# How to Take Smart Notes ## Metadata - Author: [[Sönke Ahrens]] - Full Title: How to Take Smart Notes - Category: #source/books ## Highlights - Just having it all in your head is not enough, as getting it down on paper is the hard bit. That is why good, productive writing is based on good note-taking. Getting something that is already written into another written piece is incomparably easier than assembling everything in your mind and then trying to retrieve it from there. To sum it up: The quality of a paper and the ease with which it is written depends more than anything on what you have done in writing before you even made a decision on the topic. (Page 3) - Good students also look beyond the obvious. They peek over the fences of their own disciplines. …[this] allows one to combine different ideas in an intelligent way with the aim of generating new ideas. (Page 7) - …it is not just about collecting thoughts, but about making connections and sparking new ideas. (Page 8) - …most distractions do not come so much from our environment, but our own minds. (Page 10)