Smart Notes

• 25 Dec 2023
• reading,
• thinking

I'm re-reading Sönke Ahrens's How to Take Smart Notes in preparation for my spring grad seminar, a second go at "Peculiar Genres of Academic Writing." It hardly needs to be said that Ahrens is super opinionated in his take on the beauty of the #Zettelkasten, and his approach is one that I've never managed to make work. Or at least not yet. I think I'm figuring out a modified version of the method (of course using #Obsidian) that I'm going to commit myself to for the semester, and see where it leads me. At first glance, it works with two key goals that I'm holding for the year ahead:

1. Read way more, and think way more about what you read, without committing to a next Big Writing Project until that project announces its inescapability.

2. Write and publish more, but in the small, self-hosted chunks that #Hometown and #blogging make possible. See where those small chunks might lead.

Sending you all wishes for whatever will most feed your creativity in #2024.

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