“Better note-taking” misses the point; what matters is “better thinking”

People who write extensively about note-writing rarely have a serious context of use

Many bloggers and “life-hackers” have made a full-time job of suggesting how you should organize your journal, or how you should most effectively Write about what you read to internalize texts deeply .NoteLink.Active { background-color: rgba(10, 132, 255, 0.15); } . We should take this advice seriously insofar as those practices have helped the authors achieve meaningful creative work: “Better note-taking” misses the point; what matters is “better thinking” .NoteLink.Active { background-color: rgba(10, 132, 255, 0.15); }

Evergreen notes

Evergreen notes are written and organized to evolve, contribute, and accumulate over time, across projects. This is an unusual way to think about writing notes: Most people take only transient notes .NoteLink.Active { background-color: rgba(10, 132, 255, 0.15); } . That’s because these practices aren’t about writing notes; they’re about effectively developing insight: “Better note-taking” misses the point; what matters is “better thinking” .NoteLink.Active { background-color: rgba(10, 132, 255, 0.15); } . When done well, these notes can be quite valuable: Evergreen note-writing as fundamental unit of knowledge work .NoteLink.Active { background-color: rgba(10, 132, 255, 0.15); } .

Evergreen note-writing helps insight accumulate

Much of the day-to-day thinking involved in creative work is simply lost, like sand castles in the tide. Ephemerality can actually be useful in low-fidelity thought, but it’s simply an accidental property in many cases. We should do our serious thinking in the form of Evergreen notes .NoteLink.Active { background-color: rgba(10, 132, 255, 0.15); } so that the thinking accumulates.

Note-ifying all the things (with Boris Mann)

Conversation about note-taking, the overwhelm of tools, and future possibilities. (shortlink:…

What's the point of a note-taking app?

The true purpose of a note-taking app is to facilitate deep learning through three interconnected processes—externalizing ideas, internalizing them into new insights, and resurfacing them over time—and good design should minimize accidental friction while preserving the productive friction that enables genuine understanding.

Smart Note Taking

Why is this important? Because without the smart, you’ll add more clutter to your system, leading to minor organization and more stress.

Notes Against Note-Taking Systems

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Double processing information for notes : Garden of Learning by Juhis

As I read discussions about note-taking and learning, I often run into complaints about how much time and effort it takes to make and maintain notes and how people wish they could end ...

The Ultimate Guide to Writing

Think better. Grow your audience. Accelerate your career.

Why do we take notes?

I recently saw a fellow note taker ponder if, in a world with LLMs, it’s still worth taking notes. My answer is a definite yes but let me explain why.

Note-Taking and Personal Knowledge Management — Unattributed

Bridge heading into the smokey landscape. License: CC-0 I read Brennan Kenneth Brown's What have note-taking PKMs accomplished, really?...

supernote-cli: pen, paper, and a pipe

A recent  NYT piece  argued we need a mental fitness revolution to combat the cognitive decay caused by algorithmic feeds and generative AI. It's an efficient one-two punch. If you're not brainrotting on short form video content, you're outsourcing all of your thinking to an LLM. The result is a kind of cognitive strip-mining. What's left requires active defense. For me, one way of defending that capacity for deep work is with a pen on e-ink. Whether it's annotating a paper or starting a sketch from scratch, I'm intentionally making room for focused thought. My army of clawed Claudes and Codexes will just have to wait.

Writing Is Thinking

When you write about your work, it makes all of us smarter for the effort, including you. Done well, this kind of sharing means you’re contributing signal, instead of noise. But writers are made, n…

The Zettelkasten Method — LessWrong

Early this year, Conor White-Sullivan introduced me to the Zettelkasten method of note-taking. I would say that this significantly increased my resea…

Re-balancing For You - For You notes