On note-taking
you don't want to take notes, you want to think effectively
Hello friends,
How have your week been so far?
I had a crazy week since last Monday getting ready for the new semester at school, planning for the offline workshop for Dong Labs members, and a few other personal development efforts that I am going to share with you in my coming posts. For now, I am going to keep this email short and then take a long sleep tonight to recover.
One critical thing that keeps me sane during busy time like this is the habit of writing my daily notes. It is simply the act of opening my note app - which is set to automatically create (or go to) a note with the name being today’s date. This note can either be empty or filled with a pre-made structure (image below). This works like a personal dashboard that tell me what I need to focus on every day.
Some people expect a lot from such a note-taking app like Roam or Obsidian, partly because the creators of these tools often made bold promises to help you organize your thinking more effectively either by linking them or collecting them with ease,… Granted, these tools are incredible at making you feel good about your notes. They have beautiful interfaces and myriad of features that meet your note-taking needs before you even know you have one. These affective and motivational benefits are legitimate on its own right.
However, tools themselves can not make you think better or become smarter. While taking-note can be an easy, automated and joyful thing to do, it can be overwhelming and even impossible to make sense of the huge amount of notes you have collected over the years. So why writing notes anyway?
The most fundamental reason I can come up with is taking notes is easier than deep learning and harder than reading. If your final goal is to think effectively, then writing notes is the behavioral buffer you can create and a favorite note-taking app is the cue for that behavior to happen more frequently. The more you capture your ideas - emotions, thoughts, decisions, intentions, goals,… - on paper (or screen), the more chance you have to deep learn these ideas and turn them into a few useful ideas.
Therefore, do take notes and review them as often as you can. But take your notes with a grain of salt. Do not paralyze if they overwhelm you. Do not beat yourself up if you can’t organize or review your notes for weeks. After all, you can never store or automate your thinking, no matter how well-written your note is. If you can’t look at your notes, try look inside your head, instead. Your notes can see you later.
A note-taking app won’t help you think, unless you do the hard work of thinking, live, in your first brain, as often as you can.
That said, keeping a daily page is a simple way to help me not only cast a wide net to capture ideas but also to identify the best of them to continue thinking about, discard the rest, and sleep well at night.
You can see my most updated version of daily page below. If you want to know more about the thought process, the science behind this design or might be how to create a note like this in Obsidian, please let me know in the comment. If there is enough interest (say, 100 likes?), I might write a deeper article, a video tutorial, or even a live workshop on this topic.
Thanks for reading and I wish you a lovely rest of the week.
See you in November.
