Is Note-taking a favor or a burden to my future-self?
Notetaking isn’t just for recalling things you read in a book. I’m principally interested in recording good ideas, tactics, or facts that help me do and finish tasks well.
Although, if you’re in the habit of reading great authors, that’s a pretty good reason to take notes. Why reinvent the wheel, especially if you have access to the best ideas in history? However, the impetus for notes includes so many sources other than books. The impetus can come from conversations, lectures, your own stream of consciousness, and even dreams.[1]
Notetaking, when successful, moves the burden of searching for information, or thinking from some point in the future to now. You’re outsourcing your future self’s thinking and searching to the present (and, potentially, a third party whom you’re quoting or paraphrasing).
Write too many notes, and the opposite happens. An excess of notes burdens your future-self, making them responsible for sorting and evaluating your notes, on top of deliberating how to best do the task these notes relate to.
I’m a lousy notetaker and a prolific one. I have a huge collection of digital notes, clippings, paraphrases, essay-ettes and memos, amassed over the decades. And hardly any of it ever influenced an important deliberation. This is almost certainly because I have it ass-backwards: instead of outsourcing my future self’s thinking and searching to the time I took or wrote each note. I’ve instead burdened my future self with, what appears to be, rubbish.
“Oh cool, Castle Bryant Johnston are the firm that did the opening titles of Cheers? I’ll figure out how this information is useful later...”
There won’t be a later...
Broadly, the solution is simple, “just think more now”. More now? But how!?
It’s another of those annoying “devil in the details” “draw the rest of the owl” situations.
I’m currently trying to develop tactics and rituals to put that into practice. The solution, counterintuitively doesn’t seem to be “I need an easier way to keep notes” or something an app can solve. Writing notes haphazardly, inspired by any seemingly interesting thought or quote, is probably only adding to the mountain of trash.[2] And further burdening my future self to sort through it. I suspect the solutions looks more like how to learn soft skills—emphasis on using notes as launching points. And similarly Murphyjitsu—imagine I put the note into practice, the outcome was bad, why?
- ^
Notes can be non-verbal. Graphs and symbols can be notes. Playing a guitar riff into your phone recorder that you may later write a song around is a note. Sketching a hand or a facial expression as a study for a painting is a note. There is a superficial overlap to pins on Pinterest and fashion moodboards.
- ^
Not an original idea at all, here I outsource (emphasis mine):
”People have this aspirational idea of building a vast, oppressively colossal, deeply interlinked knowledge graph to the point that it almost mirrors every discrete concept and memory in their brain. And I get the appeal of maximalism. But they’re counting on the wrong side of the ledger. Every node in your knowledge graph is a debt. Every link doubly so. The more you have, the more in the red you are.”
Unbundling Tools for Thought—Fernando Borretti
I largely disagree. I suppose there are different types of notes:
Kind of “fetishistic” notes that people are taught to take in schools/universities, where you basically just copy over the contents of a lecture/textbook/article, without reprocessing them and with no specific goal in mind.
Project-relevant notes, of two types:
“Stream-of-consciousness”/brainstorming notes, where you frantically write down the contents of your chain of thought to not lose track of its different branches and to be able to re-enter the flow state the next day or if interrupted.
More persistent notes containing distillations of your streams of consciousness, and any other information about the project you’d like not to forget (e. g., some tricky but forgettable edge cases).
More general context-relevant notes, taken in anticipation of projects you might start in the future.
They have different levels of usefulness:
(1) are indeed basically useless. Maybe this is the type of notes most people end up taking, and that’s what generates the opinion that note-taking should be minimized?
(2a) are explicitly transient, of course. Ideally, they’d be continuously edited down to 2b. (I still keep them in case they’d be valuable later for e. g. fine-tuning a (local) LLM on them or something.)
(2b), I think, are invaluable. Maybe if you have really good memory, or if you’re working on one thing at a time only and never have to go back to a previous project, you don’t need them? But that’s not the case for me at least, not maintaining those types of notes would lead to pretty important information falling through the cracks. These are the notes in the reference class of “leaving comments next to bits of code that have to be weirdly-shaped in order to avoid a weird bug”, which generalizes beyond programming.
Another source of utility here is preserving information about “paths not taken”. When working on some theoretical problem, you may end up adopting some very promising-seeming assumption and running with it. After a while, that assumption would be baked into your model of the problem so deeply it might be difficult to imagine a world without it – which would be lethal if the assumption was wrong. Seems important to explicitly keep track of it, in a format that isn’t as corruptible as your brain.
Yet another potential source of utility here is that you can copy-paste them into an LLM if you need to give it context about your project (if they’re written in a comprehensible-enough format, which mine admittedly often aren’t).
(3) is tricky, because there’s a very fine line between it and (1). It’s easy to fetishize the process, end up taking notes in anticipation of projects you’ll never actually end up needing to do, or to take very useless notes which could just be replaced by the link to a relevant Wikipedia page (or, nowadays, by asking a question to an LLM). But if done right, they can be helpful, and if correctly organized, I don’t see how they can really get in your way during your normal operations.
Guilty as charged. I do not regret my crime and I will attempt it again.
Disagree with which bits precisely?
I think, to use your taxonomy, I’m trying to formularize how to produce types 2b and 3. Take the note—“Castle Bryant Johnston are the firm that did the opening titles of Cheers”. To you this might seem like a type 1 note—it’s a “who did what” statement. But actually it’s probably closer to type 3 in that it points to a implicit vague goal I have about appropriating the film grammar and design language used in opening title sequences of both films and television shows, which is a highly compressed and efficient form of storytelling, and making self-contained stories with it.
A way of distilling it might be:
Learn interesting thing → think about kind/type of event/decision this is useful for → think about specific instance this would be useful for (or three) in explicit detail → write that down
What I’d need to do to improve my notetaking (and tell me if this is wrong) is go a step further rather than say “this vaguely points towards this goal”. I should stop, brain storm exactly which techniques from, say the still-photographs chronological progression of Cheers, or the family dynamics in a single shot from Rosanne and how I might build a self-contained story about that. Not just saying “it would be cool to do something based on that” but actively writing down what might be a candidate to apply those techniques. Coming up with a story, even if it’s as simple as “girl meets boy, from wrong side of the tracks” “kind died, queen died of grief”. Because again, now I’m leaving less work for future me.
If I learn about some cool new FFMPEG ability, “oh wow, I can make a carousel with this commandline, that’s cool”—I should stop—and think about what kinds of video content I would want to stack horizontally and scroll. Why? What content would suit it? I should have a provisional answer. This increases the chances of me using that note.
Yep, hard agree.
Except, annoyingly, I often find myself with the inverse. My baked-in assumptions are correct (or at least, right within the specific way I’ve chosen to do something—Fundamental Failure-Mode Theorem—every complex system is always in a failure but some components are compensating for it). I’ve erected Chesterton’s Fence and forget why I did and quickly remember why with disastrous results.
If the note is a burden, I’d say it is a problem of the note-taking system rather than of the note itself.
(That said, I think it is possible that all existing systems suck, and we need to invent something much better.)