Too busy to read?

If you want to learn something for the long run, you have to write it down. If you want to really understand something, you have to translate it into your own words. Thinking takes place as much on paper as in your own head.

Zeigarnik effect: Open tasks tend to occupy our short-term memory - until they are done. That is why we get so easily distracted by thoughts of unfinished tasks, regardless of their importance. But thanks to Zeigarnik's follow-up research, we also know that we don't actually have to finish tasks to convince our brains to stop thinking about them. All we have to do is to write them down in a way that convinces us that it will be taken care of. That's right: The brain doesn't distinguish between an actual finished task and one that is postponed by taking a note. By writing something down, we literally get it out of our heads.

Learning would be not so much about saving information, like on a hard disk, but about building connections and bridges between pieces of information to circumvent the inhibition mechanism in the right moment. It is about making sure that the right "cues" trigger the right memory, about how we can think strategically to remember the most useful information when we need it.

After a while, you will have developed ideas far enough to decide on a topic to write about. Your topic is now based on what you have, not based on an unfounded idea about what the literature you are about to read might provide.

If we practice learning not as a pure accumulation of knowledge, but as an attempt to build up a latticework of theories and mental models to which information can stick, we enter a virtuous circle where learning facilitates learning.

Only the actual attempt to retrieve information will clearly show us if we have learned something or not.

poor students often feel more successful (until they are tested), because they don't experience much self-doubt. In psychology, this is known as the Dunning-Kruger effect (Kruger and Dunning, 1999). Poor students lack insight into their own limitations - as they would have to know about the vast amount of knowledge out there to be able to see how little they know in comparison. That means that those who are not very good at something tend to be overly confident, while those who have made an effort tend to underestimate their abilities. Poor students also have no trouble finding a question to write about: they neither lack opinions nor the confidence that they have already thought them through.

We learn something not only when we connect it to prior knowledge and try to understand its broader implications (elaboration), but also when we try to retrieve it at different times (spacing) in different contexts (variation), ideally with the help of chance (contextual interference) and with a deliberate effort (retrieval).

We tend to think we understand what we read - until we try to rewrite it in our own words. By doing this, we not only get a better sense of our ability to understand, but also increase our ability to clearly and concisely express our understanding - which in return helps to grasp ideas more quickly.

ego. It is well known that decision-making is one of the most tiring and wearying tasks, which is why people like Barack Obama or Bill Gates only wear two suit colours: dark blue or dark grey. This means they have one less decision to make in the morning, leaving more resources for the decisions that really matter.

Charlie Munger, Warren Buffett's partner and vice chairman of Berkshire Hathaway, stresses the importance of having a broad theoretical toolbox - not to be a good academic, but to have a good, pragmatic grip on reality. He regularly explains to students which mental models have proven most useful to help him understand markets and human behaviour. He advocates looking out for the most powerful concepts in every discipline and to try to understand them so thoroughly that they become part of our thinking. The moment one starts to combine these mental models and attach one's experiences to them, one cannot help but gain what he calls "worldly wisdom." The importance is to have not just a few, but a broad range of mental models in your head. Otherwise, you risk becoming too attached to one or two and see only what fits them. You would become the man with a hammer who sees nails everywhere

As proper note-taking is rarely taught or discussed, it is no wonder that almost every guide on writing recommends to start with brainstorming. If you haven't written along the way, the brain is indeed the only place to turn to. On its own, it is not such a great choice: it is neither objective nor reliable - two quite important aspects in academic or nonfiction writing.

The brain also doesn't store information neurally and objectively. We reinvent and rewrite our memory every time we try to retrieve information. The brain works with rules of thumb and makes things look as if they fit, even if they don't. It remembers events that never happened, connects unrelated episodes to convincing narratives and completes incomplete images. It cannot help but see patterns and meaning everywhere, even in the most random things (cf. Byrne, 2008). The brain, as Kahneman writes, is "a machine for jumping to conclusions"

"If you can't say it clearly, you don't understand it yourself."

"Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn't really do it, they just saw something." (Steve Jobs)

Learning, thinking and writing should not be about accumulating knowledge, but about becoming a different person with a different way of thinking. This is done by questioning one's own thinking routines in the light of new experiences and facts.

in terms of understanding the content of the lecture, the students who took their notes by hand came out much, much better. After a week, this difference in understanding was still clearly measurable. There is no secret to it and the explanation is pretty simple: Handwriting is slower and can't be corrected as quickly as electronic notes. Because students can't write fast enough to keep up with everything that is said in a lecture, they are forced to focus on the gist of what is being said, not the details. But to be able to note down the gist of a lecture, you have to understand it in the first place. So if you are writing by hand, you are forced to think about what you hear (or read) - otherwise you wouldn't be able to grasp the underlying principle, the idea, the structure of an argument.

the more connected information we already have, the easier it is to learn, because new information can dock to that information. Yes, our ability to learn isolated facts is indeed limited and probably decreases with age. But if facts are not kept isolated nor learned in an isolated fashion, but hang together in a network of ideas, or "latticework of mental models" (Munger, 1994), it becomes easier to make sense of new information.

You have to externalise your ideas, you have to write. Richard Feynman stresses it as much as Benjamin Franklin. If we write, it is more likely that we understand what we read, remember what we learn and that our thoughts make sense. And if we have to write anyway, why not use our writing to build up the resources for our future publications?

Having trouble finding the right topic is a symptom of the wrong attempt to rely heavily on the limitations of the brain, not the inevitable problematic starting point, as most study guides insinuate. If you on the other hand develop your thinking in writing, open questions will become clearly visible and give you an abundance of possible topics to elaborate further in writing.

Turn your notes into a rough draft. Don't simply copy your notes into a manuscript. Translate them into something coherent and embed them into the context of your argument while you build your argument out of the notes at the same time. Detect holes in your argument, fill them or change your argument.

If we look into our slip-box to see where clusters have built up, we not only see possible topics, but topics we have already worked on - even if we were not able to see it up front. The idea that nobody ever starts from scratch suddenly becomes very concrete. If we take it seriously and work accordingly, we literally never have to start from scratch again.

Whenever you read something, make notes about the content. Write down what you don't want to forget or think you might use in your own thinking or writing.

"Manipulations such as variation, spacing, introducing contextual interference, and using tests, rather than presentations, as learning events, all share the property that they appear during the learning process to impede learning, but they then often enhance learning as measured by post-training tests of retention and transfer.

Writing is, without dispute, the best facilitator for thinking, reading, learning, understanding and generating ideas we have.

willpower is compared to muscles: a limited resource that depletes quickly and needs time to recover. Improvement through training is possible to a certain degree, but takes time and effort. The phenomenon is usually discussed under the term "ego depletion": "We use the term ego depletion to refer to a temporary reduction in the self's capacity or willingness to engage in volitional action (including controlling the environment, controlling the self, making choices, and initiating action) caused by prior exercise of volition." (Baumeister et al., 1998, 1253)

Keywords should always be assigned with an eye towards the topics you are working on or interested in, never by looking at the note in isolation.

Physicist and Nobel Prize winner Richard Feynman once said that he could only determine whether he understood something if he could give an introductory lecture on it.

Writing brief accounts on the main ideas of a text instead of collecting quotes. And she also stresses that it is no less important to do something with these ideas - to think hard about how they connect with other ideas from different contexts and could inform questions that are not already the questions of the author of the respective text.

gut feeling is not a mysterious force, but an incorporated history of experience. It is the sedimentation of deeply learned practice through numerous feedback loops on success or failure.[20] Even a rational and analytical endeavour like science does not function without expertise, intuition and experience - which is one of the most interesting outcomes of the empirical research on natural scientists in their laboratories (Rheinberger 1997). Chess players seem to think less than beginners. Rather, they see patterns and let themselves be guided by their experience from the past rather than attempt to calculate turns far into the future.

Those who fear and avoid feedback because it might damage their cherished positive self-image might feel better in the short term, but will quickly fall behind in actual performance

The attempt to rephrase an argument in our own words confronts us without mercy with all the gaps in our understanding. It certainly feels less good, but this struggle is the only chance we have to improve our understanding, to learn and move forward

We know for example that watching television reduces the attention span of children (Swing et al. 2010).

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.

the long-term, cross-topic organization of notes, which is guided only by one's own understanding and interest,

He did not just copy ideas or quotes from the texts he read, but made a transition from one context to another. It was very much like a translation where you use different words that fit a different context, but strive to keep the original meaning as truthfully as possible.

The trick is that he did not organise his notes by topic, but in the rather abstract way of giving them fixed numbers.

One of the most famous figures to illustrate this skill is the mathematician Abraham Wald (Mangel and Samaniego 1984). During World War II, he was asked to help the Royal Air Force find the areas on their planes that were most often hit by bullets so they could cover them with more armour. But instead of counting the bullet holes on the returned planes, he recommended armouring the spots where none of the planes had taken any hits. The RAF forgot to take into account what was not there to see: All the planes that didn't make it back.

We can hold a maximum of seven things in our head at the same time, plus/minus two (Miller 1956).

Whenever he read something, he would write the bibliographic information on one side of a card and make brief notes about the content on the other side (Schmidt 2013, 170). These notes would end up in the bibliographic slip-box.

Permanent notes, on the other hand, are written in a way that can still be understood even when you have forgotten the context they are taken from.

care of in one place and process it in a standardised way. This doesn't necessarily mean that we actually do everything we once intended to do, but it forces us to make clear choices and regularly check if our tasks still fit into the bigger picture. Only if we know that everything is taken care of, from the important to the trivial, can we let go and focus on what is right in front of us. Only if nothing else is lingering in our working memory and taking up valuable mental resources can we experience what Allen calls a "mind like water" - the state where we can focus on the work right in front of us without getting distracted by competing thoughts.