Member-only story
The Key to My Creativity Is This Weird Note-Taking System
Using Niklas Luhmann’s ‘slip box’ method, I’m finding better ideas everywhere
I’ve always been an avid notetaker—extracting ideas from books as inspiration for my articles. But most of my notes were disorganized, housed digitally in Pocket, Evernote, Google Docs, Trello, or on stacks of index cards. Accessing the information was a pain, and I likely wouldn’t review or even see 99% of my notes ever again.
Then about a year ago, I came across Sönke Ahrens’ How to Take Smart Notes, a book that details the note-taking system of the late German sociologist Niklas Luhmann. He calls it “slip box” and it’s a system that helped Luhmann write 60 books (and six more that were published posthumously), in addition to completing his grand theory “The Society of Society.” I knew I needed to try it.
On the surface, the slip box looks like a bunch of handwritten index cards. (Luhmann produced 90,000 of them in all.) The cards are stored in filing boxes, divided by subjects and numbered consecutively. But scholars who’ve studied the system know that it serves not just as a note collection, but as a partner in communication. Sociologist Johannes F.K. Schmidt writes that the process makes “serendipity possible in a systemically and theoretically informed way.”
