Ahrens on notes that outlive projects
📚SOURCE
💎PERMANENT NOTES
🧵SYNTHESIS
Paraphrase, not quotation: the whole of 📕 How to Take Smart Notes, rewritten today from my November 2024 notes.
Ahrens describes the working method of the sociologist Niklas Luhmann and draws a general claim from it: writing is not what you do after thinking, it is where the thinking happens. Luhmann read with a pen, put each idea on its own slip in his own words, and filed it next to the slips it related to, not under a topic. Over decades the box became something he could question and be surprised by. He called it a partner in conversation.
The method needs only three kinds of note. Fleeting notes are reminders and get thrown away. Literature notes say what a source says. Permanent notes say what I think, each one complete enough to stand alone.
The part that ended rebuild four: he insists the tool should be simple and then left alone. Mine never were.
✨KEY IDEAS
Nobody starts from a blank page; a text is assembled from notes that already exist.
Notes are sorted by what they connect to, not by the topic they fall under.
A permanent note is written as if for print: full sentences, own words, understandable without the source.
Project notes belong to one project and can be archived with it; permanent notes belong to no project.
A fixed, boring structure is what makes room for unexpected ideas.
📝READING NOTES
Why this is the first literature note in the vault
I read the book in the last weeks of 📂 Rebuild my notes system, attempt four, with the new design 70 percent built. I took eleven pages of notes on it inside the half-built system, which tells you most of what you need to know. This morning at Lantern Coffee I threw those away and wrote this from memory, in one sitting. That is the method, applied to the book that teaches it.
What he actually claims
1. Writing is the work. Reading, understanding and having ideas are not stages before writing. They happen in it. If I cannot write a thing down in my own words I have not understood it yet.
2. Three kinds of note, kept apart. See 🧩 Literature and permanent notes. The failure he describes is treating them all the same: keeping every fleeting thought forever, or keeping only project notes so that nothing accumulates.
3. Bottom-up. Topics and structure come out of the notes. You do not choose a subject and then collect for it; you notice where the box has grown thick.
4. The box answers back. Because notes sit next to their neighbours and link to distant ones, looking something up shows you things you did not ask for.
5. Keep it simple. The whole apparatus is slips, a box and an index.
What it did to me
Four systems. One long document; deep folders; forty plugins; my own design. In every one I can find the notes on how the system should work, and in none of them can I find twenty notes I would call permanent. Each rebuild started in the week a piece of writing got hard.
So the problem was never the tool. The tool was where I went when the writing got hard.
Where I do not follow him
- He argues from one extraordinarily productive man. Plenty of people kept card files and wrote nothing.
- The book is repetitive, and evangelical in a way that made me want to build something, which is the opposite of its advice.
- He is vague on how many links are enough and when a note is done. I have had to invent my own test.
What it produced
- 💎 A system I keep rebuilding is a system I am not using
- 💎 A note is finished when it can be read without its source
Added 5 April: ninety days without a structural change. Nineteen things on the itch list. I looked at each and wanted none of them.
Questions it left me with
- Would I have listened to this book in 2021, or did it take four failures to hear it?
- How will I know this vault is being used and not just kept? Count of permanent notes by April, perhaps, and whether an issue was ever built from them.
- Luhmann worked alone for decades. What is the version of this for someone with a job, a Tuesday class and about six hours a week?
Related notes
- 🧩 Literature and permanent notes
- 📂 Rebuild my notes system, attempt four
- 📖 Matuschak on evergreen notes
Reading record
- Reading: rewritten from old notes
🗣️IN SHORT
- In : How to Take Smart Notes, the whole book
- Ahrens argues that : writing is the medium of thinking, and a simple, permanent collection of connected notes does more for a writer than any plan or any tool
- by stating that : notes kept in one's own words, one idea each, filed by connection and independent of any project, accumulate into something that can be questioned, while project notes and collected highlights die with their occasion