I just need to optimize my life and my brain. Then I will get the job I want, the partner I want, the life I want, and I will truly be happy when I have those things. The emptiness within me will go away. There is a solution to all my problems: work harder and be better. If I just figure out the right notetaking system, I can stop forgetting the important parts of all these books I'm reading (I read 80 last year, but I'm on track to do 120 this year). The problem isn't that deeply understanding a complex subject takes a lifetime and every domain of human knowledge has limits beyond which no one really has any answers, it's that I'm not "learning actively enough." If I take notes, then I will be learning actively and I will actually be thinking better, thanks to my second brain I've built in Roam Research/Org Mode/whatever. Fitter, happier, more productive.
It’s (imo very obvious) satire. It’s pointing at the implicit belief that one can solve the deep problems in one’s life through the process of time, through becoming more productive/efficient/etc. I think it’s an implicit belief set that’s familiar to many of us here.
That's a great sendup, but it looks different when juxtaposed against the alternatives.
- "I haven't created anything I'm proud of, but that's because my nerve cells aren't folding the proteins that do that. I'm not happy with my life, but I can't change the laws of organic chemistry. I'm watching Netflix right now because of, uhh, alleles."
- "I'm smart and I'm great and everything comes naturally to me. It's lame to try hard because only people who aren't gifted have to. That's why we call them 'tryhards.'"
- "I believe one of the above, but I express it in other words because I'm aware of how bad they sound when set right out there."
Among them all, the one you're satirizing is really the hero.
Very refreshing to see content like this. Personally I'm VERY sick of the whole productivity hustle and the people who spout it.
They prey on insecurities, make you feel like unless you're employing some kind of productivity system, you're cheating yourself or your employer. In reality however the very systems they tout steal away more productivity to maintain the productivity system itself than any benefit for actual work derived from it. I've found this true everything from pomodoro to note taking to Anki flashcards etc etc.
I'm reminded of a story. This is going to date me. When I was in graduate school, the university computer store put out a pamphlet, to help you decide if you should get your own computer. The one memorable comment was:
Don't expect your computer to organize you. If you have a messy desk, you will have a messy computer.
It probably also applies to note taking, to-do lists, etc. I am living proof of this.
Whether my desk or my computer is messy is not obvious to me. I mean it's clearly both. It almost always works perfectly for what I need, and it's ... kind of a mess.
Both in reality and on my computer there is a top surface, and things get bounced from there to lower-priority spots when they deserve less attention. Some folders are very specific, others are as specific as "things I've done with money" or "Downloads".
But I do vastly prefer org-roam (or when I'm in the mood, Semantic Synchrony) for letting me put things in more than one place, and keeping all relevant backlinks correct.
To mention Anki in this context, as if its developers or its community were trying to prey on anybody, is utterly ridiculous.
The fact that any particular system gets mentioned among those who presumably spout productivity hustle neither implies that those who do so represent such system accurately (never mind properly use it) nor that such a system has any kind of association with those who mention it.
Alternate take: you don't face the problem these tools were designed to solve.
My personal organization/productivity methods mitigate some very real (and common) weaknesses. Most were recommended by a neuropsychologist after some rigorous testing. Categorically dismissing them makes no more sense than assuming they're universally beneficial. Vitamin C supplements remain beneficial to many despite snake oil salesmen posing them as rhinovirus-proof forcefields.
To be clear, I'm not saying taking notes etc is never beneficial - I do it all the time, mostly for stuff that I need rarely enough to not remember by heart but often enough to justify making a note so I don't have to waste time relearning it every time. My "system", if it can even be called that, is simply creating a gist.md in GitHub Gists, sending an email to myself, or putting something in Google Keep.
The point is I no longer agree with anyone telling me that all aspects of my life must be "optimized" for "productivity", or that without some formal elaborate system I'm hopelessly lost, or that if I do use something I'm n times more productive, better at remembering etc etc, like the productivity hackers and hustlers seem to want everyone to think.
> “… I no longer agree with anyone telling me that all aspects of my life must be…”
My heart goes out to you for feeling so much social pressure from a blog post. I feel the pain here.
Personally, I quickly tune-out posts which i feel bent on preaching to me. I hear your anguish, and I just want to say, ‘turn the page’.
I guess I’m sometimes missing out on catching the “best waves”, or the “bleeding edge” of technological and social change.
I do have strong feelings about ridiculous social situations. Right now I’m positively mental about customer support people (and by extension SO, Reddit, etc) who don’t answer your direct questions.
Anki helped me build vocabulary during language learning. Never heard of it used for productivity though. It actually took a bit of time to build my deck, so I thought never thought of it as saving me time compared to paid tools. Rather just something more custom.
Eh. Different things work for different people. I wrote in paper notebooks for years before switching to Logseq, primarily because I couldn't search my notes or even quickly find something. I now use it extensively for drafting documents, research, and remembering quick snippets.
Best model of this I have is math professors from undergrad. I never saw any notes on their desks during office hours. Just pages and pages of scribbles everywhere, crumped on the ground, in the trash bin, etc. I remember asking one how he retained any of the info when reading dense papers, and he said "Oh I never do. I just figure out the details again each time and eventually it sticks."
Math seems like the discipline best suited to such a process. Experimental sciences are less so -- the quintissential example perhaps being medicine / biochem.
Thats a great comparison! Math is more about keeping the mind vice strong and well-lubricated, so you're ready to crack that nut when it comes down the pipe.
I bet some of that sloppiness is a strategy. Mental confusion like muscle confusion - if there's no plan/organizational schema/notes, your brain has to be ready for anything.
This is very much like me. Going through same process until it gets into the head. However, I feel like I need to remember some fundamentals every now and then. As time passes, our brain can barely hold enough information.
I do not want to lose what I know. So, I am stuck in this limbo of retaining what I learnt and using it. Because not everything I learnt gets used everytime at all!
It happens over different period of time. And when it happens, it just sucks not remembering these!
My maths supervisor always had a bunch of papers on his desk. I never figured out how someone with such a logical mind could have so much stuff everywhere. One feature was a huge vertical pile of papers. I always joked that he knew where everything was, it was just a case of measuring from the ground upwards.
This is one that is hard for me. In my, clearly incorrect, mind, notes are beautiful things you would be proud to show someone. Best I've ever done is something I'm not embarrassed to throw away in my trash can.
Oh man this really hits home as someone who did a lot of this searching for a "perfect" system. At some point it really hit me, I think a lot of people are subconsciously believing that the note system will do the thinking for you, and it's really very bad at that. The good news is, that's what you -- the human -- are for.
Literally all the computer can do is periodically remind you of something, and all you can do is try to pick how/when it can re-tell you things you already know. Anything after that is you using your human brain to make the real connections.
(Yes, discovering this has made me wildly skeptical of AI to the point that I generally don't believe in it anymore, i.e. I'm 99.999% certain we will never see anything remotely close to a "singularity.")
I guess if you thought that all a computer could do was remind people of facts then it would make sense to be skeptical, but I'm not sure how you've concluded that.
At a minimum, a computer can play many games better than a human, automatically sort vast troves of information and serve results from queries, kind-of-drive a car, detect images which contain cancer, etc.
I guess you could (or I could) divide A.I. into roughly two categories, "cool thing that uses things like Machine Learning" and then "appears to be sentient/likely to be more intelligent than humans" etc.
I'm old enough to have seen the goalposts on the first one move all the time, and that's not what I'm referring to, I'm more referring to the latter.
I think this idea applies to diet, fitness, career coaching, basically all forms of self improvement (getting career advice from someone who became a career coach is especially ironic).
I think there are benefits for some people in having a system, or having external motivation. My wife goes to a personal trainer for example, which I'd reflexively say is unnecessary but I've seen how it makes her stay focused on what she's doing, even if it's mostly just a list that you could get on the internet. It's the same thing for writing advice. It will work for some, be pointless for others, and draw in a wider group than it actually works for because some people are expecting a silver bullet.
That said, there are definitely worse things to try
Just to add, I like to take notes, but only scribbles for the sake of noting the key points. I rarely if ever look back at them, and when I do they are mostly illegible, but I find the act of noting helps me remember. It was the same in university.
Yes, everyone is unique and needs to find out what works for them. When my fiancee and I went to the beach this morning, she claimed she missed her swimming group class because she gets a better workout with them versus when she's by herself.
For me, I definitely get a better workout with a group that pushes me to the edge but I don't need a group to get a good workout
Group workouts can definitely push you (well me anyway) harder than individual. I like running alone, but I used to occasionally run on a track with a friend that was faster than me, and would end up going way harder than I could possibly make myself on my own.
I suppose the analogy to note taking is something like you're better finding someone to discuss the material with, because it can help you internalize better (with the caveat that at least for math, I have to have some decent understanding before I can discuss a topic or the discussion ends up not helping)
In graduate school (economics) I was part of a small* group that took and shared extensive notes. It really felt like a Voltron-esque superpower. We were way smarter and more capable together than we were on our own.
That experience is part of the flame that keeps me passionate about shared knowledge graphs.
* We were 3 to 7 people (depending on the night), meeting one to three hours a night, maybe three or four nights a week.
I take extensive notes at meetings because I'm terrible at absorbing information from speeches and discussion. I can maintain attention for about 15 minutes, then I zone out. So in order not to start fidgeting and looking out the window, I write notes. I may or may not look at them again... taking them is enough to make most of it "stick". I don't do any better than colleagues who don't take notes. For me it's just a coping mechanism to keep things from going in one ear and out the other.
> taking them is enough to make most of it "stick"
This is the only reason I take notes on anything. The act of physically writing something down (typing works only half as well at best) sticks it into my brain. Hand-writing notes and immediately throwing them away is 10x as useful to me as just listening or reading alone.
At school, I only have one notebook. I pay attention to the teacher and whenever I don’t understand something immediately, I redo the demonstration on paper. There were a few teachers that didn’t use textbooks or slides so I had to rely on friends and photos to review things later. But the real advantage is that I usually understand the subject deeper. I did well on explanation questions, not so on memorization question. But I could always guess the answer.
What the heck is with that crazy page design? The sliding panels and stuff. I'll see if I can figure out how to read it. That guy must do an awful lot of work keeping them organized and publicly presentable. His basic point is fine, "professional" note taking systems generally seem silly.
I have found it worthwhile to keep a bunch of org mode files about stuff I get interested in. They become progressively more useful as search engines get worse: if I find an interesting page and make a mental note of it, I probably won't be able to relocate it by remembering a few keywords as was formerly possible. So now I make a point of saving the link and ideally a quick summary in an org file. It's fairly practical to find stuff that way using emacs search commands (I could imagine improvements). But the individual files aren't particularly organized, they are just chronological (append new stuff to the end), with occasional updates or cross-links in the middle. I don't need anything fancier. I sometimes post the notes online (Org html export) and other people find them useful despite their near-total lack of structure.
This is not too different than the old fashioned way of reading books for English class: keep a yellow pad alongside of the book as you read, and as you read each page, note down the main points made on that page, along with the page number. Then when you have to write your class paper, it's pretty easy to go back over your notes to find what to use from the book, and to find it again in the book and cite it with page numbers.
Yeah I guess it makes sense, it just threw me at first. There are also all the little pop-up notes on things. Again, it looks very time consuming to maintain. I find it sufficient to just record the info in a file, and search for what I need in it using search commands or grep. For nesting info, the tree features of org mode seem like enough. Maybe I'll need more organization if my volume of notes gets a lot larger.
I do have an idea for a big optimization but it's less about the notes than the source materials. I may try to write it up sometime. I look at the really big personal notes sites (gwern.net comes to mind) and wonder how the heck the authors ever find the time. Andymatuschak.org seems like another one of those. Do the authors do anything else, have regular jobs, or anything like that?
>This is not too different than the old fashioned way of reading books for English class: keep a yellow pad alongside of the book as you read, and as you read each page, note down the main points made on that page, along with the page number.
Wew… That’s a pretty painful way to “enjoy” a book.
Well, it's not reading for entertainment or relaxation, it's coursework where the assignment is to read the book and then write a paper analyzing it. I like reading but was always stupefied by the amount of reading (big armload of books and you had to actually read each of them cover to cover) that those classes required. Math was a lot easier. A class would have one book, would cover maybe half of it, and you didn't have to really read it beyond flipping pages enough to figure out how to do the problem sets. But I'm glad I took the English classes since their point was to teach critical reading and writing, which I hadn't been familiar with before, and which is an important skill. They weren't just about giving you cultcha by exposing you to litteratcha.
That looks nice! It is similar to what I was describing as an optimization, above. But, I would want it to be on my local machine rather than as a web service, both for privacy and to have permanent ownership of the saved bookmarks/snapshots.
These days, remote-indexing page contents also seems like a technical challenge because of all the javascript and crap in the pages. That may be part of the reason search engines now suck. I guess the browser extension could upload the page contents over the network, but again I'd rather have it local, and that would be a lot faster too.
I’ve always found it amusing that when I was in school/grad school, I was reading a lot of material that I didn’t usually find interesting, so it would have been valuable to know how to take good notes. I never even heard of a course in the subject of note-taking so I never learned any of these methods you hear about. Nowadays I only read or otherwise consume stuff that I find interesting for its own sake so my retention is vastly better, and I have no real need for such systems anyway.
"I will use technology when I judge it to be in my favor to do so. I resist being used by it. In some cases I may have a moral objection. But in most instances, my objection is practical, and reason tells me to measure the results from that point of view. Reason also advises me to urge others to do the same. An example: When I began teaching at NYU, the available instruments of thought and teaching were primitive. Faculty and students could talk, could read, and could write. Their writing was done the way I am writing this chapter—with a pen and pad. Some used a typewriter, but it was not required. Conversations were almost always about ideas, rarely about the technologies used to communicate. After all, what can you say, except that you've run out of ink? I do remember a conversation about whether a yellow pad was better than a white pad. But it was inconclusive."
> The most effective readers and thinkers I know don’t take notes when reading.
I get what the author is saying, but this is some serious "mistaking correlation for causation" here.
I am someone who could hold everything in his mind, never needed a single note, and was constantly baffled why others wrote so many seemingly useless notes.
Then I turned 21 and had a trivial operation under general anaesthetic.
While the change to my brain function was effectively invisible to people around me, I can tell you I suddenly started needing to write. shit. down. Effectively my mental "desktop space " feels like it has shrunk.
I am now a huge fan of Anki; something I would never have needed before my operation.
Agreed I usually read a few books that circle around core new concepts that I internalize, no notes required. In fact the brain’s built in lossy memory is an advantage here. Related article a few clicks deep points to where I also think writing can be useful:
> Many of the most effective people I know—alive and dead—seem unable to do serious thinking without a writing surface in front of them. It seems to extend cognition somehow: perhaps it effectively extends one’s Span of working memory, or perhaps moving the fingers somehow contributes to the thinking.
People who talk about their note-taking systems often have a laundry list of things the system does for them, like todo lists, meeting notes, reading notes, note BBQ, note fried rice, buttered notes...
The trouble is, they are trying to jam all these different things into one system. It's as if they were using one spreadsheet to track everything in their business rather than using multiple spreadsheets each with very different structures and usage. That's what Roam does. It's a no-code app which people jam all sort of functionality into and it becomes a leaky mess.
Much of what people call "note taking" isn't even note taking. "Notes" is a term which is doing a lot of work.
I think there's a real problem people are looking to solve, or it wouldn't get so much air play. I think it starts with the mess of digital things which become un-usable within a couple of days. These same people can keep a project going for as long as they need becausea project becomes a useful organizing container. Once that project is done, then the items in the container immediately rot just like everything else on disk which isn't part of some other active container.
What Andy is talking about, is just one possible "application" which people might use for note-taking. Meeting notes are just reference, they aren't necessarily tools for thought. Maybe you could swap "application" with "workflow." I'm not looking for a note-taking system. I want to way to organize workflows for the files on my disk. I want these workflows to be applied to specific projects. I also want a way for one piece to be positioned within multiple projects (this is where backlinks are useful.) It just happens that a note-taking application may be the best tool for setting all this up and maybe other people agree with me. So, we call this thing "notes."
It's not notes. You're looking for something like a project management system for the mess of things which aren't at the top of your priority list. We know how to do that most important thing which will pay the bills. We don't know how to deal with the stuff which may be an interest but currently outside of our periphery. Maybe the answer is that outside of that periphery should be inbox zero.
Like all those books on writing (or screenwriting) from people who have not published a book (or movie) you like.
One big difference, though, is if most people don’t take notes, then most successful people won’t take notes. (Not sure how you would know that if it’s even true).
My point is that you have a base rate problem on note taking.
I suspect that successful people have some system to think. It may be conversations, or writing emails or something else.
Tangentially I always found it rather confusing that on YouTube so many tech reviewers call themselves creators when they only “create” recycled videos such as unboxing/what’s in my bag/office tour/new office tour/new new office tour video.
I don’t often take notes, especially since I listen to a lot of audiobooks while walking, but I am not sure it’s ‘good’ that I don’t take notes. I’ve often felt like there were concepts I’d like to discuss or go further with later but without notes I just plow into the next set of thoughts. I guess even with notes I often do that, but I think perhaps a practice of more collaborative or public-ish expression would be easier with a more robust note-distill-synthesize practice, which is what led me into taking a class on note-taking (Building a Second Brain) though I’m still not enough in practice to see a big impact on my output.
Another aspect of this is the problem of aspiring to some goal other than actually doing work... for example, having a large and impressive note graph, or making content (youtube videos, blog posts etc) about note taking.
I'm always interested to see the broader phenomenon where people leave a job to create content/educational courses about the job full time instead. I have seen cases in finance, programming, wood working and in university students thus far. What is particularly interesting is when they make more as a content creator than they ever would have doing the actual job.
I think the key thing to me here is that these notes are designed to be clicked through without losing track of where you were, and keep the context of why you're reading this current note. The stack concept they have here is really great
I'm prone to winding up with too many open tabs when I use lots of atomic notes with links, and now I'm having to juggle a set of tabs while looking through this information.
I love taking notes but I never write about the process I use. Writing notes helps adds clarity to my thoughts. Without it, they move a zillion miles per second and when i try to recall something later it just is a blur.
