Luhmann wrote his notes on cards and filed them in a physical catalogue. Digital Approaches and Applications for Pastors and Biblical Scholars This was due in part to the unexpected connections made within his Zettelkasten.
He was able to approach subjects in fresh ways, finding surprising connections among disparate disciplines. But perhaps even more impressive than his scholarly output is the nature of his scholarship. Writing is the thinking process.īy using this method, Luhmann was able to write more than 70 books and 400 scholarly articles before he died at the age of 70.
That’s because you think you know the subject matter better than you do. This can be difficult, and you may find much personal inertia to this approach. You must force yourself to formulate your thoughts and write them as if writing them for someone else. In my conceptualization, Luhmann’s method is a form of atomic writing. Once written, you must then link a note to the other notes in your existing network of note-ideas. Zettel (process your literature notes and write permanent notes-one note per idea).Literature notes (write these as you read a book, but keep them separate from the next type).Ephemeral notes (these eventually get thrown out).Ahrens proposes dividing your note-taking into three types. If you’re old enough to remember physical card catalogues, Luhmann used two of these. He used a system that is known as a Zettelkasten, or notes box.
#SMART NOTES AHRENS HOW TO#
The Heart of the BookĪt the heart of Ahren’s How to Take Smart Notes is a somewhat idiosyncratic notetaking system developed by German sociologist Niklaus Luhmann. I need to warn you now, that for some of you, what you’re going to hear next is going to send you down a deep, deep rabbit hole on the Internet, and what you find will affect many aspects of your life. It’s a proposal for a more disciplined-yet much more liberating-process of contemplation and writing.
#SMART NOTES AHRENS SERIES#
But this book goes much deeper than a series of tips and tricks. It will certainly help you to process your thoughts. I believe that following the model suggested in this book may in fact make you a better student and researcher. It’s not a self-help book with tips for becoming a better student, a better listener, or to improve your ability to capture thoughts for future contemplation and recall. To appropriate the profundity of Samuel Roy Hagar, “only time will tell if stand the test of time.” Whether or not they will hold up in the long run is an open question. I asked for replacement copies, and Amazon promptly sent them-even before receiving the bad copies in return. The glue on the bindings did not hold well, and pages were falling out of the defective copies. These appear to be self-published through Amazon’s CreateSpace. I should say that two of the first five paperbacks I ordered were very poorly bound. I loved this book so much that I ordered several copies to give as gifts to friends. This book is not about Reformed theology, church history, or even philosophy, but I’m confident many of you nevertheless will be intrigued. My wife even asked me what in the world I was reading, to which I sheepishly confessed it was a book on taking notes.
I couldn’t put the book down and read it well into the night. I decided to retrieve a sample chapter on my Kindle.
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