I’ve taken notes over my whole life. As a Swiss, I’m very particular about organization and structured in filing my knowledge. I’ve tried and taken notes in many different ways, from forgetting everything, to noting down every detail, to only taking listings of the most important things. Today, I can say, there’s no right way, but I can see it’s working for me, as my most interesting ideas grow inside my note taking system, and they power what I share online, and earning a living from it.
So what is important when taking notes? And how you might take notes too? First, the book Smart Note Taking by Sönke Ahrens helped me tremendously to understand the basics, that was after I was taking notes already for 10 years, but the principles of it being fine to delete notes, to go from literature notes to evergreen (though I changed that a bit for my liking), were two things that helped me a lot. To see the notes as a system of thoughts, more than just notes. From dumping all my thoughts into a blank file in my text editor of choice to sorting them, and getting clarity from it. And that writing is not the outcome of thinking, it is the medium in which thought occurs. This has grown since then, even more.
But if we think about it, we can also make it a hugely scientific and philosophical, but on the other hand, it’s just ideas we have in our heads to:
- Write down in a way we don’t forget, and more importantly
- find them again in a year or two.
- Also, do not write only a couple of words, as later you might not know exactly what you meant, but also don’t write too many details, or worse, copy a full article.
The key is to pause for a second, and think about it, and then write it down in a sentence or two. I usually use listings, so I know it’s kind of a brainstorming, if I want to go deeper, I can just indefinitely indent and go up again. So I can, if I want, write a full outline, add new thoughts from the idea I just heard, link it to other ideas and notes in my vault.
But number two is harder than it looks to write it in a way to find it again easily. That took me a long time to optimize, and only changing of system from OneNote to Obsidian, and more so from file organization to connected notes, or also called Zettelkasten. This means, during the writing, I didn’t need so much thought where to put the note, is it in business, or personal, should I create a new folder, or do I need to search all my notes if there’s already a similar folder, to just open a new note, doesn’t matter where it is, directly type, link it to at least one or two other notes (so I find it later if I forget the file name based on backlinks) and give it a name that I might search for in a year. That is crucial, as I almost exclusively search all my notes via file name, the name is key.
Luckily Obsidian helps us with duplicated names, because if you open double brackets anywhere with `Plaintext Files file Markdown. These files are just text files locally on my machine, meaning I can open them with my Text Editor or IDE, or do a search and replace on all my files. Back them up easily, and also notice they almost use no space, as just text files. And the best part, I completely own them, so all my ideas and work I put into them, I will own forever as long as there will be computers. They will not die with the tool such as OneNote, Apple Notes or Notion, once they are gone, your notes are gone too, or if they deactivate your account, byebye all your notes.
Blogging
But the not foreseen effect, was that when I migrated my blog from WordPress (Rich Text interface) to a Static Site Generators (SSG) with GoHugo, that is just Markdown. Now instead of needing to reformat, to upload somewhere in an online form, and constantly need to sync them between each other, say I updated my notes or fixed some grammar. No, now it’s essentially the same note. Obviously, the blog post needs a title, a hero image, maybe a description and some more attributes, the plain note doesn’t need.
But once I noticed this, I upgraded the workflow quite a bit. And I added my Quartz based second brain to my website (see ssp.sh/brain), and there I had the goal to do zero edits, and just hit a button and publish. And to be honest, that’s what I do for more than 6 years or so.
I add #publish to my note, and run a script (it ended up not being a button :), and it’s on my website under new recent note. Including all the backlinks I added via Obsidian and formatting, links title and everything. I even added an automatic hero image generator based on each note, and updated a bunch of more advanced things with the frontmatter that Obsidian later added too, same as my GoHugo had already, meaning the format aligned even more, and is even more the same!
What I’ve Learned
So what I’ve learned? It’s really important to remove friction, to make it so that you can use and enjoy it. Maybe for some it’s needed the friction of opening a web form and typing in there, same as some like writing the email newsletter in an email client, to feel the pressure of the readers more, than just in a text editor - which I also implemented in my email client and newsletter in newsletter-rss, I can either run a script and start an email and upload it to my email newsletter, or write it to newsletter-book@ssp.sh and my email client will create a new campaign in my listmonk and send it out 30min later.
But that is what I was saying, the pressure of writing in the email or WordPress editor directly can be a help, but if you want to Learn in Public and share what you learned more often, I think removing friction is key. Also to overshare some times, when the note is still very rough. Because people might give you feedback, that helps your thinking or gives you an angle that you never had before.
TL;DR
- Take smart notes
- Use connected links instead of folders to break out of the 1 dimensional world of folders, especially if you write or want to learn. (it takes time though to adapt)
- Choose an open format, I highly recommend Markdown. Also read File Over App as Kepano said, the app might not be here in 5 years, but your notes will.
- Publish notes to learn, make the process as smooth as possible, no formatting or copying/duplicating of your notes needed.
- Have fun, and enjoy the process. Especially with AI agents, choose a framework like GoHugo or Astro that builds on Markdown and plaintext files, and get the agent to help you with making the site pretty, adding features to the website that you like and make it truly your site. Not a boring site that everyone else has, not for others, but for you.
This was a little bit of a ramble, but it’s really a love letter to my 17 years of note taking. It evolved quite a bit sine I started, but stabilized now for quite a while with Markdown and open format with GoHugo.
If you are curious how the notes look, just go to my second brain and check out my public notes and how all my notes are public and connected with an interactive graph and backlinks. You can literally dive into my brain, see what I am thinking about, see how all the notes connect, hopefulyl learn something new for yourself. If you do learn something new, please reach out and write me an email and tell me. I love connecting to like-minded people.
Latest addition to my website here, I interconnected not only my second brain with the graph, but my blog and my book I’m writing at dedp.online, on each chapter, blog or second brain note there is an interactive graph, and you can see links to the second brain and vice versa. Check this note as example, or see Future of Blogging where I elaborate a bit more on that topic, and included backlinks.
How did you evolve your blogging and note-taking over the years? Any other learnings? I also love the Obsidian Workflow with templates I use everyday and the tools to write in with Obsidian. Check out my other blogs if that interests you. I also share templates in Obsidian, or to clip online articles with Obsidian Webclipper and its templates.
The whole second brain code is public at my second-brain-public and how I automated the copying of my obsidian notes to my second brain, so I don’t need to duplicate them, is described here Public Second Brain with Quartz.