Assalam Alikum Everyone.

Have been a little sick lately , didn’t have the same level of productivity but making progress still, I am finishing “How to take smart notes " by Sonke Arhens, some thoughs that inspired in me from the book are as follows.

  • A workflow is important to have for each instance you’re working on , because it allows you to move between instances seamlessly without the tedious thought of losing the track of the last workflow you were working on and having to setup the new instance you ought to work on.
  • This all , workflow setup, has to be made for one reason and one reason only, to allow us to not work on something we don’t feel like , this isn’t a good advice some would say , but it can be applied within a single discipline too for instance , as I’m studying Cybersecurity, I tend to have multiple disciplines that I have to study and keep track of, if I have seamless workflows for networking , reverse engineering , web exploitation etc. I can move amongst them easily without losing the track of each and having to worry about losing any progress. This will allow me to work on and study a different thing when I’m not feeling like studying the first one.
  • There’s a threshold that a student of knowledge has to cross, from being a normal student to being a prodigy / better then normal. This among other things require of the student to tap into the vastness of his own discipline besides the normal path that his/her peers are taking, study more and delve deeper then what is taught, this is often the enlightenment for any student of knowledge , but once he achieves it , there’s no going back, hence the threshold. He can’t go back to just doing the bare minimum, once he’s crossed that threshold.
  • Having a system like the slip box ,if implemented correctly , can have the same impact as that of a qualified personal research assistant, for what it’s worth , it can also be named as our own second brain, which does the thinking for us, for which our mental capacity can’t reach just yet. we wont’ be starting from a clean sheet of paper, but a well made argument with all the references and ideas already present, we will just have to organize them
  • Writing is the best facilitator of thinking .
    • Make fleeting notes on the go , have a notebook or a phone with you at all times.
    • Make literature notes and make sure to jot down the bibliography along with any quotes that may come up in the text.
    • Make Permanent notes by visiting your knowledge base ( fleeting and literature notes ) and making your own ideas from them and making such notes that are processed from these two types of notes, make connections if you want to etc. For me it’s the same analogy as using an MOC, that I’ve implemented in my system, a Map Of Content is a single index like note that contains all the information about that Topic or Discipline ( it should be a diverse one ). this makes it impossible to lose track of anything and after I dump all my learning ( in my own words ) in the MOC note, I come back and review it and structure it in such a way that it’s my own original work , at that point it’s called a permanent note. ( MOC ) I hope this is useful to you, I also realized that I won’t be able to finish both bugbounty and Pen Test job role paths in one month, if I want to be efficient , I must drag it to two months. or a month and a half which I can manage, I have recovered alot from the fever and strains, I believe I’ll be able to continue exercise again in 2 days.

Especially now that I have revamped my room here in my hometown so I don’t necessarily have to leave my room and I can focus on studying from morning to sundown