Four kinds of notes

Fleeting notes

These are purely for remembering your thoughts. They can be: fleeting ideas, notes you would have written in the margin of a book, quotes you would have underlined in a book.

They should be thrown away as soon as their contents have been transferred to literature/permanent notes (if worthy) or not (if unworthy).

Literature notes

These summarize the content of some text, and give the citation.

Permanent notes

Each permanent note contains one idea, explained fully, in complete sentences, as if part of a published paper.

Project notes

These are notes made only for a project, such as a note that collects all the notes that you'd want to assemble into a paper. They can be thrown away after the project is finished.

Don't just read. Make reading notes. Don't just learn. Make blog posts or something to share what you learned.

Calculate productivity not by how many pages of paper you've written, but by how many permanent notes you've written per day.

Use the Zeigarnik effect to your advantage. If you want something to stop intruding your mind, write it down and promise yourself that you'll "deal with it later". If you want to keep pondering something (perhaps a problem you want to solve), don't write it down, and go for a walk with that problem on your mind.

you should make the network of slip-box notes to be like a small-world network, with a few notes having many connections, and some notes having "weak ties" to far-away notes (Granovetter, Mark S, 1977 The Strength of Weak Ties).

When I am stuck for one moment, I leave it and do something else... I always work on different manuscripts at the same time. With this method, to work on different things simultaneously, I never encounter any mental blockages.