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.

In her autobiography, Lean In, Sheryl Sandberg reluctantly admits to carrying a notebook and pen around to keep track of her To Do list, and confesses that at Facebook, where she is the COO, this is "like carrying around a stone tablet and chisel." Yet she and many others like her persist in this ancient technology. There must be something to 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.

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

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.

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.

Writing them down gives both implicit and explicit permission to the rehearsal loop to let them go, to relax its neural circuits so that we can focus on something else. "If an obligation remained recorded only mentally," Allen says, "some part of me constantly kept thinking that it should be attended to, creating a situation that was inherently stressful and unproductive."

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.