How to Take Smart Notes

By: Sönke Ahrens

I came across this book when first learning about zettlekasten, personal knowledge management, and Obsidian.

… the professor is not there for the student and the student not for the professor. Both are only there for the truth. And truth is always a public matter.

Inspired by Getting Things Done, another popular book about productivity in knowledge work.

It basically gives a quick biography of Niklas Luhmann, a 20th century German sociologist that developed the zettlekasten method. Ahrens gives his thoughts on how to instill “smart notes” as a habit, and how to apply them to the reader’s field of work.

I suppose I wasn’t a huge fan of this book because its saying something that we already know — we don’t review our old notes enough and allow ourselves to be bored and daydream about our ideas. We don’t write essays about the things we obsess about, things that we’d be happy to share our thoughts with people about.

This feeling is reflected in a post I wrote about publishing content online.