Sönke Ahrens | How to Take Smart Notes

Srini Rao

Soenke, welcome to the Unmistakable Creative. Thanks so much for taking the time to join us.

Soenke Ahrens

Thank you so much for having me.

Srini Rao

It is my absolute pleasure to have you here. I found out about your work, to be honest. I have no idea how I stumbled up on this lecture you did about the Zettelkasten Method and Nicholas Lumen. And then I found your book, How to Take Smart Notes. And my dad being a college professor, when I saw the idea that somebody finished a PhD in a year, I thought, wait a minute, what the hell? I have 58 books, 500 papers. I'm a writer and I have a dad as a college professor. I have to find out more about this. And you know, it's amazing.

how transformative these ideas have been. So on that note, I was surprised to see what did your parents do for work and how did that end up shaping and influencing the choices that you've made throughout your life and your career.

Soenke Ahrens

Oh, that's an interesting question. So there's no obvious answer because both of my parents don't have an academic background at all. So my mom was a social worker. My dad was in the administration in my home city, Hamburg. And in a way, I think it puts you on a

in a weird place because you have to figure a lot out on your own. And I think my interest in how to take notes is one of the things I really needed to figure out on my own because there was no role model. And sometimes that can be incredibly helpful because you don't just take on something that's

done for generations, but you question some of the fundamentals. And I think note taking is certainly one of the fundamental skills you can have in learning and teaching and academia and beyond. But what my parents always passed on to me is that...

it's never a waste of time to read a book. And it's never a waste of money to buy books. So one thing that was absolutely clear is, I can read as much as I like. And I think that's an enormous gift you can give your children.

Srini Rao

Yeah. Did your parents encourage you to pursue any particular career paths or any particular fields? Because I mean, I, you know, I've alluded to this on a show before, like, you know, you're up in an Indian family, the narrative is doctor, lawyer, engineer. Those are your paths to a good life.

Soenke Ahrens

I think they would have preferred me becoming a medical doctor. But, and weren't particularly happy about my choice of pedagogy and I think philosophy of education is something they don't really know what it is all about. Like most people, me included most of the time. But

No, there was no particular path they had in mind, but very encouraging to go to university and to study. That's for sure.

Srini Rao

Let's let's talk specifically about

education, you know, because you, you know, in the talk that you gave, which will link up for people listening, you talked about the sort of current state of higher education. And it just made me rethinking, this is something that I ask all people who are academics when I have them on the show. If you were tasked with redesigning the education system from the ground up, particularly here in the United States, where we're riddling students with student loan debt, they're coming out with their relevant skills. And often people are just memorizing and regurgitating.

What would you change about it and how would you redesign it?

Soenke Ahrens

That's quite a big question. I think.

Srini Rao

Yeah, I realized we could do four episodes on that alone.

Soenke Ahrens

Well, I think the application of knowledge being playful with the information you get and doing something with it is certainly one of the key skills that's often missing. I think technology can help to a certain degree.

Um, and.

in many ways I don't know where to start. So starting from the choice of topics that are taught, then the way it's taught and I think...

Encouraging thinking thoroughly and being playful with the information you have is probably one of the keys to it. So it's not very original to see Richard Feynman as one of the role models on bringing life to information.

So I think there is a reason he was also not just a great scientist but also a great teacher. I think that goes hand in hand in some regards.

Srini Rao

Yeah.

Srini Rao

You know, I, you know, as we're talking about for here, record here, you know, my roommate, Matt, you know, asked me, he's like, Oh, we're straight A student in high school. Of course, if I was a straight A student in high school, I'm Indian. Like, you know, my parents would have disowned me if I wasn't a straight A student in high school. But the funny thing is that you realize that you, you know, you get to college as we were talking about. And the way you're taught to learn in high school does not serve you very well at all. In fact, it doesn't work. Even if you were a straight A student in high school, usually everything that got you to play.

like Berkeley usually is you know completely useless and I wonder you know

One, why we have perpetuated this sort of linear thinking, factory model of education long after the industrial revolution is over. And also, I'm curious about the contrast. You know, I know that being in Germany, you may not have perspective on this, but I'm guessing you've interacted with students from America and academics from America. What did you notice as differences in the way that we're sort of educated and socialized in education systems in Germany

the United States.

Soenke Ahrens

I think the differences between universities within the United States are much, much greater than between the United States and Germany. I think Germany is probably a little bit more homogeneous, not vastly different between universities in Germany, but all in all more.

Soenke Ahrens

on the middle ground. I experienced two different systems because with the Bologna reform in Europe it became much more modular and much more siloed. So I studied under the old system which came with a lot more freedom and there is obviously an upside to that. I...

felt very little restriction on what I can do and all the grades and examinations were more or less a second thought. That changed after the Bologna reform. So now the students I encounter when I teach are much more focused on the next exam, getting their credit points.

feeling much less free in choosing what they learn. And you can see it in the statistics as well. So one of the big reasons for the reform was to encourage traveling within Europe, changing universities, and that actually went down a lot. So that more or less backfired. So I think the differences I experienced

Srini Rao

Mm-hmm.

Soenke Ahrens

before and after the reform is probably much greater than between the average American university and the average German university. But I grew up with a lot of freedom.

Srini Rao

there.

Srini Rao

Yeah, you know, I think that, you know, the unfortunate thing here in the United States, in a lot of ways, from what I've heard from talking to primary teachers is that they're forced, unfortunately, to teach the test. Right. And we groom, you know, future bankers, lawyers and, you know, doctors by, you know, having these standardized tests. And that's a huge source of stress. And that often is what drives people to learn. Because there are a lot of people I found who think that they don't enjoy reading, primarily because they never got to choose the books they read. And that's pretty cool.

common in high school. I can't tell you a damn thing about most of the books that I read in high school. And that's probably because I wasn't taught to look at them the way that you teach people look at them. So what's the key to sort of breaking this conditioning, you know, on a much larger scale? Because I think that, to me, it seems like, you know, these sort of anomaly weirdos like me and people like Tiago Forte stumble on your work, and we're thinking, wow, this is the way everybody should do this. And of course, trying to convert them, you know, we sound like

you know, ridiculous religious evangelists trying to basically convert people to a new religion, which I kind of feel like we are.

Soenke Ahrens

Yeah, well, again, that's a big question and I feel there is no simple answer because at the moment I teach at a university where a lot of students do not have an academic background and they look for guidance on

how does it work here? How does university work? How does studying work? And I think we should give them guidance so that those students who have parents with an academic background don't have all the advantages and we pretend there's this big freedom, but it's more about figuring out the implicit rules of it.

That's the one side of it. And the other side is, well, how can we encourage them? And...

Soenke Ahrens

to study more freely, following their own interest, building up some structure themselves, and maybe also to collaborate more. So there is a lack of collaboration I see at the moment, which is also of course COVID related. So there are these two sides. How can we

give them the security of some kind of structure, and on the other hand, encourage them to use the freedom they have to follow their interest and to search the knowledge they need to answer certain questions, regardless of where the information comes from. And unfortunately, the structure we provide

Srini Rao

Hmm.

Soenke Ahrens

quite narrowing and is more or less the administrative structure. So maybe because of a lack of structure in the skills like note taking and how to write, how to keep track of your ideas, notes, how to develop them, maybe because we don't teach enough the structure on that level, they

look for structure somewhere else. And that is the structure built by administrators who look for, okay, how can we combine credit points in our system and how can we differentiate between the seminars and lectures they have to attend and cross the checklist. So maybe it's not so much about more or less structure but...

giving the right structure that enables freedom on the content level. Yeah, I think probably the enormous influence of the administration is one of the key problems in reforming higher education.

Srini Rao

Yeah. You know, it's funny you say that because one thing I learned after writing a couple of books, I went back and thought about the way that I was taught to write in high school versus the way that I was taught to write a book. And I've said, you know, there's a reason there's no such thing as the great American five paragraph essay.

Because in school you were taught to write in order to get a grade, not to be read. And of course, to your point, you follow this sort of linear structure in which you have this hypothesis, the thesis statement and the conclusion. And then you're like, this is mind-numbing. Why would anybody want to read this? So I think that makes a perfect segue into actually talking about the entire process of note-taking and smart notes and how different it is than anything else that we've seen.

Soenke Ahrens

Right.

Srini Rao

you stumble upon this and then you know how is it that something that's 60 plus years old got buried and never you know came to the surface until you wrote this book?

Soenke Ahrens

I always felt the need for a better system and I always blamed myself of not being rigorous enough of going through the books and the highlights I made again and again. I spent a lot of time searching for quotes I vaguely have in mind and I know they would be fitting but can't remember where I wrote them down.

And that certainly because I was very unstructured in my studies. So I was very curious about the neighboring disciplines and went to lectures far off the beaten track of my discipline. And so I gathered a lot of information from different places.

So it was a setup that made the need for a better system obvious, because the usual system I used as a young student, just collecting everything, I heard in one seminar or a lecture and then put it away together with other seminars from the same year, didn't really work.

And then I became very much interested in Niklas Luhmann's theory of social systems. So that started with an interest in his work, not in his writing technique. That was more or less an anecdote people in the field mentioned once in a while, that there is this strange Zettelkasten somewhere in the...

his house and it was more a curiosity, not something to be taken very seriously. And I think the theory of social system in itself kind of prepare you to detect the superiority of the system because it's all about building up complexity.

Soenke Ahrens

and finding ways to reduce that complexity. And it's about the evolution of ideas, it's about how insight can emerge out of chaos. And so there's a lot in the theory itself that is mirrored in the system. And I think when I realized that...

there might be more to the system than just a curious way of taking notes. It kind of fell into place. So it made sense. And it also made sense because at the time I read a little bit more about new insights from learning theories and seeing learning not so much as

storing information but retrieving information. That the key to understand learning is really to understand what forgetting is and what it means to be able to retrieve information when it's necessary and how to inhibit information when you don't need it.

Srini Rao

Mm.

Soenke Ahrens

chance that two or three things suddenly come in contact with each other and out of that some kind of insight is born. And then it certainly started with me trying to explain to myself why is it so fascinating to me, why does it work, how did he actually work with that.

Srini Rao

Yeah.

Soenke Ahrens

and then it became more. But what's interesting for me is in hindsight, how many parallels there are between the process of discovering the importance of the note-taking system and how it's at the same time an example of the very...

note-taking system itself and the parallels to the theory. And I think just describing it wouldn't really convince anyone. I think it becomes more convincing because you understand the principles and ideas behind it. And that's also what makes it fun, because it has...

Srini Rao

Yeah.

Srini Rao

Yeah.

Soenke Ahrens

this path of discovery that comes with it.

Srini Rao

Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Well, you know, it's funny because it's funny you say that because I was thinking about this. I was like, how the hell do we justify and explain this to people considering that it doesn't make a lot of sense until you see it and you put it into action yourself? But, you know, one of the things that you talk about is the importance of workflow. And you said, you know, this really struck me. So the workflow is one of the greatest predictors of academic success. And I thought that was so true for professional success as well. And then you want to say the challenge is to structure one's workflow in a way.

insight and new ideas become the driving forces that push us forward. We do not want to make ourselves dependent on a plan that is threatened by the unexpected like a new idea, discover insight. And I remember very distinctly that you say in the lecture that you gave that you know insight isn't something that you plan for so this linear you know sort of bottom top-down approach doesn't make any sense because insight is something that happens spontaneously. It took a while for me to really comprehend that. Can you expand on what you mean by that and then we'll get kind of into some of the

of this.

Soenke Ahrens

Yeah, sure. I'm actually not sure if I mentioned that in the book, but one of the authors that really helped me understanding the limitations of planning is a French scholar, a cynologist called Francois Julien, who wrote on the differences between Western thinking and...

traditional Chinese thinking. And he describes, what he's trying to do is not describing how Chinese thinking works, but using the detour of another old written philosophy tradition to...

gain some outside perspective on what we take for granted, and to distance ourselves a little bit from our way of thinking. And one of the key elements of Western thinking is this difference between planning and execution. And that made a lot of sense to me,

Soenke Ahrens

There is a lot you can achieve with planning and execution, but when it comes to insight or something where other people and chance plays a big role, planning can get you only so far. So he talks a lot about examples, for example, in war strategy.

where there's a lot of planning going on up until you encounter the enemy and then everything falls apart. Pedagogy is certainly similar, that you can do as much planning as you like, but when the first pupil says something very strangely, you have to react to that. And

Soenke Ahrens

that needs a different approach to planning. And...

Soenke Ahrens

What I find really strange is that all these manuals for students on how to write a thesis, how to write a book, follow this linear approach where you have to start with your goal, where you want to end up to. And then you start doing your research and then you start

reading and then you come to a conclusion and that

was very strange to me because I knew from experience, that might be because I never properly learned how to do research, that I started by amassing a lot of information in the area that was of interest to me up until the point something popped out as interesting. And as I was

doing a lot of research on how to gain insight, I realized that a lot of the empirical studies on how in the laboratory insight is generated very much resemble this intuitive process I followed by gathering a lot of information and then putting it somehow together and trying to figure out what's...

what the key issues are and letting in a way chance to help letting it fall into place. That this is much more adequate and you need to translate it into a workflow that allows you to build up some kind of critical mass of solid information. Something

Soenke Ahrens

that you believe is true. And you don't start necessarily with everything I believe is untrue and what I want to disprove, but let's start with what we think is really true. And then we get to the point maybe where we detect what's missing. And detecting what's missing requires

Srini Rao

Mm-hmm.

Soenke Ahrens

a lot of information because you don't see what's missing if you only have a hypothesis and little information. So trying to get to a full picture first and then reaching the boundaries of your understanding. I think that is...

Srini Rao

Yeah.

Soenke Ahrens

the approach I was trying to find a practical solution for. If that makes sense.

Srini Rao

Yeah, no, it absolutely does. You know, it's funny because I think, you know, to your point earlier, you know, for people listening to us, they might be thinking, well, what am I supposed to do with this? But tell me about Lumens productivity, and then we'll actually get into the system itself. Because like, like I said, the minute I read that, I was immediately intrigued. And I said, Okay, I have to know how to do this.

Soenke Ahrens

Sure. So I think one of the key elements is that you have a strong filter process and distinguish between different types of notes. So these kind of notes which are more a reminder of what you have in your head. And I think we all...

know these kind of notes, we drop them down quickly and after a few days, a few hours for me, I don't really understand anymore what I meant with that or it kind of loses the significance. So writing notes in a way that they can be understood by someone else or by yourself

in a year's time or a month's time requires obviously a little bit more effort because you have to give some context and ideally write it down in whole sentences. But as it requires more effort, you need to be very selective with what you write down permanently. And I think

This distinction between is it really worth writing it down deliberately is something we don't necessarily do if we don't have a place where to put it afterwards. Because if it gets lost, it's a whole lot of effort that's wasted. So it's very selective with what we write down.

Srini Rao

Thanks for watching!

Soenke Ahrens

deliberately and then putting it all in one place to build up a critical mass of ideas we spend some time thinking them through. And then it's all about

Soenke Ahrens

going through a bottom-up process of seeing which information can connect with another information, how can I categorize it, can I build some categories bottom-up. Instead of starting with a structure we fit everything into and that is probably what we usually

learn in school that we get a structure and then add information into that. So here it's the other way around. We collect everything in one place and then see what kind of categories make sense. And thinking about categories, thinking about how does information A and information B have in common.

triggers thinking. It kind of pushes us to think things through and Lumen use pen and paper and just edit new pieces of notes behind relevant notes where the new information can be connected to.

And that is, even when we work with digital tools, the same principle. When we add new information to the system, we first look, okay, where might that fit to? And by looking at what we have written before, we have to make decisions on how to connect it. So if I want to add the new piece of information to some existing one,

Srini Rao

Yeah.

Soenke Ahrens

I need to justify to myself, is this a contradiction to it? Is it in addition? Is it expanding on an idea? And ideally, I write the new note in dialogue with the existing one. So I continue. Yeah, sure.

Srini Rao

Yeah. Can I, can I stop you for a second on that? Yeah. So that, that's one of those things that I think is vitally important because I think when people first discover this concept of bi-directional links, because I remember the first formatted version I saw of a Zettelkasten note, you know, had the thing with related notes underneath. But to your point, I said, you know, you really, if you have bi-directional links, you should be using them to complete sentences. Like you should be writing sentences in a new note with, you know, like the titles of other notes. Is that what you mean by that?

Soenke Ahrens

Yes, yes, I think there is a trap in these tools. And a lot of the digital tools make it very easy to link between notes and to connect them. And it's fun to do. But if you don't think through the connection and make it explicit,

And like your suggestion, to not just put a link to another node, but to embed the link in a full sentence makes all the difference. Because instead of saying, well, there is something else that is somehow related to this, you justify it by explaining to yourself, well, but on the other note...

there is a contradicting information and that triggers the question, well, is the empirical data wrong or is that a different perspective? And now you have to really engage in the questions and it also produces a lot of questions. And I think that's kind of the beauty of this

forced elaboration that comes with it, that you constantly come up with new questions.

Srini Rao

Yeah, I mean, I noticed the amount. What I said was this was literally the key to never experiencing writer's block again, because I noticed this, you know, the first thing that didn't click for me was permanent notes. But when I started taking literature notes, I noticed I would come up with these just ideas and I would create a link to the note. And suddenly I would look through the database was like, wow, I have no shortage of things I could write about today.

Soenke Ahrens

Yeah. Yeah, I think when students are faced with their first papers or have to write a thesis, they often struggle, especially in the beginning, with finding good questions and what's a topic and they ask you to provide them with a topic they can write about. And I think

Soenke Ahrens

they have written their notes in a particular way, where one piece of information was just added without connecting it to something else, and that doesn't lead to any questions. But then you have an abundance of things to write about, and you have to make a decision on what's the most pressing question here, and what do I want to...

follow up on. And that's sometimes hard for me to deal with the abundance of possibilities because you constantly have to make decisions on what not to follow up on. It kind of makes the limitations of time and attention quite obvious.

Srini Rao

Alright.

Let's talk about tags in particular because this is something that I think really has been, you know, the bane of people's existence is they don't know how to find anything. And this is something you say that really struck me and it took me a while for this to click. You say the way that people choose their keywords shows clearly if they think like an archivist or a writer. Do they wonder where to store a note or how to retrieve it? The archivist asks which keyword is the most fitting? A writer asks in which circumstance do I want to stumble up on this note? Even if I forget about it, it's a crucial difference.

Keywords should always be assigned with an eye towards the topics you're working on or interested in never by looking at a note in isolation and What I realized when I thought I saw that I said, you know people it's like Oh do I tag my notes by topic and Tiago Forte wrote a fantastic article about this where he talks about Contextual tagging and I realized why that was so important because topics are infinite. There's just no end to it but

How, you know, when we think about tags in particular as an organizational mechanism in, you know, reference to what you say specifically that keywords, how do you think about this? Like, what is the right way to do this? So that things, you know, we are able to retrieve things.

Soenke Ahrens

Yeah, I think there is an abundance of tools that help you with storing information. The offline readers, Instapaper, Pocket, Readwise, etc. They all help you to get information into your system. You can add tags to...

somehow make it easier to find them again. But that doesn't really require cognitive effort. And the moment you have to connect it with existing knowledge or put it in the place you think you will need it, you suddenly feel the need to put

effort into it. And I think effort is a good indicator if you're doing it right or wrong. If it doesn't feel like you need effort, you probably do it wrong.

Srini Rao

Yeah, that was one of the first comments I got from a YouTube video I made about this. Somebody said, this seems like a lot of effort. And I said, yes, it is. But the payoff, the pay it is. I mean, but the funny thing is it's like, you know, compound interest. It when it finally pays off, it pays off big.

Soenke Ahrens

You're back.

Soenke Ahrens

Yeah, and you can look at it from the other side. And the other side is the perspective of the writer. So does my action now bring a publication closer to the finish line? And it does it when I add in my manuscript a new paragraph. It does it when I link.

Soenke Ahrens

from the notes I collect for a manuscript another note, which is meaningful and adds to the rough draft I'm outlining. But if I tag an article and collect it, read it, find it interesting, and do nothing else with it, it doesn't...

add anything to the project I'm supposed to work on. So I think it's very much an illusion of putting less effort into it, because you do put less effort into it, but you also put no effort into getting closer to the finish line. So if you spend a lot of time

collecting articles from the internet, tagging them, and none of that brings you closer to a finished manuscript or insight or whatever your goal is, then it's not more efficient, it's less efficient. And yeah, it's really about, okay, thinking.

How does what I read contribute to my understanding of something I decided deliberately to work on? And that helps you also to improve the filters you use to make a decision on what to read and what to dive into, etc.

Srini Rao

Mm-hmm.

Srini Rao

Yeah. Well, you know, I think for me, the other reason this had intrigued me so much was that, you know, I always jokingly said if I could take all the ideas from the books I've read and the people that I've interviewed on the show, I'd be a billionaire with six-pack abs and a harem of supermodels and I'm none of those things. So you know, but the real thing that intrigued me was I said, you know, I have this encyclopedia of just information in my head from a thousand interviews. How do I access it in a way that's useful? And what I started to see was that if I did.

you know, followed this process for the books I read. Not only did I get more from each book that I read, but it gave me tons of original ideas. And the workflow, I think, is one of those things that, like you say, people almost have to see it in action. It took me creating a course about this before it all connected. And when I got to the final module, I thought, wait a minute, I just wrote a 10,000 word article and laid the foundation for it in 10 minutes.

Soenke Ahrens

Right.

Srini Rao

So basically, let's just say somebody, you know, we'll wrap this up with like a very concrete example. So let's just say somebody is reading a book, maybe your book, you know, step by step. Can you walk us through what they should be doing versus what they've probably been doing?

Soenke Ahrens

Actually, I wouldn't start with reading. I know I started with reading in the book, but I am now noticed from feedback and also coaching a lot of people that I might have overemphasized the process of taking information into the system.

Srini Rao

Okay.

Srini Rao

Yeah.

Soenke Ahrens

bottom-up approach of building structure out of a critical mass, which is certainly the big difference to the usual way of taking notes. But equally important is to acknowledge that we never start from scratch. We always already have some kind of structure in our head.

Soenke Ahrens

your system in the beginning is to write down what are the topics you think about and you want to continue to work on and how would you structure that. So I have a page where I have an overview of everything I'm working on, thinking about, and that is a...

kind of skeleton where I can then add new pieces of information to. But it's not hardwired into the system, so it will evolve over time. I will drop topics, I will change questions, build subcategories, or get rid of them. But I think it's a really good idea to make...

of a brain dump and start with, okay, what do I already know? Because I'm not starting from scratch. And then when you decide to read a book or an article, you already have some kind of filter. And you can be more explicit about the filter. So a lot of things are interesting. Not everything is worth

writing down. But some of the things are relevant for a current project and some of the things you notice are really good to know and keep in mind even though you don't know yet for what kind of project that might be helpful. And then it's worth writing them down either in a literature note where you...

first start giving yourself an overview over everything that's interesting in the paper you're reading or you skip this step and already know, okay, that triggers an idea I want to write down in my permanent notes section and write an individual note with a backlink to the source where it comes from. So that's the ideal bit. That you...

Soenke Ahrens

get some insight, you already know how it helps you answering a question or bring something forward you're thinking about, write it down, put it in that place and then link back to the original source. But how many in between steps you need to get to the point that you know what you get out of it, it really depends on what you're reading.

Srini Rao

Thanks for watching!

Soenke Ahrens

And I think having a flexibility in reading is much more important than having a rigorous method or workflow you apply to all kinds of text. And that's, I think, a common mistake in the beginning because you naturally look for the right way of doing it. But to be honest, I sometimes read a book and it's fun. But

Srini Rao

Mm-hmm.

Soenke Ahrens

I don't take any notes because the only note I take is in the end. Okay, there was one interesting point and I don't make the effort of making a literature note and then extract it and then put it in permanent notes. I just write it directly where I need it. And sometimes I struggle to understand a text and need more than

Srini Rao

Yeah.

Srini Rao

Yeah.

Soenke Ahrens

one go. And then it's a good idea to start with the classic way of highlighting sentences and postpone writing things down. It doesn't mean you don't have to take notes because you have highlighted it, but it can be a good step in between. So when I'm new to a topic...

I sometimes need to read the whole bit to understand the relevance of the individual details and having post-its or highlights then help me to go back and be more ready to take notes on that. So being flexible depending on the source I think it shows skill.

Being too strict and rigorous is maybe helpful in the beginning, but...

It's not necessarily a good recommendation to treat every text the same.

Srini Rao

Yeah, absolutely. So this is this is just what I question out of morbid curiosity, because I was, you know, was talking to my dad last night, you know, we were I was having to letting him know that I was going to be interviewing you. And so I asked him about completing a PhD thesis. And, you know, when I mentioned Lumen, you know, completed a PhD in a year, he said, that's ludicrous, nobody can do that. But that's because he's a scientist. So I I'm curious is, you know, he works in a field where there's a lot of experimentation required. Is this viable in any field in

in terms of the speed at which you can produce.

Soenke Ahrens

I'm always a bit hesitant to talk about disciplines I don't know much about. So, Blumann as a sociologist was maybe ideally fitted for this system because his topic was society, so basically everything. So it's good to have a system that is open to...

absorb all kinds of information and then seeing for similar structures. But the feedback I receive for the book is often in the way of, well, you mention only non-fiction writers, but I'm a fiction writer and it works great for me. Why didn't you include that

Srini Rao

Thanks for watching!

Soenke Ahrens

People from medicine especially struggle a lot with information overload. And I think after all the big promises of AI and IBM didn't pan out the way, at least not until recently, they really look for a better system. And I hope to...

get people together from similar fields of research. And not only research to come up with individualized or to adapted versions of it. Because I think you need to adapt it a little bit to your own personal needs. And it's good to talk to people from your own field. But the basic principles are probably.

Srini Rao

Yeah.

Soenke Ahrens

the same. But you see differences. I think someone like Joe Chan, who's publishing a lot on how to implement the Cephalcustin properly, he works with a lot of empirical data. I think he has a slightly different approach than I have, who's more working with philosophical text and sociological texts.

So I'm hesitant to recommend it for everyone.

Srini Rao

I totally understand. I mean, like I said, that was one of those sort of, you know, morbid curiosity questions. I knew Nick, because I thought about that too. I thought, you know, like the, the key here, I think is to adapt it to your own workflow. Like that is one thing. And it took me a while to figure that out as well, because I realized, okay, I built this workflow based on the fact that I host a podcast and I read books and I write.

Soenke Ahrens

Yeah, I mean, probably that's the perfect application for it. I think people who are broadly curious, for those, it resonates the most. If you're in a very detailed, narrow field, you might need different tools. But the broader it is, I think, the better it works.

Srini Rao

Yeah.

Srini Rao

Wow. Well, this has been really eye opening and thought provoking. Where can people find out more about you, your work, and also learn more about using the Zettelcast? I mean, I have a course called Maximize Your Output, which people can learn about at MaximizerOutput.com that is largely based on these ideas. But where can they learn about you and everything else and then kind of see this in action?

Soenke Ahrens

Well, I'm preparing a course myself with basic principles and focusing on the basic principles and using Rome Research as a tool and Sotero as a literature tool and also Obsidian as an alternative to Rome Research. Hope to get it out this year. There is a new.. edition coming out of the book, Soonish. And I'm setting up my webpage, take smart notes.com. Also Soonish, but the best way to stay in contact is to either follow me on Twitter, or to get on the mailing list, which I use.very, very sporadically to announce something new.

Srini Rao

Excellent. And for everybody listening, we'll wrap the show with that.