## 6 Simplicity Is Paramount We tend to think that big transformations have to start with an equally big idea. But more often than not, it is the simplicity of an idea that makes it so powerful (and often overlooked in the beginning). Boxes, for example, are simple. Malcom McLean, the owner of a trucking company and a former trucker himself, regularly got stuck in traffic on the crowded coastal highways. When he came up with an idea to circumvent the congested roads, it was a simple one. He had no clue that it would tip the world in a new direction. He did not foresee that his simple idea would reshape the political landscape, let some nations rise to the top and other fall behind, make century-old professions redundant, give birth to new industries, and would barely leave a single person on earth unaffected by it. I am speaking, of course, of the shipping container, which is basically just a box. When McLean converted the tanker Ideal X to be able to carry 58 containers and set it to sail on 26 April 1956, it was just because it made more sense to ship parts of a lorry than the whole lorry itself, which in itself made more sense than to have them stand in traffic for days. He certainly did not aim to turn world trade upside down and pave the way for Asia to become the next big economic power. He just didn’t want to get stuck in traffic anymore. It wasn’t just that nobody foresaw the impact of something as simple as this box. Most ship owners had in fact considered the idea of putting different kinds of products into the same sized boxes as fairly abstruse. Experienced stevedores were able to use the storage room on a ship optimally by arranging and fitting the goods, and every good came in its optimal package. Why replace it with an obviously less optimal solution? And speaking of suboptimal, why would anyone want to try to fit square boxes into a round-shaped ship body anyway? Ship owners also didn’t have many customers who wanted to ship exactly the amount that fit into a container. That either left customers unhappy or containers half empty or filled with goods from different customers, which meant that you had to unpack and rearrange the containers to untangle different orders in every single harbour. That did not sound very efficient to the ears of experienced shippers. And then you had the problem with the boxes themselves. Once unloaded and sent off on trucks, you had to find a way to get them back. McLean lost hundreds of containers this way. It was a logistical nightmare. And by the way: McLean wasn’t the only one who had the idea to use containers on ships. Many others tried it, too, and almost all gave up on the idea soon after – not because they were too stubborn to accept a great idea, but because they lost too much money on it (Levinson, 2006, 45f). The idea was simple, but it wasn’t easy to put it efficiently into practice. In hindsight, we know why they failed: The ship owners tried to integrate the container into their usual way of working without changing the infrastructure and their routines. They tried to benefit from the obvious simplicity of loading containers onto ships without letting go of what they were used to. In the beginning, the perception was very much shaped by what worked before, and only the most immediate effects were visible. The ship owners looked at the bags and crates of goods and wondered why they should pack them a second time into another box. They were glad when they unloaded their goods at the harbour and they were eager to move on. They wondered why they should go container-hunting instead. They looked at the ships they had and wondered how to fit containers into them. McLean understood better than others that it is not the perspective of the ship-owners that counts, but the purpose of the whole trade: to bring goods from the producer to the final destination. Only after aligning every single part of the delivery chain, from packaging to delivery, from the design of the ships to the design of the harbours, was the full potential of the container unleashed. When the advantages became obvious, second-order effects came into play and went into a self-reinforcing positive feedback loop. The more harbours were able to handle containers, the more container ships were needed to be built, which made shipping cheaper, which increased the range of goods worth shipping, which created more traffic, which made bigger container ships economical, which created more demand for infrastructure and so on. It wasn’t just another way of shipping goods. It was a whole new way of doing business. Many students and academic writers think like the early ship owners when it comes to note-taking. They handle their ideas and findings in the way it makes immediate sense: If they read an interesting sentence, they underline it. If they have a comment to make, they write it into the margins. If they have an idea, they write it into their notebook, and if an article seems important enough, they make the effort and write an excerpt. Working like this will leave you with a lot of different notes in many different places. Writing, then, means to rely heavily on your brain to remember where and when these notes were written down. A text must then be conceptualised independently from these notes, which explains why so many resort to *brainstorming* to arrange the resources afterwards according to this preconceived idea. In this textual infrastructure, this so-often-taught workflow, it indeed does not make much sense to rewrite these notes and put them into a box, only to take them out again later when a certain quote or reference is needed during writing and thinking. In the old system, the question is: Under which topic do I store this note? In the new system, the question is: In which context will I want to stumble upon it again? Most students sort their material by topic or even by seminars and semester. From the perspective of someone who writes, that makes as much sense as sorting your errands by purchase date and the store they were bought from. Can’t find your trousers? Maybe they are with the bleach you bought the same day at your department store. 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 standardised into the same format. Instead of focusing on the in-between steps and trying to make a science out of underlining systems, reading techniques or excerpt writing, everything is streamlined towards one thing only: insight that can be published. The biggest advantage compared to a top-down storage system organised by topics is that the slip-box becomes more and more valuable the more it grows, instead of getting messy and confusing. If you sort by topic, you are faced with the dilemma of either adding more and more notes to one topic, which makes them increasingly hard to find, or adding more and more topics and subtopics to it, which only shifts the mess to another level. The first system is designed to find things you deliberately search for, putting all the responsibility on your brain. The slip-box is designed to present you with ideas you have already forgotten, allowing your brain to focus on thinking instead of remembering. Even though the slip-box, being organised bottom-up, does not face the trade-off problem between too many or too few topics, it too can lose its value when notes are added to it indiscriminately. It can only play out its strengths when we aim for a *critical mass*, which depends not only on the number of notes, but also their quality and the way they are handled. To achieve a critical mass, it is crucial to distinguish clearly between three types of notes: 1\. *Fleeting notes*, which are only reminders of information, can be written in any kind of way and will end up in the trash within a day or two. 2\. *Permanent notes*, which will *never* be thrown away and contain the necessary information in themselves in a permanently understandable way. They are always stored in the same way in the same place, either in the reference system or, written as if for print, in the slip-box. 3\. *Project notes*, which are only relevant to one particular project. They are kept within a project-specific folder and can be discarded or archived after the project is finished. Only if the notes of these three categories are kept separated it will be possible to build a *critical* mass of ideas within the slip-box. One of the major reasons for not getting much writing or publishing done lies in the confusion of these categories. A typical mistake is made by many diligent students who are adhering to the advice to keep a scientific journal. A friend of mine does not let any idea, interesting finding or quote he stumbles upon dwindle away and writes everything down. He always carries a notebook with him and often makes a few quick notes during a conversation. The advantage is obvious: No idea ever gets lost. The disadvantages are serious, though: As he treats every note as if it belongs to the “permanent” category, the notes will never build up a critical mass. The collection of good ideas is diluted to insignificance by all the other notes, which are only relevant for a specific project or actually not that good on second sight. On top of that, the strict chronological order does not offer any help to find, combine or rearrange ideas in a productive sense. It is not surprising that my friend has a bookshelf filled with notebooks full of wonderful ideas, but not a single publication to show. The second typical mistake is to collect notes only related to specific projects. On first sight, it makes much more sense. You decide on what you are going to write about and then collect everything that helps you to do that. The disadvantage is that you have to start all over after each project and cut off all other promising lines of thought. That means that everything you found, thought or encountered during the time of a project will be lost. If you try to mitigate the effect by opening a new folder for every potential new project whenever you stumble upon something that might be interesting for that, you will soon end up with an overwhelming amount of unfinished projects. If that in itself does not become a drag on your motivation, the task of keeping track of them will. But most importantly, without a permanent reservoir of ideas, you will not be able to develop any major ideas over a longer period of time because you are restricting yourself either to the length of a single project or the capacity of your memory. Exceptional ideas need much more than that. The third typical mistake is, of course, to treat all notes as fleeting ones. You can easily spot this approach by the mess that comes with it, or rather by the cycle of slowly growing piles of material followed by the impulse for major clean-ps. Just collecting unprocessed fleeting notes inevitably leads to chaos. Even small amounts of unclear and unrelated notes lingering around your desk will soon induce the wish of starting from scratch. What all these category-confusing approaches have in common is that the benefit of note-taking decreases with the number of notes you keep. More notes will make it more difficult to retrieve the right ones and bring related ones together in a playful way. But it should be just the opposite: The more you learn and collect, the more beneficial your notes should become, the more ideas can mingle and give birth to new ones – and the easier it should be to write an intelligent text with less effort. It is important to reflect on the purpose of these different types of notes. Fleeting notes are there for capturing ideas quickly while you are busy doing something else. When you are in a conversation, listing to a lecture, hear something noteworthy or an idea pops into your mind while you are running errands, a quick note is the best you can do without interrupting what you are in the middle of doing. That might even apply to reading, if you want to focus on a text without interrupting your reading flow. Then you might want to just underline sentences or write short comments in the margins. It is important to understand, though, that underlining sentences or writing comments in the margins are also just fleeting notes and do nothing to elaborate on a text. They will very soon become completely useless – unless you do something with them. If you already know that you will not go back to them, don’t take these kind of notes in the first place. Take proper notes instead. Fleeting notes are only useful if you review them within a day or so and turn them into proper notes you can use later. Fleeting literature notes can make sense if you need an extra step to understand or grasp an idea, but they will not help you in the later stages of the writing process, as no underlined sentence will ever present itself when you need it in the development of an argument. These kinds of notes are just reminders of a thought, which you haven’t had the time to elaborate on yet. Permanent notes, on the other hand, are written in a way that can still be understood even when you have forgotten the context they are taken from. Most ideas will not stand the test of time, while others might become the seed for a major project. Unfortunately, they are not easy to distinguish right away. That is why the threshold to write an idea down has to be as low as possible, but it is equally crucial to elaborate on them within a day or two. A good indication that a note has been left unprocessed too long is when you no longer understand what you meant or it appears banal. In the first case, you forgot what it was supposed to remind you of. In the second case, you forgot the context that gave it its meaning. The only permanently stored notes are the literature notes in the reference system and the main notes in the slip-box. The former can be very brief as the context is clearly the text they refer to. The latter need be written with more care and details as they need to be self-explanatory. Luhmann never underlined sentences in the text he read or wrote comments in the margins. All he did was take brief notes about the ideas that caught his attention in a text on a separate piece of paper: “I make a note with the bibliographic details. On the backside I would write ‘on page x is this, on page y is that,’ and then it goes into the bibliographic slip-box where I collect everything I read.” (Hagen, 1997)[\[13\]](part0000_split_023.html#_ftn13) But before he stored them away, he would read what he noted down during the day, think about its relevance for his own lines of thought and write about it, filling his main slip-box with permanent notes. Nothing in this box would ever get thrown away. Some notes might disappear into the background and never catch his attention again, while others might become connection points to various lines of reasoning and reappear on a regular basis in various contexts. As it is not possible to foresee the development of the slip-box, the fate of the notes is nothing to worry about. In contrast to the fleeting notes, every permanent note for the slip-box is elaborated enough to have the potential to become part of or inspire a final written piece, but that can not be decided on up front as their relevance depends on future thinking and developments. The notes are no longer reminders of thoughts or ideas, but contain the actual thought or idea in written form. This is a crucial difference. It is the standardised format that enables the notes to build up a critical mass in one place. It is also the key to facilitating the thinking and writing process by removing all unnecessary complications or decisions that come with a variety of different formats and storage places. Only because every note is in the same format at the same place can they later be combined and assembled into something new and no thought is ever wasted on the question of where to put or label it. The last type of note, the ones that are related to only one specific project, are kept together with other project-related notes in a project-specific folder. It doesn’t matter in which format these notes are as they are going to end up in the bin after the project is finished anyway (or in an archive – the bin for the indecisive). Project-related notes can be: · comments in the manuscript · collections of project-related literature · outlines · snippets of drafts · reminders · to-do lists · and of course the draft itself. The Zettelkasten has the built-in function of project-specific desktops. Here, you can not only structure your thoughts and conceptualise the chapters of your draft, but also collect and sort the notes for this specific project without fear that they will water down or interfere with the slip-box itself. You can even change the notes according to your project without affecting the notes in the slip-box. The same applies to the reference system. In Zotero, you can collect literature in project-specific folders without taking them out of the reference system itself. All this keeps the permanent notes from the project-related notes clearly separated and allows you to experiment and tinker with them as much as you like within the boundaries of each project without interfering with the actual slip-box. I suggest keeping a physical binder for each project to keep all the handwritten notes and printouts separate from the rest and combined in one place. When you close the folder for your current project in the evening and nothing is left on your desk other than pen and paper, you know that you have achieved a clear separation between fleeting, permanent and project-related notes.