Taking durable notes
What is the use of taking notes? Is it to record events and useful information, to support learning by helping us to remember concepts, figures, quotes, etc? Yes to all the above, but also no, those are building blocks, links in the chain, and second-order effects. The goal of good note taking is to support our thinking, to think better. Good note taking leads to better thinking. Better thinking feeds improved note taking. This creates a positive feedback loop of creative thought generation, wherein our recorded body of thought – our notes – become generative in themselves, prompting further and deeper insights. Or more succinctly: Good note-taking is good thinking. Beyond that, note-taking allows us to close open loops granting us the privilege,
[…] of forgetting the manifold things [we do not] need to have immediately at hand, with some assurance that [we] can find them again if proven important.
— Noah Wardrip-Fruin and Nick Montfort (2003), The New Media Reader
Being able to get ideas out of our minds is the only way to keep from going out of our minds ourselves, one must make room for the other. For these reasons, the generation of useful notes is perhaps the most important tool for thought. But Capturing lightning is hard, so how can we make good notes?
What makes notes less durable?
The Platonic ideal of a note is hard to arrive at directly, so let’s start by thinking about what makes a note less than useful.
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Unbounded
Even good notes can be undone by their scope being stretched too far, and consequently their substance stretched too thin. Long winded, unedited, unrefined notes can feel good on the way in (the writing), but rarely hold up on the way out (reading/reviewing, ya know… the useful part). Unbounded notes are unwieldy, difficult to work with or develop further.
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Unintelligible
Ever read over some old notes and found most of it meaningless? The easiest way to make a useless note is to remove too much of its context, either by simply copying a passage wholesale from a source, or by being too cavalier in re-writing it, in essence bad writing.
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Irretrievable
Buried in a notebook on a shelf, siloed in this months note app de-jour, adrift in the midst of a document you’ve forgotten all about. Notes that you cannot find, remember, or access are the most useless of all.
What does a useful note look like?
So now we have a pretty good idea of what a useless note looks like, perhaps we can approximate what might constitute useful note taking. (These proposals don’t map 1-to-1 to the issues we discovered as some of them address, or partially address, multiple issue eg. Making our notes Atomic helps prevent Unbounded notes from developing.
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Atomic
By constraining the scope of any individual note to that of a self contained unit of thought we avoid the sprawl and disorganisation of unconstrained capture. Where here ‘self contained’ means that it has all the context it needs to stand alone as an idea, nothing more, and further contextual enhancement can be achieved by linking to other notes (see next point). Good notes should avoid embedded tangents, any valuable tangent should become its own note. The key here is that a note should capture a concept. One concept, one note. That way any further reading or thinking you uncover that relates to that concept can be recorded alongside it. This forcing together of existing knowledge and new knowledge helps to uncover inconsistencies in our understanding of a concept by forcing us to reconcile the two, and update our notes (read: thinking) accordingly.
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Incremental
Our notes will never be perfect, but they can get better. By making our notes Atomic – concept centred – we can encourage ourselves to keep in closer contact with our notes. For our knowledge to meaningfully grow it must compound. By returning to them whenever our knowledge or understanding of the notes. Our notes should living documents they should breathe, and we should breathe – new ideas – into them. Non-incremental notes decay, that is their usefulness contracts over time, with better praxis we can expand the usefulness of our notes over time.
The only kind of writing is rewriting.
– Ernest Hemingway, 1964Embracing that our notes – an idea – will emerge in a nascent state, only reaching towards its potential through prolonged iterative refinement takes the pressure off the moment of genesis and spreads it out over the whole of the ideas life. An incremental approach to note-taking keeps us in closer contact with our notes. Knowledge grows through compounding. Knowledge is self-reinforcing and self-referential. New knowledge builds on existing knowledge, this is the path to any meaningful depth of knowledge. Knowledge that simply accumulates rather than compounds is shallow, not useful.
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Intelligible
Legible and long-lasting. Carefully written, or perhaps it’s more accurate to say carefully rewritten, after all: All your notes should be in your own words, direct quotes should be used sparingly, these are your notes after all, not other peoples notes.
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Interlinked
A good note taking system is all about contextualising your thinking within the body of your previous thinking. If making your notes atomic/self-contained solves the problem of near term context decay (notes losing usefulness over time) then effectively interlinking them effectively reverses that norm. By successfully situating (interlinking) your notes, you contextualise them within the growing body of your thought, permitting, indeed forcing, your notes to become more useful over time. A related concept is that of transclusion (explore more).
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Accessible
The resulting web of thoughts and memories is necessarily useful by virtue of being offers many points of entry (interlinked)
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Private
There is tremendous value to be drawn from the experience and feedback of sharing our thinking. There are also issues So, with practice, we can develop a network (interlinked) of self-made(intelligible), self-contained (atomic) notes that promise to be better than they are (incremental). Puts me in mind of Hemingway’s beautiful reflection:
Sometimes I write better than I can.
— Ernest Hemingway
With a good system of iterative thought capture, may we all think better than we can.
