Sönke Ahrens

If we instead focus on “retrieval strength,” we instantly start to think strategically about what kind of cues should trigger the retrieval of a memory.

Effortless Productivity

Luhmann's approach to work was characterized by ease and enjoyment rather than struggle and resistance. He believed in doing only what felt easy and natural, avoiding tasks that caused friction. Ahrens emphasizes that 'even hard work can be fun as long as it is aligned with our intrinsic goals and we feel in control.' By creating a flexible and supportive work environment, Luhmann maintained a steady flow of ideas and insights.

The Importance of Externalizing Thoughts

Writing is not just a means of recording ideas but a crucial part of the thinking process itself. Ahrens argues that externalizing thoughts through writing helps in understanding, remembering, and developing ideas. 'Thinking takes place as much on paper as in your own head,' Ahrens asserts. By consistently writing down thoughts and organizing them in the slip-box, one can build a rich repository of knowledge that fuels future creativity and productivity.

Simplifying the Workflow

Ahrens emphasizes the importance of simplicity in academic writing and note-taking. He advocates for a streamlined approach using a slip-box system, which he describes as a 'crucial element in an overarching workflow that is stripped of everything that could distract from what is important.' This system helps in maintaining focus on the main task—thinking—by providing an external scaffold for storing and organizing information.

The Role of Feedback Loops in Learning and Writing

Ahrens highlights the importance of feedback loops in both learning and writing. Seeking timely and concrete feedback is crucial for improvement and growth. Practices such as reading with a pen in hand, rewriting ideas in one's own words, and regularly reviewing and connecting notes help identify and correct misunderstandings, refine ideas, and enhance one's ability to express thoughts clearly. 'Feedback loops are not only crucial for the dynamics of motivation, but also the key element to any learning process,' Ahrens explains.

The Illusion of Learning

Many students fall into the trap of believing they are learning by simply rereading and underlining texts. Ahrens advocates for deliberate practice, which involves actively engaging with the material, testing oneself, and confronting gaps in knowledge. 'The one who does the work does the learning,' Ahrens quotes Doyle (2008). By taking smart notes and combining them with other ideas, learners can create a rich, interconnected web of knowledge.

Create a Slip-Box System

Start by setting up a slip-box with two components: one for bibliographical notes and another for your own ideas. Write each idea on a separate card and link related notes to build a network of interconnected thoughts.

Write Regularly and Thoughtfully

Make it a habit to write down your thoughts, ideas, and insights regularly. Use full sentences and clear references to ensure that your notes are understandable and useful for future reference.

Embrace Flexibility in Your Work

Focus on tasks that feel easy and enjoyable, and avoid forcing yourself to do things that cause resistance. Create a flexible work environment that allows you to adjust and adapt as needed, maintaining control and motivation.

Engage in Deliberate Practice

Instead of passive rereading, actively test yourself on the material. This could involve summarizing what you’ve read in your own words, creating flashcards, or teaching the content to someone else. The goal is to challenge your understanding and identify gaps in your knowledge.

Use Elaboration Techniques

When reading, think deeply about the content. Ask yourself how it relates to other topics you know, how it can be applied in different contexts, and what questions it raises. Write down these thoughts and connections to reinforce your understanding.

Implement an External System

Adopt a system like the slip-box to organize and store your notes. This allows you to keep detailed information and references in an accessible format, freeing your brain to focus on understanding and creativity. Regularly review and connect your notes to build a rich, interconnected web of knowledge.

Break Down Tasks

Instead of viewing writing as a single, overwhelming task, break it down into smaller, manageable tasks. For example, aim to write three notes or review one paragraph each day. This makes the process more achievable and allows for regular progress checks.

Writing is not what follows research, learning, or studying; it is the medium of all this work.

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.

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

Good, productive writing is based on good note-taking.

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.

Multitasking is not what we think it is. It is not focusing attention on more than one thing at a time. Nobody can do that.

It is not only impossible to focus on more than one thing at a time, but also to have a different kind of attention on more than one thing at a time.

A lack of structure makes it much more challenging to stay focused for extended periods of time.

The moment we stop making plans is the moment we start to learn.

Experts rely on embodied experience, which enables them to reach the state of virtuosity.

The slip-box provides an external scaffold to think in and helps with those tasks our brains are not very good at, most of all objective storage of information.

The slip-box is the shipping container of the academic world. Instead of having different storage for different ideas, everything goes into the same slip-box and is standardized into the same format.

If you change your mind about the importance of writing, you will also change your mind about everything else.

The slip-box takes care of details and references and is a long-term memory resource that keeps information objectively unaltered.

Writing, taking notes and thinking about how ideas connect is exactly the kind of elaboration that is needed to learn.

The best way to deal with complexity is to keep things as simple as possible and to follow a few basic principles.

Writing that aims at insight must therefore be organised in a much more open manner.

Only if you can trust your system, only if you really know that everything will be taken care of, will your brain let go and let you focus on the task at hand.

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.

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.

Thinking, reading, learning, understanding and generating ideas is the main work of everyone who studies, does research or writes.

Good tools do not add features and more options to what we already have, but help to reduce distractions from the main work, which here is thinking.

For students, the need for writing mainly appears in the form of examination. By writing, students demonstrate what they have learned, show their ability to think critically and ability to develop ideas.

Studying, done properly, is research, because it is about gaining insight that cannot be anticipated and will be shared within the scientific community under public scrutiny.

Making something public always means to write it down so it can be read. There is no such thing as a history of unwritten ideas.

Deliberate practice is the only serious way of becoming better at what we are doing.

Every intellectual endeavour starts from an already existing preconception, which then can be transformed during further inquires and can serve as a starting point for following endeavours.

The seemingly pragmatic and down-to-earth-sounding advice – to decide what to write about before you start writing – is therefore either misleading or banal.

While those who multitasked felt more productive, their productivity actually decreased – a lot. Not only the quantity but also the quality of their accomplishments lagged significantly behind that of the control group.

Multitasking is not what we think it is. It is not focusing attention on more than one thing at a time. Nobody can do that. When we think we multitask, what we really do is shift our attention quickly between two (or more) things.

Writing a paper involves much more than just typing on the keyboard. It also means reading, understanding, reflecting, getting ideas, making connections, distinguishing terms, finding the right words, structuring, organizing, editing, correcting and rewriting.

The key to creativity is being able to switch between a wide-open, playful mind and a narrow analytical frame.

Experts, on the other hand, have internalised the necessary knowledge so they don’t have to actively remember rules or think consciously about their choices. They have acquired enough experience in various situations to be able to rely on their intuition to know what to do in which kind of situation.

Once we make a meaningful connection to an idea or fact, it is difficult not to remember it when we think about what it is connected with.

Zeigarnik successfully reproduced what is now known as the Zeigarnik effect: Open tasks tend to occupy our short-term memory – until they are done.

By writing something down, we literally get it out of our heads.

The smartest way to deal with this kind of limitation is to cheat. Instead of forcing ourselves to do something we don’t feel like doing, we need to find a way to make us feel like doing what moves our project further along.

If one were to attempt to identify a single problematic aspect of human reasoning that deserves attention above all others, the confirmation bias would have to be among the candidates for consideration.

The ability to think beyond the given frames of a text (Lonka 2003, 155f). Experienced academic readers usually read a text with questions in mind and try to relate it to other possible approaches, while inexperienced readers tend to adopt the question of a text and the frames of the argument and take it as a given.

The brain alone is too eager to make us feel good – even if it is by politely ignoring inconsistencies in our thinking. Only in the written form can an argument be looked at with a certain distance – literally.

The brain, as Kahneman writes, is “a machine for jumping to conclusions”(Kahneman, 2013, 79). And a machine that is designed for jumping to conclusions is not the kind of machine you want to rely on when it comes to facts and rationality – at least, you would want to counterbalance it.

What does help for true, useful learning is to connect a piece of information to as many meaningful contexts as possible, which is what we do when we connect our notes in the slip-box with other notes.

Mistaking learning with cramming is still very much ingrained in our educational culture.

The challenge of writing as well as learning is therefore not so much to learn, but to understand, as we will already have learned what we understand.

If you focus your time and energy on understanding, you cannot help but learn. But if you focus your time and energy on learning without trying to understand, you will not only not understand, but also probably not learn.

The search for meaningful connections is a crucial part of the thinking process towards the finished manuscript. Instead of figuratively searching our internal memory, we literally go through the file-box and look for connections.

Working with the slip-box is disillusioning, but at the same time it increases the chance that we actually move forward in our thinking towards uncharted territory, instead of just feeling like we are moving forward.

By learning, retaining, and building on the retained basics, we are creating a rich web of associated information. The more we know, the more information (hooks) we have to connect new information to, the easier we can form long-term memories.

Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn’t really do it, they just saw something.

Comparing, differentiating and connecting notes are the basis of good academic writing, but playing and tinkering with ideas is what leads to insight and exceptional texts.

The real enemy of independent thinking is not an external authority, but our own inertia.

The ability to generate new ideas has more to do with breaking with old habits of thinking than with coming up with as many ideas as possible.

The biggest threat to creativity and scientific progress is therefore the opposite: a lack of structure and restrictions.

Without structure, we cannot differentiate, compare or experiment with ideas. Without restrictions, we would never be forced to make the decision on what is worth pursuing and what is not.

Indifference is the worst environment for insight. And the slip-box is, above all, a tool for enforcing distinctions, decisions and making differences visible.

It is so much easier to see what worked than to predict what might work. We don’t need to worry about the question of what to write about because we have answered the question already – many times on a daily basis.

A visibly developed cluster attracts more ideas and provides more possible connections, which in return influence our choices on what to read and think further.

The ability to change the direction of our work opportunistically is a form of control that is completely different from the attempt to control the circumstances by clinging to a plan.

The ability to keep control over our work and change course if necessary is made possible by the fact that the big task of “writing a text” is broken down into small, concrete tasks.

The most important step is to get started. Rituals help, too. But the biggest difference lies in the task you are facing to start with.

The goal here is to get into the habit of fetching pen and paper whenever we read something, to write down the most important and interesting aspects.

The slip-box does not put the learner in the centre. Quite the contrary: It allows the learner to let his or her own thinking become decentralised within a network of other ideas.

The slip-box is as simple as it gets. Read with a pen in your hand, take smart notes and make connections between them. Ideas will come by themselves and your writing will develop from there.

The Power of the Slip-Box System

The slip-box, or Zettelkasten, is a revolutionary note-taking system that was the cornerstone of Niklas Luhmann's extraordinary productivity. By writing each idea on a separate index card and linking related notes, Luhmann created a dynamic and flexible network of knowledge. This method enabled him to produce 58 books and hundreds of articles. Ahrens notes, 'Luhmann was able to focus on the important things right in front of him, pick up quickly where he left off and stay in control of the process because the structure of his work allowed him to do this.'

The Non-Linear Approach to Writing

Ahrens emphasizes the importance of breaking down the daunting task of writing a paper into smaller, manageable tasks. He argues against the traditional linear model of writing and advocates for a more flexible approach where stages overlap and interact. 'Disassembling the big challenge of 'writing a paper' into small, manageable tasks helps to set realistic goals that can be checked on a regular basis,' Ahrens states. This method allows for continuous feedback and adjustment, making the writing process more realistic and less stressful.

If we instead focus on “retrieval strength,” we instantly start to think strategically about what kind of cues should trigger the retrieval of a memory.

Writing is not what follows research, learning, or studying; it is the medium of all this work.

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.

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

Good, productive writing is based on good note-taking.

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.

Multitasking is not what we think it is. It is not focusing attention on more than one thing at a time. Nobody can do that.

It is not only impossible to focus on more than one thing at a time, but also to have a different kind of attention on more than one thing at a time.

A lack of structure makes it much more challenging to stay focused for extended periods of time.

The moment we stop making plans is the moment we start to learn.

Experts rely on embodied experience, which enables them to reach the state of virtuosity.

The slip-box provides an external scaffold to think in and helps with those tasks our brains are not very good at, most of all objective storage of information.

The slip-box is the shipping container of the academic world. Instead of having different storage for different ideas, everything goes into the same slip-box and is standardized into the same format.

If you change your mind about the importance of writing, you will also change your mind about everything else.

The slip-box takes care of details and references and is a long-term memory resource that keeps information objectively unaltered.

Writing, taking notes and thinking about how ideas connect is exactly the kind of elaboration that is needed to learn.

The best way to deal with complexity is to keep things as simple as possible and to follow a few basic principles.

Writing that aims at insight must therefore be organised in a much more open manner.

Only if you can trust your system, only if you really know that everything will be taken care of, will your brain let go and let you focus on the task at hand.

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.

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.

Thinking, reading, learning, understanding and generating ideas is the main work of everyone who studies, does research or writes.

Good tools do not add features and more options to what we already have, but help to reduce distractions from the main work, which here is thinking.

For students, the need for writing mainly appears in the form of examination. By writing, students demonstrate what they have learned, show their ability to think critically and ability to develop ideas.

Studying, done properly, is research, because it is about gaining insight that cannot be anticipated and will be shared within the scientific community under public scrutiny.

Making something public always means to write it down so it can be read. There is no such thing as a history of unwritten ideas.

Deliberate practice is the only serious way of becoming better at what we are doing.

Every intellectual endeavour starts from an already existing preconception, which then can be transformed during further inquires and can serve as a starting point for following endeavours.

The seemingly pragmatic and down-to-earth-sounding advice – to decide what to write about before you start writing – is therefore either misleading or banal.

While those who multitasked felt more productive, their productivity actually decreased – a lot. Not only the quantity but also the quality of their accomplishments lagged significantly behind that of the control group.

Multitasking is not what we think it is. It is not focusing attention on more than one thing at a time. Nobody can do that. When we think we multitask, what we really do is shift our attention quickly between two (or more) things.

Writing a paper involves much more than just typing on the keyboard. It also means reading, understanding, reflecting, getting ideas, making connections, distinguishing terms, finding the right words, structuring, organizing, editing, correcting and rewriting.

The key to creativity is being able to switch between a wide-open, playful mind and a narrow analytical frame.

Experts, on the other hand, have internalised the necessary knowledge so they don’t have to actively remember rules or think consciously about their choices. They have acquired enough experience in various situations to be able to rely on their intuition to know what to do in which kind of situation.

Once we make a meaningful connection to an idea or fact, it is difficult not to remember it when we think about what it is connected with.

Zeigarnik successfully reproduced what is now known as the Zeigarnik effect: Open tasks tend to occupy our short-term memory – until they are done.

By writing something down, we literally get it out of our heads.

The smartest way to deal with this kind of limitation is to cheat. Instead of forcing ourselves to do something we don’t feel like doing, we need to find a way to make us feel like doing what moves our project further along.

If one were to attempt to identify a single problematic aspect of human reasoning that deserves attention above all others, the confirmation bias would have to be among the candidates for consideration.

The ability to think beyond the given frames of a text (Lonka 2003, 155f). Experienced academic readers usually read a text with questions in mind and try to relate it to other possible approaches, while inexperienced readers tend to adopt the question of a text and the frames of the argument and take it as a given.

The brain alone is too eager to make us feel good – even if it is by politely ignoring inconsistencies in our thinking. Only in the written form can an argument be looked at with a certain distance – literally.

The brain, as Kahneman writes, is “a machine for jumping to conclusions”(Kahneman, 2013, 79). And a machine that is designed for jumping to conclusions is not the kind of machine you want to rely on when it comes to facts and rationality – at least, you would want to counterbalance it.

What does help for true, useful learning is to connect a piece of information to as many meaningful contexts as possible, which is what we do when we connect our notes in the slip-box with other notes.

Mistaking learning with cramming is still very much ingrained in our educational culture.

The challenge of writing as well as learning is therefore not so much to learn, but to understand, as we will already have learned what we understand.

If you focus your time and energy on understanding, you cannot help but learn. But if you focus your time and energy on learning without trying to understand, you will not only not understand, but also probably not learn.

The search for meaningful connections is a crucial part of the thinking process towards the finished manuscript. Instead of figuratively searching our internal memory, we literally go through the file-box and look for connections.

Working with the slip-box is disillusioning, but at the same time it increases the chance that we actually move forward in our thinking towards uncharted territory, instead of just feeling like we are moving forward.

By learning, retaining, and building on the retained basics, we are creating a rich web of associated information. The more we know, the more information (hooks) we have to connect new information to, the easier we can form long-term memories.

Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn’t really do it, they just saw something.

Comparing, differentiating and connecting notes are the basis of good academic writing, but playing and tinkering with ideas is what leads to insight and exceptional texts.

The real enemy of independent thinking is not an external authority, but our own inertia.

The ability to generate new ideas has more to do with breaking with old habits of thinking than with coming up with as many ideas as possible.

The biggest threat to creativity and scientific progress is therefore the opposite: a lack of structure and restrictions.

Without structure, we cannot differentiate, compare or experiment with ideas. Without restrictions, we would never be forced to make the decision on what is worth pursuing and what is not.

Indifference is the worst environment for insight. And the slip-box is, above all, a tool for enforcing distinctions, decisions and making differences visible.

It is so much easier to see what worked than to predict what might work. We don’t need to worry about the question of what to write about because we have answered the question already – many times on a daily basis.

A visibly developed cluster attracts more ideas and provides more possible connections, which in return influence our choices on what to read and think further.

The ability to change the direction of our work opportunistically is a form of control that is completely different from the attempt to control the circumstances by clinging to a plan.

The ability to keep control over our work and change course if necessary is made possible by the fact that the big task of “writing a text” is broken down into small, concrete tasks.

The most important step is to get started. Rituals help, too. But the biggest difference lies in the task you are facing to start with.

The goal here is to get into the habit of fetching pen and paper whenever we read something, to write down the most important and interesting aspects.

The slip-box does not put the learner in the centre. Quite the contrary: It allows the learner to let his or her own thinking become decentralised within a network of other ideas.

The slip-box is as simple as it gets. Read with a pen in your hand, take smart notes and make connections between them. Ideas will come by themselves and your writing will develop from there.