"“One cannot think without writing.”"

"Every intellectual endeavour starts with a note."

"You can use this pool of notes not only to make writing easier and more fun for yourself, but also to learn for the long run and generate new ideas."

"There is another reason that note-taking flies mostly under the radar: We don’t experience any immediate negative feedback if we do it badly."

"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."

"With that in mind, it is not surprising that the single most important indicator of academic success is not to be found in people’s heads, but in the way they do their everyday work."

"there is no measurable correlation between a high IQ and academic success – at least not north of 120."

"What does make a significant difference along the whole intelligence spectrum is something else: how much self-discipline or self-control one uses to approach the tasks at hand"

"It is not so important who you are, but what you do. Doing the work required and doing it in a smart way leads, somehow unsurprisingly, to success."

"Self-discipline or self-control is not that easy to achieve with willpower alone. Willpower is, as far as we know today,[2] a limited resource that depletes quickly and is also not that much up for improvement over the long term"

"Having a meaningful and well-defined task beats willpower every time."

"A good structure is something you can trust. It relieves you from the burden of remembering and keeping track of everything."

"A good structure enables flow, the state in which you get so completely immersed in your work that you lose track of time and can just keep on going as the work becomes effortless"

"Still, we often struggle the most with procrastination and motivation."

"The challenge is to structure one’s workflow in a way that insight and new ideas can become the driving forces that push us forward."

"Planners are also unlikely to continue with their studies after they finish their examinations. They are rather glad it is over."

"Having read more does not automatically mean having more ideas."

"All that means is that a system is needed to keep track of the ever-increasing pool of information, which allows one to combine different ideas in an intelligent way with the aim of generating new ideas."

"In fact, poor students often feel more successful (until they are tested), because they don’t experience much self-doubt. In psychology, this is known as the Dunning-Kruger effect (Kruger and Dunning, 1999). Poor students lack insight into their own limitations"

"Good students, on the other hand, constantly raise the bar for themselves as they focus on what they haven’t learned and mastered yet."

"There is no need to build a complex system and there is no need to reorganise everything you already have. You can start working and developing ideas immediately by taking smart notes."

"There is really no need to reorganise anything you already have. Just deal with things differently the moment you have to deal with them anyway."

"We only need to combine two well-known and proven ideas. The first idea lies at the heart of this book and is the technique of the simple slip-box."

"Only when all the related work becomes part of an overarching and interlocked process, where all bottlenecks are removed, can significant change take place"

"it does provide a structure for our everyday work that deals with the fact that most distractions do not come so much from our environment, but our own minds."

"What we can take from Allen as an important insight is that the secret to a successful organization lies in the holistic perspective. Everything needs to be taken care of, otherwise the neglected bits will nag us until the unimportant tasks become urgent."

"That is why we need a note-taking system that is as comprehensive as GTD, but one that is suitable for the open-ended process of writing, learning and thinking. Enter the slip-box."

"“I, of course, do not think everything by myself. It happens mainly within the slip-box”"

"“I only do what is easy. I only write when I immediately know how to do it. If I falter for a moment, I put the matter aside and do something else.”"

"Studies on highly successful people have proven again and again that success is not the result of strong willpower and the ability to overcome resistance, but rather the result of smart working environments that avoid resistance in the first place"

"you need to be smart to be successful in academia and writing, but if you don’t have an external system to think in and organise your thoughts, ideas and collected facts, or have no idea how to embed it in your overarching daily routines, the disadvantage is so enormous that it just can’t be compensated by a high IQ."

"Intuitively, most people do not expect much from simple ideas. They rather assume that impressive results must have equally impressively complicated means."

"Luhmann had two slip-boxes: a bibliographical one, which contained the references and brief notes on the content of the literature, and the main one in which he collected and generated his ideas, mainly in response to what he read."

"Whenever he read something, he would write the bibliographic information on one side of a card and make brief notes about the content on the other side (Schmidt 2013, 170). These notes would end up in the bibliographic slip-box."

"He did not just copy ideas or quotes from the texts he read, but made a transition from one context to another. It was very much like a translation where you use different words that fit a different context, but strive to keep the original meaning as truthfully as possible."

"The trick is that he did not organise his notes by topic, but in the rather abstract way of giving them fixed numbers. The numbers bore no meaning and were only there to identify each note permanently."

"By alternating numbers and letters, with some slashes and commas in between, he was able to branch out into as many strings of thought as he liked."

"Whenever he added a note, he checked his slip-box for other relevant notes to make possible connections between them."

"You have to have a two-step process in place. First, don’t worry too much about the notes you take while you are doing something else. Whether you are in a discussion, attending a lecture, or suddenly have an idea while brushing your teeth, the best thing you can do in most situations is to jot down a reminder and go back to what you’re doing."

"Now, to the important second step: as quick notes are only reminders of an idea, you need to turn them (ideally within a day) into permanently understandable notes. Otherwise you will soon have forgotten what each note was all about. Write as if you write for someone else."

"If you do it right, these notes can be much more than just an archive of ideas. You can build up an ever-growing external memory that helps you to develop your thoughts, keeps your biases in check, streamlines your writing process, sparks new ideas and improves your learning. Focus on the process and turn elaboration into an actual task. How?"

"Standardize. Keep everything in one place in one format, give each note a distinct number (see below), and connect related notes."

"Elaborate. Now, before you write the permanent note, think about how a new idea contributes, challenges or alters something you have written down before by looking through your Zettelkasten for related notes. Write down the outcome of this thinking process as clearly and precisely as possible on a new note."

"Connect. Most note-taking systems lead to nothing but collections of isolated ideas stored in preconceived categories. Don’t fall for that. Facts are only as useful as the context they are embedded in. How we connect them is as important as they are themselves."

"Instead, let order emerge bottom-up by making connections between your notes and be observant of the differences between them."

"Give each note a permanent ID. Add your new note behind the most related existing note and make references to other related notes."

"Mind the context. By using permanent ID’s one note can be embedded in different contexts. It it similar to hyperlinks, but with a strong emphasis on building up note-sequences."

"Build up note-sequences. If you intend to write articles or books, these note-sequences can later be turned into parts or even whole chapters of your manuscript."

"Keep an alphabetic index for orientation, but don’t overdo it – you only need to refer to one or two notes as entry-points into a line of thought."

"Whenever you want to get an overview of a topic, just write another note in which you elaborate on a possible topic-structure."

"Make it a habit. When you turn writing like this into a daily habit, you no longer have to decide upfront what to write about or worry about the blank page"

"Just follow your interests, accompany your reading with simple note-taking followed by conversion to permanent notes until it becomes second nature, and then look at where note-clusters have built up in your Zettelkasten."