Writing is thinking. When you write you organize your ideas more effectively and it will help you have better thoughts and solve more difficult problems. As the frequency of information increases, the world becomes noisier and noisier.
Your mind is for having ideas, not storing them. By taking notes on everything you 'build a second brain'; you organize (and store) your knowledge outside of your brain.
When you take notes on something you're reading, you're actually building the logical structure of the text's argument into the notation.
With everything you read, ask the question -- what do I want to remember about this?
You need a way to store the thing you've read and later want to get back to. You need a system to retain what you read.
There is no point in spending time 'filing' away notes, ordering them in groups etc. You just want to add tags and search for keywords.
Some problems I'm personally having when taking notes and how this note-taking system solved them:
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I highlight a ton of things in books but I never 'process' them (coming back to them). Now I plan a book review every month where I go trough the book and put all of those highlights in this note-taking system.
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Same goes for articles. I always keep a list of articles but I don't highlight and only store the article not the knowledge withing that article. If I want to reference something I read in an article, I needed to re-read the whole article.
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This system helped me to journal more consistently. Make it into a habit with a pre-defined template.
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I jot things down without properly linking to the original resource. When I come back to an idea I'm not sure where I got it from and what the original source was.
The problem with most writing tools is that there is no ability to explicitly define relationships. Let's take a web page (or wiki) which allows for orthogonal linking between related files. It's a good start but those aren't 'real' relationships. Those links have no relationship between each other.
The human brain is non-linear: we jump from idea to idea, all the time. Your second brain should work the same.
That's were the concept of backlinking comes in which allows you to create a dynamic network (graph) of relationship between notes and references. Updates and revisions are populated across the entire graph simultaneously.
Knowledge is organized associatively, not hierarchically.
That difference in approach makes it inherently easier to store, recall, and cross-reference ideas.
Links and connections are crucial to discovering the relations between what we know.
Foam is a personal knowledge management and sharing system inspired by Roam Research. Built on Visual Studio Code (with extensions). The Foam prototype is built by assembling third-party extensions.
This repository is a further enhancement on the foam-template project but also includes some principles on note-taking.
Foam doesn’t have features in the traditional sense. Out of the box, you have access to all features of VS Code and all the Recommended Extensions you choose to install, but it’s up to you to discover what you can do with it!
The Zettelkasten Method is not a thing; it are guidelines for knowledge management.
- Don't create categories;
- Create manual links (don't rely on search only)
- Expand on existing notes instead of creating new ones
- Write notes in your own voice and link to sources
https://zettelkasten.de/posts/dont-rely-on-source-have-faith-in-yourself/
- Write in outlines
https://zettelkasten.de/posts/how-i-use-outlines-to-write-any-text/
- Principle of atomicity
Limit its content to that single topic. https://zettelkasten.de/posts/create-zettel-from-reading-notes/
- Principle of Connectivity
It is not important where you store a Zettel as long as you can reference it from every other point. https://zettelkasten.de/posts/luhmann-folgezettel-truth/
The building blocks of a Zettelkasten are the inbox, the note archive, and the reference manager.
While your note archive will most likely be private, you’re going to write and publish articles, books, or blog posts. In your publications, you put a frame around a part of your web of knowledge, and make it accessible so others can benefit from what you’ve learned.
Translate stuff from the outside world into something your system can understand. A book, physically, cannot be part of your Zettelkasten. Your personal library isn’t part of it. A representation of a book will fit in nicely, though.
This is the challenge a Zettelkasten puts up: You have to be able to understand what you have written up to a life time. Don’t just expect that you can understand yourself in a couple of years.
Don’t prepare. Don’t invent categories. Just let it come.
Creating categories is a top-down process. You start with the structure and then file the material away. Notes will have to fit the structure. If they don’t, there’ll have to be a compromise.
Links are hand-picked references. The idea that makes you create a link is unique, and so is the resulting link.
‘to know about something’ isn’t the same as ‘knowing something’. Bookmarking a web page is satisfying because we get rid of the fear of losing access to the information.
Taking notes thoroughly means you can rely on your notes alone and rarely need to look up a detail in the original text.
Reading alone won’t suffice: we have to create notes, too, to create real, sustainable knowledge.
- The Process improves Thinking.
- The Process strengthens Memory.
Note to self; have a good note taking system.
You don't need to publish to start with a good note taking system. Note-taking can be useful personal and private.
Spark file; a file where you write down all your new ideas.
Pick a moment where you will read trough your notes.
Zettelkasten; technique to organize personal knowledge. (personal wiki, extended mind, second brain)
Move way beyond input/output-based note-taking. You should be able to communicate with your system of notes.
Do not sort your stuff. Don’t waste time making up categories.
‘Reading’ isn’t always ‘learning’. Reading notes consist of your interpretation of other people’s thoughts
Take notes in your own voice, don't thrive for 100% coverage. Trough reading you need to make sense of the text in your own voice (thereby creating information). Before I still had to read the texts again and again to re-claim the information I did already discover the first time. You need to stop collecting. This produces far better results, because a note you wrote yourself is tailored to your own patterns of thought, making it easier to work with it in the future.
Texts by Themselves are Worthless – it’s Your job to Create Information from a Source.
Coverage: apply efficient reading techniques to drill through texts quickly. Practice: take notes to see whether you understood what the text contains. Insight: integrate the notes into your note archive to create lasting knowledge. Using your own words will make the information more accessible to a Future You.
Cloud services can shut down, get bought, or change privacy policy any day. You don't want your information held hostage (data lock-in). Foam and this Starter all markdown files sit in a local folder (with back-up to e.g. github).
They are just local markdown files, you can back-up wherever you want.
- Roam Research: pricy, web-only. Slow to load, interface feels clunky.
- Obsidian: software itself is closed source and VS Code has most of the same features Obsidian has. No need for another application.