Roam Book Club — Interview with Sönke Ahrens

Sonke Ahrens, author of How To Take Smart Notes, on the Zettelkasten method and what survives translation into a networked tool.

Notes

• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iFC9R8t1tkk&feature=youtu.be
• “There is really no book I can recommend to my students about Note-taking even though it’s so critical.”
• Huge interest in Niklas Luhmann’s work
• “Technology shapes our thinking.”
• His writing on Zettelkasten was largely dismissed by academia as a silly way for an old professor to sit with his notes.
• Most people try and repeat one idea over and over again rather than trying to connect that idea to many others to offer different lenses of illustration.
• “Ideas have their time and pop up in different places. I have really high hopes about this technology’s ability to create leverage in Education and help drive Multidisciplinary Thinking.”
• “If we don’t take notes we’re floating on the newest ideas, and those newest ideas aren’t necessarily better.” Note-taking
• Niklas Luhmann talks of his Zettelkasten as a “dialogue partner.” It can help with avoiding Confirmation Bias.
• “The book was really written for academics but since I’ve spoken to people with a lot of different backgrounds I’m now more confident in saying this works for a huge variety of professionals.”
• There are some studies that show writing has benefits that typing does not. Hand-written notes can be a good way to clarify your thoughts and then you can type it up.
• Your ideal should be creating as close to perfect of a system as you can that can be done the same way every day.
• Your routine can be something you fall back on but it can always adjust based on what you need; just Reading, Walking, Conversation with people.