## 11 Take Smart Notes The educational psychologist Kirsti Lonka compared the reading approach of unusually successful doctoral candidates and students with those who were much less successful. One difference stood out as critical: 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. What good readers can do is spot the limitations of a particular approach and see what is *not* mentioned in the text. Even more problematic than staying within the given frame of a text or an argument is the inability to interpret particular information in the text within the bigger frame or argument of the text. Even doctoral students sometimes just collect de-contextualised quotes from a text – probably the worst possible approach to research imaginable. This makes it almost impossible to understand the actual meaning of information. Without understanding information within its context, it is also impossible to go beyond it, to reframe it and to think about what it could mean for another question. Jerome Bruner, a psychologist Lonka refers to, goes a step further and says that scientific thinking is plainly impossible if we can’t manage to think beyond a given context and we only focus on the information as it is given to us (Bruner, 1973, quoted after ibid.) It is not surprising, therefore, that Lonka recommends what Luhmann recommends: Writing brief accounts on the main ideas of a text instead of collecting quotes. And she also stresses that it is no less important to do something with these ideas – to think hard about how they connect with other ideas from different contexts and could inform questions that are not already the questions of the author of the respective text. This is exactly what we do when we take the next step, in which we write and add permanent notes to the slip-box. We don’t just play with ideas in our heads, but do something with them in a very concrete way: We think about what they mean for other lines of thoughts, then we write this explicitly on paper and connect them literally with the other notes. ### <a class="pcalibre pcalibre1" id="_Toc475013818"> 11.1 </a> Make a Career One Note at a Time The first time one faces the challenge of writing a long text, say a dissertation, it is pretty normal to feel intimidated by the prospective of filling a few hundred pages with well-conceived ideas, source-based research and correct references on every page. If you don’t feel some kind of respect for this task, there is something wrong with you. On the other hand, most people feel that writing a page a day (and having a day a week off) is quite manageable, not realising that this would mean finishing a doctoral thesis within a year – something that does not happen very often in reality. The technique of writing a certain amount every day was perfected by Anthony Trollope, one of the most popular and productive authors of the 19thcentury: He would start every morning at 5:30 a.m. with a cup of coffee and a clock in front of him. Then he would write at least 250 words every 15 minutes. This, he writes in his autobiography: “allowed me to produce over ten pages of an ordinary novel volume a day, and if kept up through ten months, would have given as its results three novels of three volumes each in the year” (Trollope, 2008, 272). And that, mind you, was *before*breakfast. Academic or nonfiction texts are not written like this because in addition to the writing, there is the reading, the research, the thinking and the tinkering with ideas. And they almost always take significantly more time than expected: If you ask academic or nonfiction writers, students or professors how much time they expect it would take them to finish a text, they systematically underestimate the time they need – even when they are asked to estimate the time under the worst-case scenario and if the real conditions turned out to be quite favourable (Kahneman 2013, 245ff). On top of that: half of all doctoral theses will stay unfinished *forever* (Lonka, 2003, 113). Academic and nonfiction writing is not as predictable as a Trollope novel and the work it involves certainly can’t be broken down to something like “one page a day.” It does make sense to break down the work into manageable and measurable steps, but pages per day don’t work that well as a unit when you also have to read, do research and think. But even though academic and nonfiction writing involve more of other types of work than fiction writing, Luhmann managed to beat Trollope in productivity if you count his articles as well as his books. Luhmann wrote 58 books and hundreds of articles, while Trollope wrote 47 novels plus 16 other books. Granted, it might have something to do with the fact that Luhmann did some work after breakfast as well. But the main reason is the slip-box, which compares to Trollope’s technique as investing with compounded interest compares to a piggy-bank. Trollope is like a diligent saver who puts a little sum to the side every day, which adds up over time toward something impressive. Three dollars put aside each day (say, one takeout coffee) add up over the year to a small vacation ($1,000) and over a working life to a deposit on a flat as a permanent holiday retreat.[\[31\]](part0000_split_023.html#_ftn31) Putting notes into the slip-box, however, is like investing and reaping the rewards of compounded interest (which would in this example almost pay for the whole flat).[\[32\]](part0000_split_023.html#_ftn32) And likewise, the sum of the slip-box content is worth much more than the sum of the notes. More notes mean more possible connections, more ideas, more synergy between different projects and therefore a much higher degree of productivity. Luhmann’s slip-box contains about 90,000 notes, which sounds like an incredibly large number. But it only means that he wrote six notes a day from the day he started to work with his slip-box until he died. If you, by any chance, don’t have the ambition to compete with him in terms of books per year, you could settle for three notes a day and still build up a significant critical mass of ideas in a very reasonable time. And you could settle for less than one book every twelve months. In contrast to manuscript pages per day, a certain number of notes a day is a reasonable goal for academic writing. And that is because taking a note and sorting it into the slip-box can be done in one go, while writing a manuscript page could involve weeks and months of preparation involving other tasks as well. You could therefore measure your daily productivity by the number of notes written. ### <a class="pcalibre pcalibre1" id="_Toc475013819"> 11.2 </a> Think Outside the Brain Taking literature notes is a form of deliberate practice as it gives us feedback on our understanding or lack of it, while the effort to put into our own words the gist of something is at the same time the best approach to understanding what we read. Taking permanent notes of our own thoughts is a form of self-testing as well: do they still make sense in writing? Are we even able to get the thought on paper? Do we have the references, facts and supporting sources at hand? And at the same time, writing it is the best way to get our thoughts in order. Writing here, too, is not copying, but translating (from one context and from one medium into another). No written piece is ever a copy of a thought in our mind. When we take permanent notes, it is much more a form of thinking within the medium of writing and in dialogue with the already existing notes within the slip-box than a protocol of preconceived ideas. Any thought of a certain complexity requires writing. Coherent arguments require the language to be fixed, and only if something is written down is it fixed enough to be discussed independently from the author. 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. We need this distance to think *about* an argument – otherwise the argument itself would occupy the very mental resources we need for scrutinizing it. As we write notes with an eye towards existing notes, we take more into account than the information that is already available in our internal memory. That is extremely important, because the internal memory retrieves information not in a rational or logical way, but according to psycho-logical rules. The brain also doesn’t store information neurally and objectively. We reinvent and rewrite our memory every time we try to retrieve information. The brain works with rules of thumb and makes things look as if they fit, even if they don’t. It remembers events that never happened, connects unrelated episodes to convincing narratives and completes incomplete images. It cannot help but see patterns and meaning everywhere, even in the most random things (cf. Byrne, 2008). 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. Luhmann states as clearly as possible: it is not possible to think systematically without writing (Luhmann 1992, 53). Most people still think about thinking as a purely internal process, and believe that the only function of the pen is to put finished thoughts on paper. Richard Feynman once had a visitor in his office, a historian who wanted to interview him. When he spotted Feynman’s notebooks, he said how delighted he was to see such “wonderful records of Feynman’s thinking.” “No, no!” Feynman protested. “They aren’t a record of my thinking process. They are my thinking process. I actually did the work on the paper.” “Well,” the historian said, “the work was done in your head, but the record of it is still here.” “No, it’s not a record, not really. It’s working. You have to work on paper, and this is the paper.”[\[33\]](part0000_split_023.html#_ftn33) This, obviously, was a very important distinction to Feynman, much more than just a linguistic difference – and for a good reason: It is the distinction that makes all the difference when it comes to thinking. Philosophers, neuroscientists, educators and psychologists like to disagree in many different aspects on how the brain works. But they no longer disagree when it comes to the need for external scaffolding. Almost all agree nowadays that real thinking requires some kind of externalization, especially in the form of writing. “Notes on paper, or on a computer screen \[...\] do not make contemporary physics or other kinds of intellectual endeavour easier, they make it possible” is one of the key takeaways in a contemporary handbook of neuroscientists (Levy 2011, 290) Concluding the discussions in this book, Levy writes: “In any case, no matter how internal processes are implemented, insofar as thinkers are genuinely concerned with what enables human beings to perform the spectacular intellectual feats exhibited in science and other areas of systematic enquiry, as well as in the arts, they need to understand the extent to which the mind is reliant upon external scaffolding.” (Ibid.) In our system, the scaffolding is done explicitly by connecting the thoughts within the external memory of the slip-box. Luhmann writes: “Somehow one has to mark differences, keep track of distinctions, either explicitly or implicitly in concepts,” because only if the connections are somehow fixed externally can they function as models or theories to give meaning and continuity for further thinking (Luhmann, 1992, 53). A common way to embed an idea into the context of the slip-box is by writing out the reasons of its importance for your own lines of thought. For example, I recently read the book “Scarcity: Why Having Too Little Means So Much” (2013) by Mullainathan and Shafir. They investigate how the experience of scarcity has cognitive effects and causes changes in decision-making processes. They help the reader understand why people with almost no time or money sometimes do things that don’t seem to make any sense to outside observers. People facing deadlines sometimes switch frantically between all kinds of tasks. People with little money sometimes spend it on seeming luxuries like take-away food. From the outside, it would make more sense to do one thing at a time, or buy food in bulk and cook for yourself. The book is interesting, because the authors don’t question this behavior rhetorically or even in a judgemental way, but investigate it as a universal human phenomenon. I took some literature notes collecting reasons how and why humans act so very differently when they experience scarcity. This was step one, done with an eye towards the argument of the book. I had questions in mind like: Is this convincing? What methods do they use? Which of the references are familiar? But the first question I asked myself when it came to writing the first permanent note for the slip-box was: What does this all mean for my own research and the questions I think about in my slip-box? This is just another way of asking: Why did the aspects I wrote down catch my interest? If I were a psychologist, this book would interest me for completely different reasons than if I were a politician or a debt adviser, or if I had bought it out of personal interest. As someone with a sociological perspective on political questions and an interest in the project of a theory of society, my first note reads plainly: “Any comprehensive analysis of social inequality must include the cognitive effects of scarcity. Cf. Mullainathan and Shafir 2013.” This immediately triggers further questions, which I can discuss on following notes, starting with: “Why?” Now, I already have two notes in my slip-box, based on the literature notes I took while reading the book, but written along the lines of my own thinking. One note states the relevance of the book for my own thinking and one explains my idea in more detail. Here I could draw from my literature notes as a source of valuable facts and insight. Even though the answers to the question of why scarcity is relevant to the study of social inequality are all in the book, they are not just there to be copied. They need to be made explicit. That means to *think* about how the insight into cognitive effects of scarcity affects the analysis of social inequality. While I am writing these notes, it becomes obvious that the answer to the question “why” has already triggered more follow-up questions, like: Isn’t this already discussed in theories of social inequality? If yes: Who discussed it? If not: Why not? And where do I turn to, to find answers to these questions? Correct: The first choice for further inquiry is the slip-box. Maybe there is already something on social inequality that helps me to answer these questions, or at least an indication of where to look. By skimming through the slip-box, I might discover that these ideas could also be helpful for another topic I haven’t thought about. One example is the question of personal responsibility, which is discussed on the example of obesity and the influence of hormones as a sub-topic to a philosophical discussion on free will. None of it needs to be discussed right away, especially as most of these ideas would require more research and reading. But there is also no reason not to write down these possible connections and come back to them later, if my research points me back to them. The more notes the slip-box contains, the more interesting and prolific this step will become and the more research questions will be triggered. Just by writing down these questions and making possible connections explicit in writing are the concepts and theories being investigated. Their limitations become as visible as their particular angle on a problem. By explicitly writing down how something connects or leads to something else, we force ourselves to clarify and distinguish ideas from each other. ### <a class="pcalibre pcalibre1" id="_Toc475013820"> 11.3 </a> Learn by not Trying “Selection is the very keel on which our mental ship is built. And in this case of memory its utility is obvious. If we remembered everything, we should on most occasions be as ill off as if we remembered nothing. It would take as long for us to recall a space of time as it took the original time to elapse, and we should never get ahead with our thinking.” (William James 1890, 680). We have seen in the first step that *elaboration* through taking smart literature notes increases the likelihood that we will remember what we read in the long term. But this was only the first step. Transferring these ideas into the network of our own thoughts, our latticework of theories, concepts and mental models in the slip-box brings our thinking to the next level. Now we elaborate these ideas within different contexts and connect them with other ideas in a durable fashion. The literature notes are going to be archived, which means the ideas would be lost in the reference system if we didn’t *do* something with them. That is why we transfer them into our external memory, the slip-box, with which we have an ongoing dialogue and where they can become part of our active set of ideas. Transferring ideas into the external memory also allows us to forget them. And even though it sounds paradoxical, forgetting actually facilitates long-term learning. It is important to understand why, because there are still many students who shy away from using an external memory. They fear that they would have to choose between remembering things in their heads (which wouldn’t require an external memory) or in the external memory (which then would be forgotten in the internal memory). That this is a false choice becomes obvious as soon as we understand how our memory truly works. To be able to remember everything and not having to resort to any external memory sounds great initially. But you might think differently if you are familiar with the story of a man who was really able to remember almost everything. The reporter Solomon Shereshevsky (Lurija 1987) is one of the most famous figures in the history of psychology. When his supervisor saw that he didn’t take any notes during their meetings, he first doubted Shereshevsky’s dedication to the job, but shortly after, it was rather his own sanity that he doubted. When he confronted Shereshevsky with what seemed to him like lazy behaviour, Shereshevsky started to recount every single word that was spoken during the meeting and continued to recount verbatim all the meetings they had ever had. His colleagues were astonished, but the person most astonished was Shereshevsky himself. It was the first time he realised that everyone else seemed to have forgotten almost everything. Even those who had taken notes couldn’t remember even a fraction of what seemed normal for him. Aleksandr Romanovich Luria, the psychologist who subsequently tested him in all conceivable ways, couldn’t find any of the usual restrictions people normally have in their memories. But it also became clear that this advantage came at a huge cost: It wasn’t just that Shereshevsky was able to remember so much, he had trouble forgetting anything. The important things got lost under a pile of irrelevant details that involuntarily came to his mind. Although he was very good at remembering facts, Shereshevsky was almost incapable of getting the gist of something, the concepts behind the particulars and distinguishing the relevant facts from minor details. He had great trouble relating to literature or poetry. He could repeat a novel word by word, but the greater meaning would be lost on him. While *Romeo and Juliet* is for most of us a story of love and tragedy, for him it would be the story of “Two households, both alike in dignity, In fair Verona where we lay our scene, From ancient grudge break to new mutiny, Where civil blood makes civil hands unclean...” It should be obvious that for academic thinking and writing, the gift of being able to remember everything is a serious liability. The science of learning is still undecided on the question of whether we all share Shereshevsky’s ability to memorise virtually everything we ever have encountered, but are only better at suppressing it. After all, sometimes we suddenly remember scenes from the past in great detail, triggered by a cue like the scent of a madeleine in Proust’s recherche. These moments of involuntary memory might be like small cracks in the mental barrier through which we can catch a glimpse of all the memories we have collected over our lifetimes, but might never again have access to. Forgetting, then, would not be the loss of a memory, but the erection of a mental barrier between the conscious mind and our long-term memory. Psychologists call this mechanism active inhibition (cf. MacLeod, 2007). It is easy to understand what it is good for: Without a very thorough filter, our brains would constantly be flooded by memories, making it impossible to focus on anything in our surroundings. That is what Shereshevsky struggled with in his life: There were moment where he tried to buy an ice cream, but some random word of the vendor triggered such an enormous amount of associations and memories that he would have to leave the shop, so overwhelming was this experience. We are very dependent on a subconscious mechanism that reliably inhibits almost every memory every moment except the very, very few that are truly helpful in a situation. Unfortunately, we cannot just consciously pluck from our memory what we need like from a folder in an archive. That would require the memory we can choose from to be already in our conscious mind, which would render the mechanism of remembering redundant. Remembering is the very mechanism to bring a memory back into our conscious mind. Therefore, Shereshevsky might not have had an ability most of us do not posses, but *lacked* an ability we all posses: The ability to forget systematically – to inhibit most irrelevant information from being remembered. Shereshevsky was still capable of inhibiting information, but even being much less fine-tuned can have serious consequences. Being too often overwhelmed by memories, associations and synesthetic experiences made it difficult for him to stay in a job and enjoy many of the things we highly value. Above all, it made it almost impossible for him to think in abstract terms. Robert and Elizabeth Ligon Bjork from the University of California suggest distinguishing between two different measurements when it comes to memory: Storage strength and retrieval strength (Bjork 2011). They speculate that storage strength, the ability to store memories, only becomes greater over one’s lifetime. We add more and more information to our long-term memory. Just by looking at the physical capacity of our brains, we can see that we could indeed probably store a lifetime and a bit of detailed experiences in it (Carey 2014, 42). It is difficult, if not impossible, to verify this claim, but it does make sense to shift the attention from storage strength to retrieval strength. Learning would be not so much about saving information, like on a hard disk, but about building connections and bridges between pieces of information to circumvent the inhibition mechanism in the right moment. It is about making sure that the right “cues” trigger the right memory, about how we can think strategically to remember the most useful information when we need it. This is far from self-evident. If we look at the current state of education, especially the learning strategies most students employ, we see that the vast majority of all learning still aims to improve “storage strength,” even though it cannot be improved. It is still mostly about remembering isolated facts and not so much about building connections. This is what learning psychologists have rightfully given the derogative term “cramming:” the attempt to reinforce and solidify information in the brain by repetition. It is basically hammering facts into the brain as if they were carvings on an ancient stone tablet. Using fancy words and describing it as a “strengthening of the connections between neurons” does not change the fact that this attempt is futile. 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. There are no natural cues: Every piece of information can become the trigger for another piece of information. These can be associations like the scent of a sweet, as the madeleine triggered childhood memories for Proust, but this kind of flashback is called “involuntary memory” for a reason: we can’t retrieve it on purpose. Then there are the accidental cues that become attached to information when we learn something in a particular environment. It is, for example, easier to remember something we have learned in school if we are tested for it in the same room with the same noise in the background (Bjork 2011, 14). Likewise, sometimes it is difficult to remember something from school when we are not sitting in the classroom where we learned it. Obviously, we don’t want to have to rely on cues in the environment. This is not only impractical, but highly misleading: If we test ourselves repeatedly in the same context and environment in which we have learned something, it would make us overconfident in terms of learning success, because we would not be able to discount the environmental cues that probably won’t exist in the context in which we want to remember what we learned. 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. Making these connections deliberately means building up a self-supporting network of interconnected ideas and facts that work reciprocally as cues for each other. Mistaking learning with cramming is still very much ingrained in our educational culture. When Hermann Ebbinghaus, the godfather of learning theory, tried to understand the basics of learning and measuring learning progress, he deliberately used meaningless bits of information like random letter combinations and made sure they bore no accidental meaning. From his understanding, meaning would distract from the actual learning process. But he didn’t realise that he was stripping the learning process from the very thing that *is* learning, which is making meaningful connections. From the standpoint of evolution, it makes sense that our brains have a built-in preference to learn meaningful information and a disregard for meaningless letter combinations. But Ebbinghaus laid the foundation for a long-lasting and influential tradition of learning theories that separates understanding from learning. Our fascination with memory artists can also be explained by this tradition. There is nothing interesting about the capability of a normal person to remember thousands of words, countless facts, numerous subjects, the names of celebrities, friends, family members and colleagues over a long period of time. But when someone is able to remember a series of twenty or thirty seemingly meaningless bits of information almost instantly, it fascinates us and reminds us of our struggles at school. The trick, of course, is not to learn like Ebbinghaus thought we would learn: by banging the information into our heads. Memory artists instead attach meaning to information and connect it to already known networks of connections in a meaningful way. One piece of information can become the cue for another and strings or networks of cues can be built. Those kinds of memory techniques are great in case you need to learn information that bears no meaning in itself or has no logical or meaningful connection to other things you already know. But why would you want to learn something like that – except when you happen to be a memory artist? Memory techniques are the fix for a rather artificial situation. When it comes to academic writing, we don't have the need for this trick, as we can choose to build and think exclusively within meaningful contexts. Abstract information like bibliographic references can be stored externally – there is no benefit in knowing them by heart. Everything else better bear meaning. 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. The problem is that the meaning of something is not always obvious and needs to be explored. That is why we need to elaborate on it. But elaboration is nothing more than connecting information to other information in a *meaningful*way. The first step of elaboration is to think enough about a piece of information so we are able to write about it. The second step is to think about what it means for other contexts as well. This is not so different from when elaboration is recommended as a “learning method.” As a method, it has been proven to be more successful than any other approach (McDaniel and Donnelly 1996). This is not a new insight, either. After looking at various studies from the 1960s until the early 1980s, Barry S. Stein et al. summarises: “The results of several recent studies support the hypothesis that retention is facilitated by acquisition conditions that prompt people to elaborate information in a way that increases the distinctiveness of their memory representations.” (Stein et al. 1984, 522) Stein et al. illustrate how commonsensical this is on the example of a biology novice who learns the difference between veins and arteries: “\[he\] may find it difficult at first to understand and remember that arteries have thick walls, are elastic, and do not have valves, whereas veins are less elastic, have thinner walls, and have valves” (ibid.). But by elaborating a little bit on this difference and asking the right questions, like “why?” the students can connect this knowledge with prior knowledge, like their understanding of pressure and the function of the heart. Just by making the connection to the common knowledge that the heart presses the blood into the arteries, they immediately know that these walls need to sustain more pressure, which means they need to be thicker than veins, in which the blood flows back to the heart with less pressure. And, of course, this makes valves necessary to keep the blood from flowing back. Once understood, the attributes and differences are almost impossible to disentangle from the knowledge of veins and arteries. Learned right, which means understanding, which means connecting in a meaningful way to previous knowledge, information almost cannot be forgotten anymore and will be reliably retrieved if triggered by the right cues. Moreover, this new learned knowledge can provide more possible connections for new information. 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. And the effects are cumulative. There is a reason why the best scientists are also often very good teachers. For someone like Richard Feynman, everything was about understanding, regardless of whether he was doing research or teaching. His famous Feynman diagrams are primarily tools to make understanding easier and his lectures are famous because they help students to really understand physics. It is not surprising, therefore, that he was passionate about challenging traditional education methods. He couldn’t stand textbooks full of pseudo-explanations (Feynman 1985) and teachers who tried to make learning easier for students by using artificial “real-life” examples instead of using their actual prior understanding as a connection point (Feynman 1963). Writing notes and sorting them into the slip-box is nothing other than an attempt to understand the wider meaning of something. The slip-box forces us to ask numerous elaborating questions: What does it mean? How does it connect to … ? What is the difference between … ? What is it similar to? That the slip-box is not sorted by topics is the precondition for actively building connections between notes. Connections can be made between heterogeneous notes – as long as the connection makes sense. This is the best antidote to the impeding way most information is given to us in our learning institutions. Most often, it comes in modular form, sorted by topic, separated by disciplines and generally isolated from other information. The slip-box is forcing us to do the exact opposite: To elaborate, to understand, to connect and therefore to learn seriously. The fact that too much order can impede learning has become more and more known (Carey 2014). Conversely, we know that the deliberate creation of variations and contrasts can facilitate learning. Nate Kornell and Bjork showed this when they experimentally taught students different art styles. First, they used the traditional approach of showing students one art style at a time using different paintings. Then, they deliberately mixed up the styles and shuffled the paintings around. The students who were presented paintings from different styles in no particular order learned to distinguish styles faster and were also much more successful at matching paintings to styles and artists they had never seen before. This shows that elaborating on the differences and similarities of notes instead of sorting them by topic not only facilitates learning, but facilitates the ability to categorise and create sensible classifications! ### <a class="pcalibre pcalibre1" id="_Toc475013821"> 11.4 </a> Adding Permanent Notes to the Slip-Box The next step after writing the permanent notes is to add them to the slip-box. 1\. Add a note to the slip-box either behind the note you directly refer to or, if you do not follow up on a specific note, just behind the last note in the slip-box. Number it consecutively. The Zettelkasten numbers the notes automatically. “New note” will just add a note with a new number. If you click “New note sequence,” the new note will be registered at the same time as the note that follows the note currently active on the screen. But you can always add notes “behind” other notes anytime later. Each note can follow multiple other notes and therefore be part of different note sequences. 2\. Add links to other notes or links on other notes to your new note. 3\. Make sure it can be found from the index; add an entry in the index if necessary or refer to it from a note that is connected to the index. 4\. Build a Latticework of Mental Models