I want to ponder, first, about note-taking, and, second, about changing my mind. Ah, wait. Is it, first, about changing my mind, and, second, about note-taking? Schrew it. The order doesn’t matter. Last month, I wrote a post about my 2021 annual review
Your take on note-taking is absolutely relatable. I developed an aversion to it too at the moment it felt more like a chore than a pleasure. It was as if the act of taking notes drained the fun out of reading or even thinking, because everytime I would have to interrupt my flow to write down my ideas---and of course that behavior wouldn't scale.
I retook the practice of note-taking after a long hiatus thanks to some new ideas I accidentaly stumbled upon on twitter. One of them was that when I'm reading non-fiction, I shouldn't be writing down every interesting insight that pops up at my face. Instead, I could wait and let them sink in. Wait a week (or a month). The most important ideas will still be there floating in the back of your mind. Write those down. It's a matter of improving the signal-to-noise ratio and making notes more interesting, as you wrote.
A couple of thoughts. There's a guy on Youtube who isn't that famous who recently posted on his separation from Zettelkasten. This is his channel https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCKuK7cMQFx9qu9xXStG3uWw (for reference). I think there's something interesting in what he said, which is that atomic notes kind of solve a different problem than he has. He found, like you, that the atomic notes were just too flat. He's trying out moving to longer/richer/more narrative notes. I think there's something to what he says in that the way we remember stuff is mostly by incorporating it into our web of knowledge. Making atomic notes with links does this in theory, but a lot of times when we look at them they feel shorn of context.
Second thought: When I used to teach project management, there's an ongoing debate about the volume of management overhead vs the size of the project. It's obvious that smaller projects cannot afford the full scale of management reporting that you need for a larger project, but what's the right amount? I feel like note-taking has a similar issue. How much time on taking notes vs writing my newsletter? (ironic of course that I've had to put my newsletter on hold because I ran out of time, but let's let that pass) Anyway, note-taking is to make other things we do better, so there's a balance to be struck about how much time/effort we spend on it.
So what your wrestling with is the question. Is this a bad idea or is my execution flawed? As you experiment with the execution, keep us updated
Your take on note-taking is absolutely relatable. I developed an aversion to it too at the moment it felt more like a chore than a pleasure. It was as if the act of taking notes drained the fun out of reading or even thinking, because everytime I would have to interrupt my flow to write down my ideas---and of course that behavior wouldn't scale.
I retook the practice of note-taking after a long hiatus thanks to some new ideas I accidentaly stumbled upon on twitter. One of them was that when I'm reading non-fiction, I shouldn't be writing down every interesting insight that pops up at my face. Instead, I could wait and let them sink in. Wait a week (or a month). The most important ideas will still be there floating in the back of your mind. Write those down. It's a matter of improving the signal-to-noise ratio and making notes more interesting, as you wrote.
The other thing that helped me retake my note taking habit was understanding **why** I was doing that (I even wrote a note about it here: https://notes.brunoarine.com/posts/2021-10-11-my-digital-garden-looks-more-like-a-microblog-than-a-slipbox/ ). Once I realized why I was doing what I was doing, it felt natural to carry on with it.
A couple of thoughts. There's a guy on Youtube who isn't that famous who recently posted on his separation from Zettelkasten. This is his channel https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCKuK7cMQFx9qu9xXStG3uWw (for reference). I think there's something interesting in what he said, which is that atomic notes kind of solve a different problem than he has. He found, like you, that the atomic notes were just too flat. He's trying out moving to longer/richer/more narrative notes. I think there's something to what he says in that the way we remember stuff is mostly by incorporating it into our web of knowledge. Making atomic notes with links does this in theory, but a lot of times when we look at them they feel shorn of context.
Second thought: When I used to teach project management, there's an ongoing debate about the volume of management overhead vs the size of the project. It's obvious that smaller projects cannot afford the full scale of management reporting that you need for a larger project, but what's the right amount? I feel like note-taking has a similar issue. How much time on taking notes vs writing my newsletter? (ironic of course that I've had to put my newsletter on hold because I ran out of time, but let's let that pass) Anyway, note-taking is to make other things we do better, so there's a balance to be struck about how much time/effort we spend on it.