How to: Personal Knowledge Management

Note Taking, Writing Better, and Building a Knowledge Base

And a review of the book "How to Take Smart Notes: One Simple Technique to Boost Writing, Learning and Thinking – for Students, Academics and Nonfiction Book Writers" by Sönke Ahrens.

Context

Last year, I read a book called "How to Take Smart Notes: One Simple Technique to Boost Writing, Learning, and Thinking – for Students, Academics and Nonfiction Book Writers" by Sönke Ahrens to improve my writing and notetaking skills. This blog post is meant for anyone who has never heard the word "Zettlekasten" or "Commonplace Notebook", and wants to get better at extracting and maintaining the information they consume. 

We need four tools: · Something to write with and something to write on (pen and paper will do) · A reference management system (the best programs are free) · The slip-box (the best program is free) · An editor (whatever works best for you: very good ones are free) — Sönke Ahrens

We consume a lot of information and almost never in a single format or delivery system. The retention of this information becomes as important as consuming the information itself. Moreover, a strictly monitored media diet ensures a high signal-to-noise ratio of the kind of information you consume.

The evolution of my note-taking system has gone hand-in-hand with the strictness of my information diet, which is something everyone should be very conscious about.

Over the years, I have sought to perfect my note-taking system to retain as much informations as I can from textual, auditory, and visual sources. The system has evolved to document questions and ideas, which have often served as checks of my understanding of the world, or as prompts to learn interesting things I might never have encountered otherwise.

Personal Knowledge Management can be implemented using a variety of tools and methodologies. I personally like the Zettlekasten method which I employ using my commonplace notebook and Obsidian.
Tools of consumption such as read-it-later apps, podcast applications, reference managers and readers, as well as a network of people who pop up in your feed with other interesting sources of information and ideas make up the second prong of your personal knowledge management system.
The third, of course, is how frequently you're in touch with the information you have accrued. This way, retention of key concepts and ideas transform into knowledge.

The Commonplace Notebook

I developed my own method of taking notes over three years of my undergraduate degree. I transitioned from documenting things I learned using apps and text editors, to what I now know is called a commonplace notebook. Around 2019, I started keeping a separate A5 notebook to jot down summaries and important points brought up in articles and podcasts. I would whip out this notebook during interesting conversations to note down any questions and ideas I had. In this manner, I was logging my takeaways from articles, books, and podcasts, as well as my conversations with others.

A commonplace book can be a good way of maintaining and reflecting on what you've learned, what ideas you've had before, what questions you've gotten answered (or not). The commonplace book serves as the foundation of building a knowledge base.

Obsidian (and other writing + visualization tools)

I use Obsidian because it's free. People who use RoamResearch are generally happy with it too.

Tools like Obsidian or Roam not only allow you to digitize notetaking, but also help you visualize the interactions of your subject matter using a graph. You can create backlinks to other documents you have made in these tools, which allows you to generate relationships between multiple documents.

Notion

If you know me, you know I love Notion.

Notion is an 'all-in-one workspace' which incorporates the really useful aspects of other notetaking and productivity applications like Evernote, OneNote, and Asana, to name a few.

Recently, with everyone asking for backlinks that Roam or Obsidian has, Notion also added backlinking functionality. However, unlike Roam or Obsidian, Notion doesn't have the cool visualization of related links that the other two do.

Thus, I mainly use Notion for general planning, logging, notetaking, and collaborating on projects.

I used Notion throughout my graduate applications, I'm using Notion to plan out my move to a whole new country, I use it to monitor my media diet, and I got my team member to sign up for it to use it for our final year project.

Notion is great. Get Notion. Use it for planning and structuring. Notion is great.

Reference Managers

I only found out about reference managers like Mendeley and Zotero in 2020. Until then, I had been reading papers by either taking printouts for easier annotation or using a PDF reader. I wish I had found out about them sooner because I now use Mendeley for all papers and textbooks I want to read and refer to.

Reference managers are especially useful if you're writing a paper, a thesis, or collaborating with others. It's good for annotating, discussing, and sharing relevant material with collaborators.

Zotero takes the upper hand here because it automatically makes a Google doc with your notes. 

(The only reason I haven't switched entirely to Zotero is that importing my Mendeley data into Zotero took too long and had too many glitches.)

Some other tools I use

There are other tools I like using like QuoteBack and Pocket, but I've been using Matter for the past month and I think Matter takes over both of these tools, especially Pocket.

QuoteBack is useful for people like me who don't like webclippers. Matter is giving me great recommendations, especially of time-tested, older articles, and their text-to-speech is much better than Pocket's.

Pocket still has the upper hand in labelling saved articles, but overall I'm loving how clean Matter is. It's still in beta on iOS. Here's the invite link if you're interested.

The Methodology

“I would advise you to read with a pen in your hand and enter in a little book short hints of what you feel that is common or that may be useful; for this will be the best method of imprinting such portcullis in your memory.” — Benjamin Franklin

1. Make concise notes and summaries of useful concepts, tidbits of information, and overarching ideas you come across. I do this in my commonplace notebook.
1. Use a good reading/referencing application or a podcast application for easier organization and delivery. This is also why I prefer ebooks to physical books.
2. Digitize your summaries into something like Obsidian. 
3. Go over your commonplace/Obsidian routinely.
1. You could also get subscription based services like ReadWise or Roam which routinely send you your highlights and notes via email. 

How to Take Smart Notes — book review and key points

The book starts off by explaining the slip-box method the German sociologist Niklas Luhmann used to create his knowledge base.

An excerpt from How To Take Smart Notes, Sönke Ahrens:

"Strictly speaking, Luhmann had two slip-boxes: a bibliographical one, which contained the references and brief notes on the content of the literature, and the main one in which he collected and generated his ideas, mainly in response to what he read. The notes were written on index cards and stored in wooden boxes. 

He would write very concise summaries on index cards, and had developed an intricate system of numbering the cards such that related cards would be grouped together (numerically). Basically, this is the analog version of making backlinks to existing documents.

The book not only goes through different notetaking methods but also talks a lot about organizing said notes and to-be-consumed content, as well as acting as a guide to writing better.

How to write better (and other takeaways)

1. Read actively — read with a pen in your hand, take notes of what you're reading, and really think about the text you're consuming. It helps us think better and be more concise in our writing.
2. Don't ever start writing with a blank page. Refer to the notes you have already made about the text.
3. Don't multitask — when writing, stick to writing. Write using the knowledge you have already gained and summarized. Don't start looking things up in the middle of writing, save that for after you've written something.
4. Don't make intricate plans on how much you will write and how long it will take; people routinely underestimate the time writing takes
5. Don't proofread as soon as you finish writing the first draft. Take some time away from the draft and then go over it with a fresh mindset.

Overall, the book is really helpful in pointing the reader towards methods that really work, and in getting the reader to develop better writing habits. I highly recommend going through the book when you start to consciously monitor your media diet and knowledge-building methodology.

Any method you adapt (might be different than the one mentioned here or in the book) will not start out perfect. You will make changes to it over time. The key is to reduce any unnecessary complex or time-consuming tasks and instead, adopting a method that you can easily integrate into your daily life.

Thanks to Janhavi Sathe, Paaras Bharadwaj, and Ananya Pendse for reading and critiquing the draft.