Gustavo NiemeyerOver the New Year holidays I've spent a while thinking about some aspects of my note taking workflow, and researching on how to improve it. If you're interested on the topic, come with me for a short walk on the thread below, and please feel free to share ideas you may have on the topic. 1/n
I've been a prolific note taker ever since I realized that my brain isn't up for the task of tracking information when switching focus over too many things. Such notes take the form of meeting reports, agreements, ideas, pending actions, and also mundane things like food preferences or arbitrary dumps of consciousness. 2/n
This sort of practice works as a brain extension: we're pretty bad at keeping too many details about too many things accessible, and even when we do manage to keep some of them at hand, it takes up space, and often that storage comes together with anxiety, which is our costly mechanism that prevents important stuff from getting lost. 3/n
So instead of doing that, the idea of taking notes is that we write it down and stash it away, freeing up space and relaxing because our ideas and conversations are preserved for easy access, accumulating a trove of the relevant details in our days. 4/n
It sounds simple, and that part really is. Indeed being intentional and ensuring that the method of annotation is as effortless as possible will do most of the job. In other words, as long as there is an effective method of taking notes with minimal steps always at hand, and an honest intention of writing things down, we'll end up with an archive of our thinking. 5/n
Now, that's exactly where things get interesting: once we have an _archive_, what's the most enriching way we can navigate it and use its information to our benefit? What's the best way to structure our notes so that it improves our thinking in ways other than being point-in-time snapshots? Can we do that while still preserving the process simple and effortless? 6/n
My organization evolved towards something typical: folders for major divisions, and tags or properties for finer-grained categorization and contextualization. This structure has helped me much over the last many years, but at the same time it seems deficient in a few ways and makes me want to improve it. 7/n
The main problem is that this top-down approach requires upfront categorization of ideas. There's that static step towards deciding the information structure and what should be close to what. That approach makes it too easy for the categorization to go stale as weeks, months, years go by and bring ideas in different fields, different people, in a constant changing world around us. 8/n
This is also unlike the way our brain works: we don't have well defined drawers for our ideas. Indeed, creativity is often associated with an ability to navigate and mix and match thoughts from seemingly disconnected areas. So what approaches could we use to further extend the ability of our brains to do just that, while working with more recorded information? 9/n
An inspiring story on this topic comes from the life of Niklas Luhmann, better covered in Sönke Ahrens' book "How to Take Smart Notes". Over 30 years he published 58 books and hundreds of articles, and his productivity is in part attributed to his unique note taking technique, which became known as Zettelkasten, or Slip-box. 10/n
Without going into too much detail here, Luhmann would hand-write his paper notes in small sheets of paper, give them a unique ID, and store them in a box. When new notes came up, he'd find the best matching position for that note so it would sit close to related ideas, and also mention others by their IDs as appropriate. These notes would not be written upfront, though, but instead more ephemeral drafts would be taken and later curated and organized. 11/n
This is a simple workflow, and it's easy to overlook where the actual value lies. The manual sorting clusters ideas and forces the reading of previous related material while the proper spot is found. Also, doing this in a separate moment in the day preserves the low-effort spark of the original thought, while encouraging further consideration of its meaning and its context as it's preserved for the future. 12/n
Some people read Luhmann's story and try to replicate the pen-and-paper approach. I rather take it as someone's solution while going through similar issues, as validation for the concern, as well as inspiration. As one of my goals for this year, I hope to improve that aspect of my processes and daily workflow. I want to end up with something that looks less like an archive and more like an interconnected and evolving web of ideas. 13/n
My first attempt at that which started over the break is to almost completely remove the notion of folders and categories from the process, instead flattening out the content. This normalizes the idea that notes themselves are related to one another, and encourages a more organic structure growth. The second change is to introduce a more formal review moment, at least every other day, to consolidate recent thoughts, and consider their associations. 14/n
Tooling doesn't seem like an issue for this particular effort, since hyperlinking is so typical. The main challenge when applying such a workflow is really maintaining a practice which is used throughout the day, every day, and that's why it's important for it to remain simple and low effort. We'll see how that goes. 15/n
That's another interesting thing about Luhmann's story: it's relatively well known, and often sought while looking for a golden method of productivity, but if there's one simple key lesson there, it is the discipline. Think, read, and write, regularly. Also, have a good year! 16/16
Kyle Fazzari@niemeyer how has this been going, after a few months?