01 Future-Proof Notes
Where did I put that? Looking for notes has been a pastime that I want to avoid in the future. In the past few years, I found a system that works. However, it takes a bit of discipline to set it up. There’s really no shortcut to taking good notes except to know that there is no shortcut.
Thankfully, we have many pieces of tech that reduce some of the friction. Desktops, Laptops, and phones allow us to carry a large amount of data to read or write. While these have solved many problems of scale and portability, they do not solve the problems of organizing notes. Digital notes do not magically organize themselves, so when you look through them, you find all the relevant notes. Perhaps AI will aid this at some point, but in my experimentation with different models, agents, and other programs that extend a model’s usefulness, they create an uncanny valley of sophistication.
Notes need to be accessible when you need them. I’ve taken great classes, read insightful books, and even took good notes on them, but they are not all accessible in one place. When I’ve changed my approach to only using one thing to take notes, that’s where the breakthrough happened.
Where to Take All Of Your Notes?
I don’t think where you put all your notes matters all that much, but they should be accessible. If you want to use paper and pen, go for it. Make sure to keep them all in one place. If you want to use some of the digital note-taking tools like Obsidian, Logseq, or OneNote, great, but keep them all in the same spot. Don’t have some notes in OneNote, some on paper in a binder, or some on paper in a notebook all in different places. Keep them all together. If you take notes on your computer, keep them all in the same folder. Having something in folders is one thing, which is good, but don’t have them in several places across your folders.
I choose to have them all in a directory called studio/, and there are several folders underneath.
Use Emacs, Vim, Obsidian, Bear Notes, Notion, Zettlr, OneDrive, Evernote, Apple Notes, or whatever program you know they will be accessible. Since some of these are dependent on companies to host your files, I would say choose something where you own them and don’t need to pay for a subscription to keep your notes accessible.
Here are the features I want in a note-taking program:
- Store files locally in plain text
- Able to link notes to others
- Able to store metadata, such as tags and dates
I prefer to use Emacs’ Org-Mode for writing anything. I don’t suggest most people do that; something like Obsidian will do. Someday I’ll write about Emacs and its utility, but that’s beyond this article.
Now with that out of the way, let’s consider the types of notes to write.
Types of Notes
Based on my research into notes, these are the types of notes I’ve found useful. This categorization helps me organize my notes better than before.
Inbox/Fleeting Notes
The inbox or your fleeting notes are where your notes go initially. Part of the friction of taking notes is deciding, first, we’ll write with this. Instead, an inbox where you just throw your notes together and process them later will be a more efficient and frictionless way of taking notes.
I have a folder called journal, and that just creates notes that are date-stamped and time-stamped. And I go through them to look back and pull notes out of those notes. Not every note you take in here will become a permanent note, so try not to overthink these notes.
Literature Notes
These notes are for when you’re reading a book or taking a course or listening to lectures. I store these notes in a folder called annotations.
Typically, these notes don’t go into the inbox first. I just open up the note for the particular book that I’m taking, and I’ll just take a bunch of notes. I’ll try to link the notes to exactly where I got the information from in the book PDF or audio file.
Main Notes
The Main Note is the lifeblood of your notes file. These are connected to your other notes, but they should not depend on a particular context. Let’s say you took a class on the Gospel of Mark, and you have lots of very helpful notes, but they are embedded in an outline you took for one of the lectures. I used to keep all these notes in a folder that is organized by date, so I would look up something like Gospel of Luke 2016, and then I would have to search that file and find that particular note I thought I wrote down for later.
That was a poor way of doing it, because it required me to find the giant file of notes and then to scan through them for this particular piece of information I wanted. It is important to take these notes at the level of idea. For instance, if you’re going to do a note on the authorship of Mark, you wouldn’t want to have a note that has all the competing arguments and all the church fathers who side for or against Mark as the author of Mark, but you would want to separate those into several different notes.
The next category helps bring all of those different smaller notes together into one bigger note called an index, a map of content or a meta note.
One very important piece to keep in mind when taking these notes. That is, write the note so that someone else can see it and understand it. It’s easy to just sketch out an idea when taking these notes, but try to be as thorough as possible and think of it as if you’re about to email this to a friend. This is what’s known as the Feynman Technique.
I also know that this article is nothing unique or special. I’ve come up on my own, but several other people have written about how to take notes using this exact same guideline, and the benefit for me is putting it in my own words is part of using the Feynman Technique for myself. This is part of why I’ve created this blog in the first place: to “publicly take notes for others”, but for myself to be more thorough than I used to be.
Indicies/MOC/Tags/Meta-Notes
All right, let’s say you have a bunch of smaller notes that are associated with one another about the Gospel of Luke. Let’s say you have a bunch of notes on that. You could use your notetaking program to search for all the notes on Luke, and that should bring up everything you’ve written so far, but instead you can create a note that links the others and this categorize and organize that information so you can quickly scan through. This is why the internet works so well, particularly for sites like Wikipedia that use the hyperlinks.
Instead of writing one note for everything about a particular subject, you create small notes that can be reused in several different meta notes, and that makes organizing notes a bit easier, and you don’t have to put a note in one spot, but rather in many spots with the several different links you could create.
Project Notes
The last type of note is what’s known as a project note. Let’s say you’re the one who’s going to teach or write about a particular subject. This is similar to a meta note but is more focused around a subject you’re going to write or do something with rather than look up later.
Go Take Notes
This is probably not the first page you’ve looked at when it comes to how to take notes. So, stop looking at all these different notes; you already have enough information you need. Go take some notes, go study, go learn, and put it in a system that works.
I am tempted to link to other articles on this subject, but by the time you got here, you’ve seen enough. Open that program. Get that notebook. Get to writing.