During my Bachelor's and Master's degree I had almost literally no time for other activities, and so I cut off completely my reading habits, which I had had since I was a child, when I was an avid reader of investigative stories and fiction.

Having regained my leisure time, I quickly found out that narrative was no more as appealing as it had been before. After a bit of wandering I stumbled casually on an online recommendation for the book How to take smart notes by Sönke Ahrens, which I started reading not expecting too much, given its hyped title.

Instead I found very valuable suggestions for how to structure intellectual work and notes, and I must admit that I have been using the techniques productively for more than two years since. In this note I will try to briefly summarize the main topics in the book and I hope this will intrigue you enough to read it and to adopt the system (Archived).

Today I want to talk about a book that I read recently and that I really enjoyed. The book is Simple Rules, How to Thrive in a Complex World by Donald Sull and Kathleen M. Eisenhardt; the central idea is the realization that complex problems can have simple solution schemes, and that we can elicit ways to collect simple rules that work effectively for the problem at hand, thus making the rules also more easy to communicate and to follow.