Notes and Takeaways from How to Take Smart Notes
When I read it: May 2021
Why I read it: How to Take Smart Notes was recommended to me by several friends. It's a step-by-step guide to Niklas Luhmann's note-taking system: the slip box ("Zettelkasten" in German). It also details the psychological principles that make the slip box note-taking system so effective.
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My notes
About Sönke Ahrens
Sönke Ahrens is the author of How to Take Smart Notes. He has worked for many universities including the University for the German Federal Armed Forces. His hometown is Hamburg, Germany.
About How to Take Smart Notes
How to Take Smart Notes provides a step-by-step guide to Niklas Luhmann's note-taking system: the slip box ("Zettelkasten" in German). It also details the psychological principles that make the slip box note-taking system so effective.
Books on writing
There are two main categories of books on writing. The first category focuses on the elements of style. The second category focuses on dealing with writer's block.
Few books break writing down to first principles. And fewer books focus on note-taking systems.
Writing
Writing is a fundamental part of the way we learn. We write to remember, to think, and to share. Without writing, thinking is limited. With writing, thinking is unlimited.
Writing starts with a thought in your mind that you turn into a note. When you’ve amassed enough notes, they come together to form larger pieces of content.
Writing is nonlinear. We often start with a vague idea that we transform into interconnected insights with research.
The simpler you write, the more intelligent you appear to the reader. (For more on this, see Consequences of Erudite Vernacular Utilized Irrespective of Necessity: Problems with Using Long Words Needlessly.)
Thinking and writing
Writing is a facilitator for thinking.
Written notes are tangible outcomes of learning and thinking. To remember something, write it down. To really understand something, translate it into your own words.
Our human brains have limited resources.
We have limited attention. We can only focus on one thing at a time.
We have limited short-term memory. We can only hold an average of seven separate items, plus or minus two, in our short-term memory at a time. To be able to focus, we have to get any distracting stuff out of our short-term memory. This is where temporary notes can come in handy. The slip box system provides a reliable place to export your distracting ideas.
We have limited mental energy. We can only make so many good decisions a day.
We depend on external structures to help us improve our thinking.
The deepest level of thinking requires externalization. For example, writing an argument down lets you look at it from a distance and scrutinize it. It helps you identify holes.
Good thinking requires a system, not a plan
Insight cannot be anticipated. Therefore, you cannot plan for insight.
Good thinking is open-ended and relies on the ability to pivot with each new insight.
Planning ahead can make you inflexible and limit your thinking. Plans also require willpower to execute, which can demotivate you.
The key is to create a system that allows you to accumulate and develop insights as you discover them.
Delayed punishment and rewards
One reason we don’t pay attention to note-taking is that we don’t receive immediate positive or negative feedback. The benefits of taking good notes and the pains of taking poor notes are delayed. It’s not until we face a blank page and a deadline that we’re punished for poor note-taking or rewarded for good note-taking. (RKL: Much like poor eating habits with delayed punishment, poor note-taking can become a bad habit.)
Relying on willpower and self-discipline is foolish.
Overcoming resistance requires willpower and self-discipline.
Productive people deflect resistance.
There are ways to get work done with less effort by setting yourself up for success.
For example, breaking down work into its smallest parts is one way to reduce your need for willpower. It’s much easier to start and complete a small, well-defined task than a huge project.
Also, we can change our environment to foster self-discipline by making things we don’t want to do hard and making things we want to do easy. You don’t need self-discipline not to drink a beer when there isn’t a beer in the fridge.
If you don’t find yourself needing to exercise willpower often, it’s a sign you’ve set yourself up for success. Studies show that success is not the result of strong willpower, but rather smart working systems that avoid resistance and the need for willpower altogether. (For more on this, see Misbehaving: The making of behavioral economics.)
Personal writing systems
A personal writing system helps you maximize your writing output. It helps increase the speed and quality of your writing. It also helps you avoid writer's block.
A personal writing system includes everything involved in producing a written work: thinking, researching, note-taking, drafting, editing, and publishing.
A good personal writing system allows you to focus your energy on the first principles of writing. For example, it should allow you to:
Break writing into small, separated tasks that you can focus on one at a time.
Move from one writing task to another without losing progress.
Get into a writing "flow state" and avoid relying on willpower.
Recall your ideas, thoughts, and notes when you need them.
Combine different ideas in novel ways.
Most people don’t consider their personal writing system until they’re working on a writing assignment and staring at a blank page.
The blank page panic
Writing doesn't start with a blank page. It starts with thinking. Translating mental thoughts to written thoughts is the hardest part of writing. (RKL: Written thoughts are more valuable than your mental thoughts.)
What is the best way to avoid the blank page panic? Take notes before you need them.
The secret to effortless writing is in preparation. Rewriting and editing notes is much easier than starting from scratch.
You don’t want to wait until you choose a topic to start taking notes top-down. It’s the opposite. You want to form a topic based on your notes bottoms-up.
Niklas Luhmann
Niklas Luhmann was a German sociologist. He was one of the most productive social scientists in history.
He was the son of a brewer. In the evenings, he'd go home and explore his interests in philosophy, organizational theory, and sociology. Whenever he encountered something remarkable, he made a note. And whenever he had a thought about what he was exploring, he made a note.
He wrote his notes on small pieces of paper, numbered them, and organized them in his slip box. Luhmann realized that a note's value depended on his ability to rediscover it at right time and in the right context. So he made sure to connect related notes to each other.
One day, he pulled together some of his notes and turned them into a manuscript that he presented to Helmut Schelsky. After reading it, Schelsky suggested he become a professor of sociology at the University of Bielefeld. Long story short, Luhmann met the requirements to become a professor there in under a year and went on to become one of the most influential and productive sociology writers of all time. In 30 years, he published 58 books.
Luhmann credited his slip box note-taking system for his productivity. German sociologist Johannes F.K. Schmidt conducted research that backs this up. (For more see, Niklas Luhmann’s Card Index: The Fabrication of Serendipity)
Luhmann wrote his notes in full sentences on index cards and stored them in boxes. He wrote each note in his own words and attached references. He kept his notes brief, limiting them to one side of a card and extending them on an additional index card when necessary.
Luhmann wrote new notes in the context of the slip box. New notes would often relate to existing notes and connected with a numbering system. The result was chains and chains of interconnected notes.
Luhmann maintained an index that served as an entry point into a line of thought or topic.
Luhmann wrote bottoms-up.
Nonfiction writing
The entire purpose of nonfiction writing is to gain insight and share it with the world.
Most people write non-fiction top-down. They start with an outline and then complete research to generate a draft. The slip box is a way to write bottom-up.
When you break non-fiction writing down to first principles, its basic building blocks are thoughts and notes. A thought is an idea you have in your head. A note is an idea you've translated into written words.
The hardest part of non-fiction writing is translating an idea from a thought in your head to a coherent written note. When you have to write a paper from scratch and you're staring at a blank page, it's overwhelming because you're realizing how many thought-to-note translations you'll need to complete to produce a draft.
The slip box system ("Zettelkasten")
With the slip box system, you never stare at a blank page. You focus on turning your thoughts into notes and interconnecting them until you have enough connections to form an outline. You then curate your notes into a draft.
It works like this:
When you have a thought, turn it into a note.
Do that over and over again.
Link the notes and as they relate.
With the slip box system, you turn your thoughts and discoveries into a treasure chest of interconnected notes. The slip box isn't just about collecting notes. It's also about connecting them and sparking new ideas.
The slip box system forces you to deliberately practice distilling the gist. The best notes focus on the gist of what is being said, not the details. Every time you take a note, you get better at it. With practice, reading gets easier, your pattern recognition improves, and you grasp the gist faster. Best of all this self-improvement is not limited to writing, it upgrades your thinking and speaking too.
Many successful writers, artists, and academics use some form of a slip box system.
The four types of slip box system notes
In the slip box system, you produce four types of notes:
Temporary notes. Temporary notes (or "fleeting notes") are reminders of ideas you've had that you want to revisit later. It's best to put them in a queue (or "inbox") that you can process later. To understand them, you'll rely on the context you took them from. Therefore, be sure to review them before you forget the context. Temporary notes don't need to stand alone so they can be shorthand. You'll discard the ones that don't stand the test of time.
Literature notes. Literature notes are notes you take when you read, watch, or listen to something interesting. They include ideas you want to remember or explore more deeply. It's best to keep them short, write them in your own words, and store them in a system you can reference later (a "reference system") along with bibliographic information. You want to write them to be in your own words, but you don't need them to stand alone because they'll be tied to the context you took them from. In general, the more complex the work or the less familiar you are with a subject, the more literature notes you'll take.
Permanent notes. A permanent note is a note written in your own words with full sentences that you've added to your slip box along with a source. Permanent notes should be able to stand alone. You should be able to revisit a permanent note and understand it without its original context. You want them to be self-explanatory and timeless.
Projects notes. Project notes include the comments, draft snippets, reminders, and to-dos that you generate as you work on publishable writing pieces. You may want to turn some of these into permanent notes and push them into your slip box. Otherwise, you can discard your project notes when you no longer need them.
The four slip box system tools
You need four tools to implement a reliable slip box system.
A writing tool. This is what you'll use to capture temporary notes. The best writing tools make it easy for you to queue, review, and process your temporary notes every day or so. For example, this might be a paper notepad or a mobile app.
A reference management tool. This is what you'll use to collect literature notes and their references. The best reference management tools make it easy for you to sort, search, and access your references.
A slip box tool. This is what you'll use to store and organize your permanent notes. The best slip box tools allow you to index, interlink, and search your permanent notes.
An editing tool. This is what you'll use to outline, draft, and edit your publishable writing pieces.
How to use the slip box system to write bottoms-up
With the slip box system, you never work on just one idea at a time. You work on many ideas that are in different stages. A typical week might contain many or all of these steps:
Write temporary notes and literature notes. The idea here is to follow your interests and take notes as you do. Read articles and books. Listen to podcasts. Explore essays, research papers, and studies. Sit in on lectures and talks. Ask questions in meetings and at conferences.
Create permanent notes. The idea here is to use your temporary and literature notes to develop ideas in your slip box. On a regular interval, you need to process your new temporary and literature notes. It's best to do this once per day so you don't forget the context or what you meant. For each temporary and literature note, look into your slip box and explore how it relates to your existing permanent notes. If and when it makes sense, create a new permanent note. Once processed, you can throw away the temporary notes and leave the literature notes in your reference system.
Push new permanent notes into your slip box and connect them to other related permanent notes. The idea here is to make sure you will be able to find the notes later in the right context. If there are no existing related notes, add a link to your new standalone note from your index. Otherwise, make links to and from related notes. The links between notes are more important than links to notes from the index. When making links between notes, ask yourself "in what situations will I want to stumble upon this note again?"
Develop your topics bottoms-up from within your slip box. Notice what clusters of notes develop in your slip box. Clusters are sequences of notes where order emerges. Follow your curiosity and continue to develop them as you learn more.
When a topic is fully developed, collect all the relevant notes in an outline. You may discover you need to do more research to fill in holes. This will often lead to project notes.
Turn your outlines into rough drafts. Merge your notes into a draft.
Edit and proofread your drafts.
Publish and share your final works.
Why most writing and note-taking approaches fall short
No overarching workflow or system. Writing and note-taking techniques are often taught without an overarching system and workflow. But, tools and techniques are only as good as the workflow they're embedded in. There is no point in having special tools or techniques if they don't work together as part of a larger system
They treat writing as linear a process. Most people work under the assumption that an article, a paper, or a book is a task with a clear beginning and an end. They think there's is a perfect step-by-step process to move from deciding on a topic (step 1) to research (step 2) to drafting (step 3) to publishing (step 4). You decide what to write about, then you research it, and then write about it. This is not really a surprise because it's what we're taught as students when our professors give us writing assignments. Attempting to force writing into a linear process is the source of many people's overwhelming frustration. For example, it leads to confirmation bias. When you start with an expectation, you create an outcome you're biased to creating. This creates a conflict between completing the project and generating insight.
Delayed feedback loops. The linear way of writing relies on one or two massive feedback opportunities at the end when other people review your drafts or published work.
Non-standardized, top-down notes. The way most people organize notes is top-down by topic. They highlight sentences and write comments in the margins. They write temporary notes in short-hand or as full excerpts in notepads. This leads to a top-down storage system with piles of notes on various topics. As the system grows, it becomes messier and more confusing, making the notes less valuable. To find notes in a topic-based system, you must use your brain to search for them. This isn't how it suppose to work. The opposite should be true.
Brainstorming. Most writing improvement guides recommend you start with brainstorming. In other words, you must rely on your brain which is neither objective nor reliable. You have to either start with something completely new (which is risky) or retrace your ideas (which is boring).
Why the slip box system works
It forces writing. All of your research, studying, and sharing of information should lead to writing in your own words. This includes your reading, the lectures you attend, and the presentation you give. This doesn't mean you should read less, attend fewer lectures, or give fewer presentations. It means you consume new information with the deliberate intention of turning it into your own words in the form of permanent notes.
It forces understanding. The slip box forces you to focus more on what you're consuming because you'll know you'll need to really understand the material in order to turn it into your own words. It will also force you to become more efficient at separating the signal from the noise in (or the "gist" of) what you are consuming. Writing in your own words forces you to think about the arguments from multiple angles. It forces understanding. And, it's easier to remember things you understand than things you don't because we connect it to what we already know.
Standardized, interconnected tasks. A good system is one you can trust not to lose any of your work. A reliable slip box allows your brain to let go of distracting ideas avoid clutter. The slip box system breaks writing into small independent tasks that you can complete without stopping. You collect notes in one place and process each of them in a standardized way. This frees your mind to focus on one note at a time. This allows you to alternate between different types of tasks and adjust your approach. Some writing tasks require intense, deep focus while others deserve a more playful, floating approach. It is important to maintain a standard format. This makes it effortless for you to combine different notes into something new. Your notes should fit together like Legos. With the slip box system, you organize notes by context. You write permanent notes in your own words and link them to other related notes on all sorts of different topics. This leads to a bottom-up storage system with chains of notes connected across topics. To find notes in a context-based system, you rely on the system to rediscover them in the right context. The slip box reduces the number of decisions you need to make in a day. As you add notes to the system and interconnect, the system makes decisions for you. This lets you spend your precious mental energy on more useful tasks like reading, thinking, and writing. The slip box allows you to take a break without fear of losing progress.
Immediate feedback loops - The slip box system provides feedback every time we attempt to push notes into the system. When we create a permanent note, the requirement to write them in our own words provides immediate feedback on how well we understand the idea. And when push a note into our slip box and attempt to interconnect related notes, the slip box exposes our duplications and contradictions. We get better every time we try to create a permanent note or push one into our system. The slip box helps you become a better writer by giving you lots of small opportunities for deliberate practice that provide immediate feedback loops when you complete them. The slip box forces you to build meaningful connections between ideas.
Antifragility. The slip box gets stronger the more add to it, edit it, connect it, challenge it, and attack it. It loves uncertainty and adventure. With the slip box, disconfirming ideas become attractive because they open up more possible connections and insights. The slip box works much the same way as our brains. As you interconnect the notes, ideas and arguments develop. The richer the slip box becomes, the richer the ideas and arguments become. When you consistently add permanent notes to your slip box, it continuously improves. The value of your permanent notes compounds as they interconnect. The slip box is a writing snowball.
You don't start from scratch. With the slip box, you draw on what you've learned before. The more notes you collect, the less you should have to rely on your brain. As you follow your curiosity and interests, the permanent notes cluster around the areas you return to most often. Topics emerge. And they'll come with writing in your own words to work with.
Treat writing as nonlinear. With the slip box, you keep your options open during the writing process. Fresh insights cannot be predetermined. To discover them you need to be able to bounce to different levels of thinking. The slip box gives you the room to explore ideas as they emerge from your research. The slip box is a system for you to think in. It's like a second brain that you can store information in and access when you need it.
It's self-reinforcing. Most work creates a vicious cycle that drains our energy and requires us to push it forward. The best work creates virtuous cycles that generate energy and pull us along with it. The slip box system creates a virtuous cycle. It is self-reinforcing. The more notes, the more connections. The more connections, the more questions. And the more questions, the more notes.
Random anecdotes
Self-discipline and self-control are better indicators of success than intelligence quotient (IQ). (For more on this, see Self-Discipline Outdoes IQ in Predicting Academic Performance of Adolescents and High Self‐Control Predicts Good Adjustment, Less Pathology, Better Grades, and Interpersonal Success.)
Behavior change is hard. Your existing behavior is the most reliable predictor of your future behavior. The trick is to use systems to build up new habits to replace old ones.
In Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi shares his concept of flow. Flow is the state in which you get so completely immersed in your work that you lose track of time and it becomes effortless.
The Dunning-Kruger effect is the idea that people with low ability at a task tend to overestimate their competence. The inverse also tends to be true. People with high ability tend to underestimate their own competence because they assume that tasks that are easy for them are also easy for others. (For more on this, see Unskilled and unaware of it: How difficulties in recognizing one's own incompetence lead to inflated self-assessments by Justin Kruger and David Dunning).
High achievers are often more likely to suffer from imposter syndrome because they are more aware of the requirements for excellence. (For more, see The Imposter Syndrome as Related to Teaching Evaluations and Advising Relationships of University Faculty Members and The imposter phenomenon in high achieving women: Dynamics and therapeutic intervention.)
The best way to deal with complexity is to keep things simple. The simplest solution is usually the right one. (For more on this, see Simple Rules: How to Thrive in a Complex World.) There is a story about the 1960s space race that NASA tried to figure out how to make a pen that works in space while the Russians simply used pencils. Avoid making simple tasks complicated.
Routines require simple, repeatable tasks that fit together. (For more, see When weight management lasts. Lower perceived rule complexity increases adherence.)
In Getting Things Done, David Allen describes a mental state of "mind like water", where you're able to focus without internal distraction. Most distractions do not come from our environment. They come from our minds. To achieve "mind like water", your brain needs to be able to let go of all other tasks and so you can focus on the one at hand.
Alignment between our interest, motivation, and focus is the precondition to effortless work.
Deliberate practice is how we get better at something. It requires effort. (For more see, The Role of Deliberate Practice in the Acquisition of Expert Performance.)
With an exergonic reaction, you need to add energy to keep the reaction going. With an endergonic reaction, once triggered, the reaction continues by itself. (RKL: is this accurate?)
Work that requires high amounts of energy and effort can demotivate you, lead to procrastination, and create a vicious circle of failure. (For more on this, see How positive and negative feedback motivate goal pursuit.)
External rewards do not create a self-reinforcing feedback loop for work. To become self-sustainable, the work itself needs to be motivating. (For more on this, see Effects of intrinsic motivation on feedback processing during learning.) For example, fitness coach Michelle Segar helps her clients build sustainable workout routines by identifying sports that are satisfying to play. When the workout becomes rewarding itself, willpower isn't needed. (For more on this, see No Sweat: How the Simple Science of Motivation Can Bring You a Lifetime of Fitness.)
Multitasking is a bad idea. While multitasking can feel productive, your productivity might actually decrease. When we multitask, we don't focus on more than one thing at a time. That's impossible. Instead, we quickly shift our attention between the things we're trying to multitask. (For more see, The “Myth” of Media Multitasking: Reciprocal Dynamics of Media Multitasking, Personal Needs, and Gratifications.)
Intuition comes from experience. The more experience you have, the more you can rely on gut feelings. Experts have strong gut feelings. No one can make you an expert with their teaching. You become an expert by doing. Teachers can give you rules and principles. Experience gives you the ability to make the right choices in real-world situations, or judgment. Experts see patterns. (For more on this, see The Five-Stage Model of Adult Skill Acquisition.)
Maximum productivity requires the right mindset (to stay committed to the system), the right systems and workflows (to build effortless routines), and the right tools and techniques (to complete the required tasks).
Feedback loops are crucial for motivation. Seeking feedback, whether it's positive or negative, is an important factor for success. People who fear and avoid feedback might feel better in the short term, but fall behind in the long run. According to psychologist Carol Dweck, the most reliable predictor for long-term success is having a “growth mindset.” Embracing a growth mindset is about prioritizing motivation that comes from the internally-generated pleasure of self-improvement over the externally-generated pleasure of others' praise. (For more on this, see Mindset: The New Psychology of Success and What Having a “Growth Mindset” Actually Means.)
Physicist Richard Feynman determines whether he understands something based on whether he can give an introductory lecture on it.
Learning is hard because we must force our brain to both retrieve existing knowledge and connect it with new information.
Any quest you undertake for new knowledge starts from a preconception in your mind. The new knowledge you gain on your quest then transforms your preconception and creates new ones. And the cycle repeats itself. This is related to what the German philosopher Martin Heidegger dubbed the "hermeneutic circle." (For more on this, see Being and Time).
Don't think of forgetting as the loss of memory. Think of it as moving knowledge to long-term memory so we can focus on the present. In this context, remembering is moving something from long-term memory into our present focus. Memories are only useful in certain moments. Otherwise, they're a distraction. The trick is to build connections to the right memories so you can recall them when they're useful. Learning is about making these meaningful connections in your mind.
Exercise helps you learn. One, it aids in transferring information into long-term memory. (For more on this, see Spark: The Revolutionary New Science of Exercise and the Brain) And two, it reduces stress, which generates hormones that suppress learning. (For more on this, see “Short-term Stress Can Affect Learning And Memory.”)
One way to learn is to elaborate. When you elaborate, you consider the meaning of some information and how it could be combined with your existing knowledge. In other words, elaboration is connecting different information in a meaningful way. (For more on this, see Elaboration and knowledge acquisition)
The mere-exposure effect can trick us into thinking we understand something simply because we are familiar with it. But, familiarity is not the same thing as understanding. Seeing information we have seen before can trick us into thinking we can retrieve it from memory.
According to research, reading and underlining sentences for later rereading is mostly useless. (For more, see Metacognitive strategies in student learning: do students practise retrieval when they study on their own?)
It's best to read nonfiction with questions in mind so you can see what is missing.
If you write a little bit every day, it adds up fast. For example, Anthony Trollope was one of the most productive authors of the 19th century. At 5:30 am every morning, he would sit down with a cup of coffee and start writing. His goal was to write at least 250 words every 15 minutes. This compounds to ten pages a day and multiple books per year. Trollope's approach works well for fiction writing which is more predictable. In nonfiction writing, rather than setting a daily word or page goal, it's better to strive for a certain number of notes per day.
According to Parkinson's Law, work tends to fill the time allotted to it like air fills a balloon. (For more, see Parkinson's law, and other studies in administration).
Humans act differently when they experience scarcity. In “Scarcity: Why Having Too Little Means So Much”, Sendhil Mullainathan and Eldar Shafir explore the cognitive effects of scarcity and how they affect decision-making.
Isolated facts are hard to remember. It's better to build a “latticework of mental models” that makes it easier to make sense of new information. Mental models help you make sense of things. They're interpretation schemes and thinking routines. You want to have a broad range of them. If you have only a few available, you risk misapplying them.
Motivation is tied to meaning. Nothing motivates us more than moving something forward that matters. Nothing demotivates us more than getting stuck on something that doesn’t seem worthwhile. Organizing work so that it allows you to steer it in the most promising direction is critical to maintaining motivation. (For more on this see, Stumbling on Happiness.) When students fail in school, it's often because they don't see the meaning in what they're supposed to learn. In other words, they cannot connect what they're being asked to learn to progress on their personal goals. (For more on this, see “What Teachers Say and Do to Support Students’ Autonomy during a Learning Activity.”).
Sudden breakthroughs are often preceded by a long period of preparation or incremental steps. Steven Johnson, the author of Where Good Ideas Come From, calls this build-up the “slow hunch.”
Big change does not require a big idea. Often, it is the simplicity of an idea that gives it power. To leverage the full power of a new tool, you often need to adjust your system to align with it. For example, Malcolm McLean was an American businessman who developed the modern intermodal shipping container in the 1950s. Containerization reduced the cost of freight transportation, improved reliability and, reduced cargo theft. Initial attempts at containerization failed because the shipping systems weren't aligned with the new tool: containers. The simple idea didn't take off until the system shifted to work with containers. As another related example, the slip box system forces you to containerize your notes.
Seek out knowledge that challenges your way of thinking. For example, Charles Darwin made a habit of prioritizing observations and thoughts that were opposed to his theories. For the most part, this rid his published theories of unaddressed objections.
Random quotes
“If I want something, it’s more time. The only thing that really is a nuisance is the lack of time.” —Niklas Luhmann
“I only do what is easy. I only write when I immediately know how to do it. If I falter for a moment, I put the matter aside and do something else.” —Niklas Luhmann
“Notes on paper, or on a computer screen... do not make contemporary physics or other kinds of intellectual endeavour easier, they make it possible.” —Neil Levy
“The white sheet of paper – or today: the blank screen – is a fundamental misunderstanding” —Armin Nassehi
"Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them.” —Alfred North Whitehead