In How to Take Smart Notes, Ahrens provides an 8-step process for using smart notes (or the Zettelkasten method) to produce a paper (or other piece of writing, the book is just geared towards academia).
4 kinds of notes are involved:
- Fleeting notes: the lowest-commitment artifact, these should cause no distraction and serve just to capture the thoughts in your head. Importantly, they should be captured into a designated inbox and processed later into a permanent note (see Systems for thinking must be comprehensive and reliable)
- Literature notes: also a low-commitment artifact, these are notes about the content of a piece of media (I suppose this is a kind of literature note). They are intended to be short and should also include bibliographic details to serve as a reference. They will also be processed into permanent notes, but unlike fleeting notes they will also be kept in a reference system.
- Permanent notes: These are what you’ll make out of your fleeting and literature notes. Rather than just collecting thoughts and references, these should be where you’re developing your thinking and drawing connections to notes already in your slip-box. They are written as though for an external audience: disclosing sources, using complete sentences, and emphasizing clarity. Contrast to Matuschak’s concept of Evergreen notes, which he explicitly guides should not be written as though for an external audience. A commonality, though, is that each system emphasizes atomicity of the notes.
Once the notes are compiled into permanent notes and either filed (literature notes) or discarded (fleeting notes), they are added to the slip-box and steps 4-8 begin. 4. Add permanent notes to the slip-box. The notes will be placed behind the note they most closely relate to (if you’re using something like Obsidian, this is less important as notes can be freely linked, though there may be benefit to identifying a single note as the parent). They will also be linked to any related notes, and added to an index. 5. Step 5 is where, it seems to me, the Zettelkasten system or other densely-linked bottom-up system (again, see Evergreen notes) really shines. The system allows for surfacing research topics, questions, and projects from within. Rather than brainstorming to ideate a future line of inquiry, you are able to reach into your notes system and see what ideas are already being developed within it and where they can be developed further. 6. Identifying those areas that have already been developed (whether or not they may need more refinement), begin bringing the notes together into a loose outline. This can help identify places where you may need to fill in gaps, and assists in structuring thought for the next steps. 7. Translate those notes into a draft for the paper. This oughtn’t be a pure copy/paste job, but the notes that you have will be the building blocks for the artifact you’ll produce. Identify any places your argument needs further development (or may have changed entirely) and feel free to turn back to prior steps to refine the draft. 8. Edit and polish the draft.
Compare this also to Matuschak’s Executable strategy for writing. Matuschak’s ideas are deeply related to the Zettelkasten approach laid out in How to Take Smart Notes, and he has laid out a comparison in Similarities and differences between evergreen note-writing and Zettelkasten. I ran into the Evergreen notes concept first, and have not fully evaluated the similarities and differences in the concepts to have formed much by way of opinion.
References
Ahrens, Sönke. How to Take Smart Notes
Matuschak, Andy. Evergreen notes, Executable strategy for writing, Similarities and differences between evergreen note-writing and Zettelkasten