The Ultimate Guide for Taking Smart Notes
“Why do we take notes in the first place?”
At one point in college, I’ve started asking that question more often. I mean, our notes don’t even get returned to — what’s the point of taking it?
I’ve always thought note-taking was wasteful ever since I was in grade school. You know what I mean — you take borderline legible notes, get them checked, and then get a “good job” for all the hand cramps. Not so cool.
You might say we take notes “for better retention”, but I, too, thought retention was the goal of note-taking. In that case, though, I’d rather use superior methods like Spaced Repetition and Method of Loci.
And so in college, I stopped taking notes. I stopped taking them religiously, at least.
It was tremendous freedom! I didn’t know you could score high on exams without even copying a word from a single slide. Am I that smart? Nah. Some people think I am, but they’ve got it all wrong — I used Anki in place of note-taking, that’s why.
But anyway, it was after college and I started doing knowledge work that I started asking the same question again:
“What really is the point of note-taking?”
I pondered and searched for answers — in that order.
Ever since college, note-taking didn’t make sense…until I wanted to become a better writer myself. That’s when I stumbled upon a profound pattern in productive writers: Some content creators are more prolific than others by a large extent, and the common thing they have is they take notes.
Best selling author Ryan Holiday takes a lot of notes — that was one “secret” that made him a prolific writer. Tim Ferriss takes notes. (Everybody knows Tim Ferriss.) Journalists take notes. Tiago Forte takes (extremely) systematic notes. Heck, even cooks take notes to develop their ideas!
It’s just that they took notes differently. They don’t merely copy information, but they do it in a way that allows idea development.
Knowing that now, why wouldn’t I take notes? More importantly, why wouldn’t anyone take notes?
That flaming fact made me realize it wasn’t note-taking itself that’s wasteful. It was rather the way we’re taught to do it — we’re not taught to produce useful notes, much less those we can use for a lifetime.
I realized that we don’t appreciate note-taking because the way we’re told to do it isn’t working. We rarely even question why we take notes in the first place! I figured that caused all the confusion.
And so I finally came to the truth. The point of note-taking isn’t just to capture important information. It’s not even to improve your retention.
The point of note-taking is to think better. Capturing is a means to it; retention is merely a side effect.
Conventional note-taking, however, defeats this purpose. Instead of extending our abilities, it rather dampens them. Our notes are supposed to help us become more creative, more productive, and more prolific as knowledge workers. Note-taking is supposed to improve the way we connect ideas, and therefore, unravel new insight. But this isn’t what you see. That’s because conventional note-taking requires using predetermined categories.
Undoubtedly, using predetermined categories made everything easier. It ensures that information is organized, notes are easy to check, and the method is easy to teach. But at the cost of inter-categorical insight. The more we add notes, the more difficult using our notes become. Therefore, the more we add notes, the less useful they also become.
It doesn’t have to be that way, and so together we’ll investigate the problem at its roots: Specialization. From there, you’ll learn how categories produce a false sense of order. In fact, this problem existed even in the early days of the web, so you’ll also learn how Tim Berners-Lee used one genius trick to solve it.
Also, it turns out that the same trick was used by a German Sociologist in his little-known note-taking framework — the Zettelkasten Method — that allowed him to produce 70 books in 30 years.
So, in this post, I’ll teach you that little-known note-taking framework so you can finally take permanent notes that will:
Help you think better, not poorer
Develop your ideas instead of killing them as they land into your notes
Create a second brain — an “idea generator”, so to speak
Fight information overload and learn in a much better way
Stop staring at a dreaded blinking cursor whenever you have to write
These rewards, however, only come at a cost: effort in learning the method. That means you have to figure a lot of stuff out yourself. That means you have to practice to get better at it. That means investing time to learn this system by heart.
If you’re into that kind of thing, then let’s get this started right away.