You always procrastinate when writing, maybe because your workflow is not right.

The difference between good students and poor students is whether they will be satisfied with the "slight taste" of problem exploration

Benefits of card notes

Overall view and modularization: Although the GDT principle cannot be directly copied into academic writing, the [holistic view] it embodies is consistent with the Luman Card notes method. We must not only divide the writing into independent blocks, but also connect them to each other and switch between blocks. P32

Its Practice: Its inventor, Nicklas Luman, grew from a civil servant to a professor of sociology with this notation method, and published nearly 60 academic works, including a sensational book: The Social The society of society, 1997.

Choose the right tool and use it correctly: Many people don’t believe that Luman’s achievement of such a high academic achievement is easy and the process is self-pleasant, but practice has proved that we only need to adjust the workflow to make ourselves academically Maintain a sense of control, maintain flexibility, maintain openness of thoughts, and consistency of work and motivation during the creation process, so that you can maintain interest and create easily. Feeling pain, perhaps because there is too much resistance in the work process. P35-36

The revolutionary nature of simple things: like the conveyor belt invented by Henry Ford

Two types of card boxes

Principle of use:

Using card box notes makes writing fun without consuming too much willpower.

All you need to do is search for notes in the note box and organize the already formed arguments and arguments. P40

Obviously, now writing doesn’t start with a blank piece of paper, every step of it is within your ability and is simple and straightforward. P41

Thinking, reading, understanding and proposing ideas are the key to taking notes

1. Take notes on flashes and put them in a "collecting box"

2. Take notes on your literature as long as you read something. It should be very brief, record it in your own language, and try to concentrate citations. Save it uniformly in the document management system.

3. Take permanent notes. P42

4. Add the newly written permanent notes to the card box. The principle of addition is:

5. Develop topics, issues, and research topics from the bottom up from within the system. Look at where the note chain has been formed in the card box and where the idea group has been established. P43

6. After a period of time, you will accumulate enough ideas to determine a topic.

7. Turn your ideas into a first draft.

8. Edit and proofread your manuscript.

An example: Pens that can be used in space: The United States has developed one, while Russia chose to use pencils. P46

The core concept of Luman card box notes: focus on writing and don’t complicate simple things.

Academic writing should avoid unnecessary interference as much as possible. Non-systematic reading skills will cause you to encounter many obstacles when you want to establish a link between old and new ideas, and everything else is redundant except for a dedicated brain and a reliable note-taking system.

a. Writing tools, used to write and draw, remember flash notes,

b. Literature management tools, such as Zotero, Citavi, are used to collect literature and write and scratch during reading. See take smart note website

c. The key is to support two-way links between notes. For example, Obsidian, Roam Research, etc.

d. Editing tools, such as word. P49

The format of sharing is not limited to publication in journals. Reviewing, handing over homework to teachers, group discussions, etc. are all a kind of sharing. “The moment the author can leave the scene, this written document becomes a public opinion on the truth. P52”

Writing is important, and does not mean spending all your time on [writing]. The work links before [writing] are more important, such as reading, listening to lectures, giving speeches, etc. P52

An example: Malcolm McLean invents sea shipping containers

Usually, when taking notes, students often adopt a multi-point flowering approach. The original notes are scattered in various places, and they rely entirely on the brain to remember the notes and store them.

When classifying notes, the logic that is often used is [Which topic was born from the notes], rather than [Which topic should you use the notes under]

Standardize all notes formats, like containers.

Classify notes according to [How to use].

Fleeting Notes

Permanent Notes

Project Notes Project Notes, only related to a specific project.

Don't mix different categories of notes in the same folder. P56

During the process of taking project notes, be sure to distinguish between project notes and permanent notes. Notes that are not related to the main project are classified into permanent notes and do not discard them directly.

Don’t put all the materials in flash notes, as this will bring you a heavy burden on daily life.

The threshold should be low enough

To quickly convert to permanent or project notes within 1-2 days. If the comments underlined and written in the sentence during reading are not processed in time, they will soon become meaningless because they forget [Why did I do this].

Be brief, cautious and meticulous, and do not be isolated as much as possible.

Document notes and permanent notes can be recorded in parallel. Document card boxes are mainly used to record basic information of documents. Permanent notes are further considerations for document notes.

"Permanent notes are texts that contain actual thoughts or opinions in written form" P58

Expressions include: comments in the manuscript, collection of literature related to the project; outlines, draft fragments, memos, to-do items, drafts.

Most note-taking software supports creating separate project pages, and they do not interfere with each other with permanent notes.

The author recommends creating a folder for the entity for each project.

The corresponding theory is the [hermeneutic cycle] theory P60 proposed by Hans George Gadamer.

Instead, we should make work behavior itself a positive incentive to move the entire task forward.

The first step to growing is to constantly seek feedback rather than avoid feedback. Only in this way can “growth thinking” be formed (P64).

On the other hand, countless small feedback loops will help you avoid missing the opportunity to correct big mistakes, thus avoiding the situation from entering an irreversible situation.

Permanent notes will also help us test whether the ideas and opinions contained in old and new notes are inconsistent, thereby replacing the brain to help us sort out the connections between thoughts; the more connections, the more conducive it is to understand new information. P66

Nowadays, our attention is facing more and more distractions, and it is not easy to improve attention.

Using multiple things in one's mind will make us exhausted and thus reduce work efficiency.

[Exposure Effect]: Confusing familiarity and skill improvement (Bornstein, 1989), may actually be a low-level multiple repetition.

【Flow Status】: (Csikszentmihalyi, 1975)

Card box notes improve our attention through structured workflows.

We cannot write and review at the same time, and the behavioral logic of the two is contrary. All ideas should be put on paper first, and then jump out of the article and play the role of a critic.

Writing outline: First determine the first version and scroll through the correction during the writing process.

Integration and development ideas: Continuously adjust the connection points between the note clusters to find the most suitable angle.

【Concentrated Attention】 and 【Floating Attention】 P74

[Creativity] Two abilities required: open and lively thinking, and traditional analytical framework, which requires flexible switching between the two.

No matter how much instruction manual you read, you can't practice it yourself.

[Expert] has internalized the necessary knowledge and accumulated enough practical experience to be able to rely on intuition to deal with complex situations.

The card box notes are guided by writing. By taking three kinds of notes, it continuously provides you with enough opportunities for deliberate practice, allowing you to intuitively judge the growth of your writing skills.

Our attention and short-term memory capacity are scarce resources. Up to 5-9 things can be saved in the brain at the same time (Miller, 1956)

[Zeignik Effect]: Unfinished tasks often occupy our short-term memory until they are completed.

And we can deceive the brain by writing down an unfinished task. The task has been completed. This is how card notation works.

The second step is to make sure that we always write down the results of our thinking without keeping it in mind and being unable to trace it back.

The third scarce resource of the brain: driving force or willpower. Therefore, decision making should be reduced to retain resources.

Always be ready to output the input information for point of view.

When taking notes, you should not copy the original text, but should constantly practice using your own words to accurately convey the original text you see and convert it into your own discourse system.

Document notes should be as concise as possible, and ultimately serve permanent notes.

Because we will fall into [cognitive bias] unconsciously.

How to use external systems to discover our psychological limitations? ——

Through practice, we can continuously enrich our [ideology tools] and form a more general and universal classification method, thereby deepening our thought depth.

As for card notes and academic writing, the difficulty of reading academic articles is the need to fully mobilize long-term memory and the correlation between memory points, and at the same time, it is necessary to filter out the most important and relevant information, and at the same time, it is necessary to jump out of the single article itself. Thinking: What is the difference between the author's explanation and the one who needs to exclude?

The ability to identify patterns, question the framework used, and discover differences between different works is a prerequisite for thinking critically and examining the views behind a text or conversation. Being able to reframe problems, judgments, and information is even more important than having extensive knowledge, without which we cannot use knowledge in practice. P91

Permanent notes are equivalent to giving yourself a brief written speech. We must assume that people who know nothing about this can also understand this note, because you will be in this state of ignorance soon.

Furthermore, written notes can force us to complete those logical loopholes in verbal expression.

Third, it can effectively and promptly avoid the repeated [exposure effect] in life, that is, after a message appears in front of you many times, the brain mistakenly thinks it really understands and remembers it. Continuously remind your brain in time that you are not that smart.

单纯的重复阅读没有任何意义。 The correct way to do this should be to constantly ask questions to yourself, set obstacles, and take the initiative to think during the reading process.

Decompose a grand writing task into a simple and easy task like writing a few ideas for each article.

Taking card notes means constantly talking to the notes already in the card box during the writing process.

This form of dialogue meets the needs of complex thinking. First, there is sufficient supporting materials, second, language fixed, and third, objectivity, thus avoiding the absolute subjectivity of the brain and psychological experience.

One thing you must think about when writing card notes is why what I wrote can arouse my interest?

How to deal with document notes?

Is the brain that does not rely on external memory tools really worth pursuing?

Are you afraid of forgetting?

So how should memory resources be used?

1. After adding to existing notes first, build a note-taking bridge.

2. With the help of modern software, links between multiple notes,

3. Create an index.

The purpose of creating an index is to create an entrance to find notes.

Summary of a topic or sub-topic and realize the use of notes to think.

When there is enough content under a topic, the notes under this topic should be reviewed and the notes should be taken.

The most commonly used link is the link between ordinary notes and notes.

The role of comparative notes: 1) Discuss and analyzes the differences between different scholars/perspectives/data for the same issue. 2) Discover contradictions, paradoxes or oppositions. Including the information and the thoughts. 3) Update the perspective.

Q: What is the "toolbox of thinking"?

[Steve Jobs: "Creativity just connects things." P121]

All good ideas and creativity must go through a long process of thinking and preparation.

Creativity requires intuition, and intuition is the manifestation of knowledge and experience in the human brain.

The internal mechanism of the contribution of card notes when forming academic articles: stripping the idea from the original context, abstracting it first, and then concretizing it.

External mechanism: Provides an appropriate operating system for us to abstract and visualize our ideas.

Excerpt: ["Generating new ideas requires breaking through old thinking habits, rather than coming up with as many ideas as possible." P125】

Function/principle: Fight against laziness and think independently.

1) Concise: The amount of information in each note should not exceed one screen on the computer or mobile phone.

2) Standardization: Take notes according to the standard structure to liberate the brain's memory space

Criticism of brainstorming: Easy-to-access ideas do not equal quality ideas.

Writing "Evolution": The reason why our work can be continuously promoted is not based on prior planning, but trial and error in the process.

Characteristics of good questions: both relevant and interesting, not too easy to answer, and potentially solved with existing materials, or at least not beyond our capabilities.

Benefits: See the limitations and shortcomings of existing ideas, and stay open to new ideas

Research believes that there are two sources of learning motivation: clarifying the meaning of learning; and connecting personal goals.

Operation method: Continuously ask yourself about the fun points in your work; expand your research interests and follow the flow;

Divide large writing tasks into small goals, so as to facilitate appropriate adjustment of direction

The more we can control our work, the less we need to force ourselves to complete it, so that we can be motivated.

Excerpt: Research believes that the motivationality of choice for people is significantly affected by individual judgment on the value of tasks. The more individuals think that the task is valuable, the more independent choice can motivate people to move forward. (Moller, 2006) P137

1. It must be structured and flexible. The outline of the article will keep changing, so it is just a reference.

2. Open multiple projects at the same time, so that the by-products on one production line become raw materials on another production line, so as to exert the maximum power of card notes. Learn to leverage your strength. P137

1. When [Plan] only focuses on the results and not the process, it fails.

2. Only those instant, repeated feedback can be helpful for personal growth.

Excerpts: Parkinson's Law, (Parkinson, 1957), P140

Drafts are just drafts: you must have the courage to delete redundant content; or transfer the redundant parts to other documents.