Those writing extensively on note-writing rarely have a serious context of use

I just need to optimize my life and my brain. Then I will get the job I want, the partner I want, the life I want, and I will truly be happy when I have those things. The emptiness within me will go away. There is a solution to all my problems: work harder and be better. If I just figure out the right notetaking system, I can stop forgetting the important parts of all these books I'm reading (I read 80 last year, but I'm on track to do 120 this year). The problem isn't that deeply understanding a complex subject takes a lifetime and every domain of human knowledge has limits beyond which no one really has any answers, it's that I'm not "learning actively enough." If I take notes, then I will be learning actively and I will actually be thinking better, thanks to my second brain I've built in Roam Research/Org Mode/whatever. Fitter, happier, more productive.

Very refreshing to see content like this. Personally I'm VERY sick of the whole productivity hustle and the people who spout it.

They prey on insecurities, make you feel like unless you're employing some kind of productivity system, you're cheating yourself or your employer. In reality however the very systems they tout steal away more productivity to maintain the productivity system itself than any benefit for actual work derived from it. I've found this true everything from pomodoro to note taking to Anki flashcards etc etc.

Best model of this I have is math professors from undergrad. I never saw any notes on their desks during office hours. Just pages and pages of scribbles everywhere, crumped on the ground, in the trash bin, etc. I remember asking one how he retained any of the info when reading dense papers, and he said "Oh I never do. I just figure out the details again each time and eventually it sticks."

Oh man this really hits home as someone who did a lot of this searching for a "perfect" system. At some point it really hit me, I think a lot of people are subconsciously believing that the note system will do the thinking for you, and it's really very bad at that. The good news is, that's what you -- the human -- are for.

Literally all the computer can do is periodically remind you of something, and all you can do is try to pick how/when it can re-tell you things you already know. Anything after that is you using your human brain to make the real connections.

(Yes, discovering this has made me wildly skeptical of AI to the point that I generally don't believe in it anymore, i.e. I'm 99.999% certain we will never see anything remotely close to a "singularity.")

I think this idea applies to diet, fitness, career coaching, basically all forms of self improvement (getting career advice from someone who became a career coach is especially ironic).

I think there are benefits for some people in having a system, or having external motivation. My wife goes to a personal trainer for example, which I'd reflexively say is unnecessary but I've seen how it makes her stay focused on what she's doing, even if it's mostly just a list that you could get on the internet. It's the same thing for writing advice. It will work for some, be pointless for others, and draw in a wider group than it actually works for because some people are expecting a silver bullet.

That said, there are definitely worse things to try

Just to add, I like to take notes, but only scribbles for the sake of noting the key points. I rarely if ever look back at them, and when I do they are mostly illegible, but I find the act of noting helps me remember. It was the same in university.

I take extensive notes at meetings because I'm terrible at absorbing information from speeches and discussion. I can maintain attention for about 15 minutes, then I zone out. So in order not to start fidgeting and looking out the window, I write notes. I may or may not look at them again... taking them is enough to make most of it "stick". I don't do any better than colleagues who don't take notes. For me it's just a coping mechanism to keep things from going in one ear and out the other.

What the heck is with that crazy page design? The sliding panels and stuff. I'll see if I can figure out how to read it. That guy must do an awful lot of work keeping them organized and publicly presentable. His basic point is fine, "professional" note taking systems generally seem silly.

I have found it worthwhile to keep a bunch of org mode files about stuff I get interested in. They become progressively more useful as search engines get worse: if I find an interesting page and make a mental note of it, I probably won't be able to relocate it by remembering a few keywords as was formerly possible. So now I make a point of saving the link and ideally a quick summary in an org file. It's fairly practical to find stuff that way using emacs search commands (I could imagine improvements). But the individual files aren't particularly organized, they are just chronological (append new stuff to the end), with occasional updates or cross-links in the middle. I don't need anything fancier. I sometimes post the notes online (Org html export) and other people find them useful despite their near-total lack of structure.

This is not too different than the old fashioned way of reading books for English class: keep a yellow pad alongside of the book as you read, and as you read each page, note down the main points made on that page, along with the page number. Then when you have to write your class paper, it's pretty easy to go back over your notes to find what to use from the book, and to find it again in the book and cite it with page numbers.

I’ve always found it amusing that when I was in school/grad school, I was reading a lot of material that I didn’t usually find interesting, so it would have been valuable to know how to take good notes. I never even heard of a course in the subject of note-taking so I never learned any of these methods you hear about. Nowadays I only read or otherwise consume stuff that I find interesting for its own sake so my retention is vastly better, and I have no real need for such systems anyway.

Neil Postman:

"I will use technology when I judge it to be in my favor to do so. I resist being used by it. In some cases I may have a moral objection. But in most instances, my objection is practical, and reason tells me to measure the results from that point of view. Reason also advises me to urge others to do the same. An example: When I began teaching at NYU, the available instruments of thought and teaching were primitive. Faculty and students could talk, could read, and could write. Their writing was done the way I am writing this chapter—with a pen and pad. Some used a typewriter, but it was not required. Conversations were almost always about ideas, rarely about the technologies used to communicate. After all, what can you say, except that you've run out of ink? I do remember a conversation about whether a yellow pad was better than a white pad. But it was inconclusive."

> The most effective readers and thinkers I know don’t take notes when reading.

I get what the author is saying, but this is some serious "mistaking correlation for causation" here.

I am someone who could hold everything in his mind, never needed a single note, and was constantly baffled why others wrote so many seemingly useless notes.

Then I turned 21 and had a trivial operation under general anaesthetic.

While the change to my brain function was effectively invisible to people around me, I can tell you I suddenly started needing to write. shit. down. Effectively my mental "desktop space " feels like it has shrunk.

I am now a huge fan of Anki; something I would never have needed before my operation.

Agreed I usually read a few books that circle around core new concepts that I internalize, no notes required. In fact the brain’s built in lossy memory is an advantage here. Related article a few clicks deep points to where I also think writing can be useful:

> Many of the most effective people I know—alive and dead—seem unable to do serious thinking without a writing surface in front of them. It seems to extend cognition somehow: perhaps it effectively extends one’s Span of working memory, or perhaps moving the fingers somehow contributes to the thinking.

People who talk about their note-taking systems often have a laundry list of things the system does for them, like todo lists, meeting notes, reading notes, note BBQ, note fried rice, buttered notes...

The trouble is, they are trying to jam all these different things into one system. It's as if they were using one spreadsheet to track everything in their business rather than using multiple spreadsheets each with very different structures and usage. That's what Roam does. It's a no-code app which people jam all sort of functionality into and it becomes a leaky mess.

Much of what people call "note taking" isn't even note taking. "Notes" is a term which is doing a lot of work.

I think there's a real problem people are looking to solve, or it wouldn't get so much air play. I think it starts with the mess of digital things which become un-usable within a couple of days. These same people can keep a project going for as long as they need becausea project becomes a useful organizing container. Once that project is done, then the items in the container immediately rot just like everything else on disk which isn't part of some other active container.

What Andy is talking about, is just one possible "application" which people might use for note-taking. Meeting notes are just reference, they aren't necessarily tools for thought. Maybe you could swap "application" with "workflow." I'm not looking for a note-taking system. I want to way to organize workflows for the files on my disk. I want these workflows to be applied to specific projects. I also want a way for one piece to be positioned within multiple projects (this is where backlinks are useful.) It just happens that a note-taking application may be the best tool for setting all this up and maybe other people agree with me. So, we call this thing "notes."

It's not notes. You're looking for something like a project management system for the mess of things which aren't at the top of your priority list. We know how to do that most important thing which will pay the bills. We don't know how to deal with the stuff which may be an interest but currently outside of our periphery. Maybe the answer is that outside of that periphery should be inbox zero.

Like all those books on writing (or screenwriting) from people who have not published a book (or movie) you like.

One big difference, though, is if most people don’t take notes, then most successful people won’t take notes. (Not sure how you would know that if it’s even true).

My point is that you have a base rate problem on note taking.

I suspect that successful people have some system to think. It may be conversations, or writing emails or something else.

It speaks for itself that these note-taker productivity hackers are, by and large, no more productive than us, mere mortals.

Tangentially I always found it rather confusing that on YouTube so many tech reviewers call themselves creators when they only “create” recycled videos such as unboxing/what’s in my bag/office tour/new office tour/new new office tour video.

I don’t often take notes, especially since I listen to a lot of audiobooks while walking, but I am not sure it’s ‘good’ that I don’t take notes. I’ve often felt like there were concepts I’d like to discuss or go further with later but without notes I just plow into the next set of thoughts. I guess even with notes I often do that, but I think perhaps a practice of more collaborative or public-ish expression would be easier with a more robust note-distill-synthesize practice, which is what led me into taking a class on note-taking (Building a Second Brain) though I’m still not enough in practice to see a big impact on my output.

Another aspect of this is the problem of aspiring to some goal other than actually doing work... for example, having a large and impressive note graph, or making content (youtube videos, blog posts etc) about note taking.

I'm always interested to see the broader phenomenon where people leave a job to create content/educational courses about the job full time instead. I have seen cases in finance, programming, wood working and in university students thus far. What is particularly interesting is when they make more as a content creator than they ever would have doing the actual job.

I think the key thing to me here is that these notes are designed to be clicked through without losing track of where you were, and keep the context of why you're reading this current note. The stack concept they have here is really great

I'm prone to winding up with too many open tabs when I use lots of atomic notes with links, and now I'm having to juggle a set of tabs while looking through this information.

I love taking notes but I never write about the process I use. Writing notes helps adds clarity to my thoughts. Without it, they move a zillion miles per second and when i try to recall something later it just is a blur.

As always, there's a relevant XKCD comic: https://xkcd.com/874/

The page loads shockingly fast!