How To Take Notes 🌱

Plus my review and summary of How to Take Smart Notes — by Soenke Ahrens

Hey there! Last week we had our book club review of How to Take Smart Notes, by Sönke Ahrens.

This is no ordinary book for me — in fact, it is probably on the podium of the ones that had the most profound impact on my life and work.

Now, for a book to have a strong impact on you, I believe two things are necessary: 1) it has to be a great book, and 2) it has to come in your life at the right time. You can (kinda) filter for the first one, but the second is largely out of your control.

In other words, you have to be lucky.

So, the first time I read HTTSN I was thinking of starting a newsletter. It was summer 2020, and I was getting fascinated by the whole personal knowledge management space, building a second brain, and all kinds of folks who took a real effort at organizing their digital life and knowledge.

How to Take Smart Notes took a lot of the disconnected, messy ideas that I had, wove them together into a convincing framework, and directed it all towards a specific purpose: writing.

So, part of my excitement about starting Refactoring was the promise that writing regularly would bring clarity to my thinking and help create a long-term manifestation of my knowledge through notes and articles.

Fast forward ~5 years, I have to admit this happened exactly as the book said.

I haven’t thought about this often, and it came as a full realization while I was reading the book for the second time. By now, I have written ~260 articles and collected 600+ evergreen notes (or permanent notes, as the book calls them), which feels surreal to say out loud. Moreover, I actually use these notes everyday: to do more writing, brainstorming with myself, social media, and (lol) trying to clone myself with AI.

By and large, the book was right, and Refactoring is a convincing evidence of it.

To be fair, though, to achieve this I built my own systems and tweaked them for years — sometimes in accordance with the book’s preaching, sometimes not. To this day, I am fond of the book’s main principles, but I also disagree with some of their implementation.

All in all, as you may imagine, I have strong opinions about pretty much all-things-note-taking.

So with this article I will try something odd: I will review and summarize the book, but also provide my own take on note-taking, updated for 2025 and everything that goes with it — techniques, AI, and tools.

• 🗃️ The Zettelkasten — how everything began.

• 🧠 Writing is thinking — the key mindset shift.

• 🍱 Breaking down work — how writing and taking notes is surprisingly similar to software engineering.

• 🌱 Sustainable note-taking — my own (lightweight) system for storing and organizing long-term knowledge.

• 🤖 How AI helps — or not? How to think at AI convenience vs long-term mental wellbeing.

Let’s dive in!