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.
For your mind to relax, you need to let go of things in your head. Best to release them in an external system. I usually let off my thoughts by dumping them all into a blank file in my text editor of choice. Doing this is more the Journaling approach to the note-taking journey. The other is general note-taking.
One principle I strongly agree with from the book How to Take Smart Notes (Sönke Ahrens) by Sönke Ahrens is that writing is not the outcome of thinking; it is the medium in which thought occurs.
When you write about an idea or a blog post, the goal is not to start from a blank paper or a file, which leads to more procrastination. So what’s the alternative? With Smart Note Taking, you write smaller notes and start connecting them in your Second Brain. Instead of brainstorming, you connect thoughts and naturally generate new ideas.
In life, no projects arrive in sequence. It’s easier to work on multiple projects and ideas simultaneously because you write the current state of thought. Next time you can continue at the exact spot you left. No dread to forget the latest. You have personal responsibilities you need to take care of, work, family related. All of which have their project and thoughts.
Another important aspect is that your brain will not rest until a task is finished. As we can’t complete all tasks on the spot, it helps that it does not distinguish between finished or written down. Therefore writing things down lets your mind and yourself rest, which is what Getting Things Done (GTD) focuses on.
When taking notes, it’s essential to stay open and even seek opposing opinions and challenge what you already know. Through that curiosity, you will get better at writing and, therefore, thinking.
Recall seven random numbers is hard. It’s much easier if numbers are connected by years, such as all football World Cup events. That’s why we connect the notes when we take smart notes and bring them to the next level with the Zettelkasten Method.
Nick Milo calls it note making instead of taking to emphasize the thinking part of just capturing notes.
There is so much more to smart note-taking. I suggest either reading the book by Sönke or, if in a hurry, the summary by Tiago Forte here.
Remember: Writing is thinking. Without writing, there is no thinking, no progress. The more you write, the more notes you take, and the better of a thinker you become. You’ll read better with better questions in your mind.
A nice example of how to continuously take notes with Obsidian by Nicole van der Hoeven on YouTube and using it as a Second Brain. And also what I have started to wrote more about in Future of Blogging.
# The Bad and Good Notetaking
Bad notetaking:
- I wrote everything down
- I have pages of notes
- I can’t find that note I took
Good notetaking:
- Here’s the key info
- Here’s why it matters
- Here’s how it connects
- And here’s a system to retrieve it anytime
From Tiago Forte on LinkedIn. More on my ideas in My Obsidian Note-Taking Workflow.
# What I Learned from 10 Years of Note Taking, and how One Line Becomes an Article
My Obsidian writing process has evolved. People have asked me how I do it. From a pipeline perspective:
- The idea lands in Obsidian, mostly a one-liner
- Connect it to existing notes
- Refine over weeks or months
- Some get a
#publishtag and go on the public site (see more in Public Second Brain with Quartz) - Eventually several related notes get distilled into a blog post.
- If I get feedback from that post, these go back into the notes for a potential future post.
Some things I learned over ten years of doing this:
- Notes vs. Blog: The second brain helps me to share whatever is in my mind, and the blog helps me refine. Notes are compound and always evolving. Blog posts capture a moment in time. Read more on Sharing as Second Brain Note vs a Blog Post
- The Feedback Loop only works if it writes back to your system (in my case, my notes)
- I don’t research in the normal sense. There’s no “pick a topic, then go read about it”. The notes grow organically based on what I read and fuel articles as backlinks to ideas.
- About 1 in 9 notes ever ships. ~9,000 private, ~1,000 public.
- Some posts take years. This one took two, and that’s before counting notes that are a decade old.
- My most-read posts aren’t usually the ones I optimized for.
- It’s also tightly related to how Learning works and how making connections really is how Spaced Repetition works, but for note taking. More in the book Uncommon Sense Teaching (Barbara Oakley, Beth Rogowsky EdD, Terrence J. Sejnowski)
I’ve written more about Future of Blogging and Why I Still Blog, and my ten years of writing in public with Obsidian, Markdown, and vim, and how one line of a note becomes an article. New articles of mine at The Process of Smart Note-Taking and even The Act and the Outcome of Creation.
# The Process of Smart Note-Taking
I’ve written a full article about
The Process of Smart Note-Taking | ssp.sh, and recorded an accompanying video for it:
# Write Notes, Compile into Essays
As Sönke also said was “Shake it until New Patterns Emerge”:
Sharing as Second Brain Note vs a Blog PostThe note sequences are the clusters where order emerges from complexity. We extract information from different linear sources and mix it all up and shake it until new patterns emerge. Then, we form these patterns into new linear texts.
This is so great, and exactly what my Compounding Note-Taking process is all about.
# Use less AI
# How to Take Notes for Physical Books?
Taking Notes for Physical Books
# Further Reads
-
Austin Kleon’s Genius Note-Taking System - by Greg Wheeler
- Original by Austin Kleon: My 4 notebooks - Austin Kleon