is the step-by-step guide on how to set up and understand the principle behind the note-taking system that enabled Luhmann to become one of the most productive and systematic scholars of all time. But most importantly, it enabled him to do it with ease. He famously said: “I never force myself to do anything I don’t feel like.” Luhmann’s system is often misunderstood and rarely well explained (especially in English). This book aims to make this powerful tool accessible to everyone with an interest in reading, thinking and writing. It is especially helpful for students and academics of the social sciences and humanities and nonfiction writers.

I rate How to Take Smart Notes a 6 out of 10 and recommend it to anyone looking to build a solid system of note taking, but be ready for the book to be a slog.