Author: Sönke Ahrens

The consummate academic personality of mine urged me to pick this up. As someone who constantly reads books and immerses himself in journal articles, I always feel like I’m missing something in the end.

I read, good ideas trigger in my brain, a few stick and I’m disappointed I can’t remember the rest. I’m always going back to books to mine those ideas again.

This book is more than just a note taking technique–it’s an entire learning system.

It will take discipline to put it in place (I’m still working on it) and I want to revisit in a year to see how I’m doing. However, Ahrens fills the gap on why so much learning is lost or forgotten.

The section on the mere-exposure effect and doing the hard work of making connections is priceless. It was a concept explained to me years ago, but this gives the idea practical execution.

While this book revolves around building a Zettelkasten (German word for slip-box or card index) in a paper or digital form, it’s the ancillary information that brings it all together.

From a personal standpoint, this was exactly what I needed.