In Praise Of Note Taking
What I read: Notes apps are where ideas go to die. And that’s good. by Matthew Guay. Published February 15, 2022.
A few days ago my friend Brian Mays sent me the notes apps article because he knew it would be something I’d enjoy reading. He was correct.
Then, yesterday morning, something happened that solidified why I felt the need to write about this topic.
Upon waking, I remembered I had been dreaming about a unique foundation narrative that would serve as a good short story or novel plotline. Lately I’ve been thinking about wanting to write more fiction. Maybe that’s what prompted the dream.
When I dream I typically forget what I dreamed within minutes after waking. With rare exception, dreams don’t stick with me. The only way they do is if I record the dream immediately right after I wake up, or I have to continually repeat it back to myself many times right after waking which takes a lot of brain power especially while I’m still waking up.
So, while still bleary eyed and half-awake yesterday, I grabbed my phone that sits on the charger alongside my bed and began tapping out a note to remember the story idea from the dream. It was the first time I’ve been that excited about a story idea. I think it will make a great short story or perhaps a novel and I plan to pursue it someday and see where it goes. Anyway…
This relates to the article by Matthew Guay that inspired this post. Guay starts his article with this.
We don’t write things down to remember them. We write them down to forget.
Like a hunter/gatherer stashing their prey, the ideas and the links we stumble upon feel valuable, rare, something worth saving. We ascribe value to the time we spend discovering things online. Surely that time wasn’t in vain.
Then we’re burdened with our findings. It’s tough to focus on something new when you’re still holding the old in your mind.
So we write things down. Bookmark them. Add them to our reading list. Highlight our findings. Make long lists and check them twice. We need a cave, a storehouse, somewhere to stash our findings.
This is exactly why I take notes all the time. Of course, I write down ideas and information because my overactive brain can sometimes be like a sieve with ideas and tidbits draining out of it faster than I can add stuff in. But most importantly I take notes so I can forget about them for a while and return to them later, thus relieving my brain of the cognitive load of trying to retain more information than it can process and hold onto at one time.
That's the true value of notebooks, notes apps, bookmarking tools, and everything else built to help us remember. They’re insurance for ideas. They let us forget.
Over the years I have tried all sorts of note taking approaches. Journaling. A single paper notepad. Various paper notepads scattered throughout my living and work areas. Dry-erase boards. Spreadsheets. And quite a few digital note taking applications. They all work, and they all don’t, depending on where I’m at with the whole process. I tend to err on recommending digital notes because they can be easily backed up, copied, and so on, but do what works for you.
Currently, and for a while now, I use the Evernote app. My reasons are it syncs all my notes to my phone, laptop, and cloud instantaneously, and because it allows me to easily export all my notes into a simple single file that I can back up to my backup storage locations of choice so I never have to worry about losing them. But Evernote is just one of a bunch of good note taking apps and I’m not here to sell you one over another.
I take notes with the full realization that many of the notes I take will eventually turn out to be worthless or no longer needed. But being able to log them, then forget them, amounts to a type of thinking and retrieval superpower that has served me extremely well for many years.
You write things down to forget them, trusting they’ll be there when you come back later and need them. Then, you’re to organize and prioritize the tasks, delegate and do them, flip back through the archives and see how you actually got things done.
That first step of emptying your brain was what actually mattered, though. Most of our thought and the random things we discover aren’t actually valuable. We’ll write them down then never give them a second thought. You could get the same value by writing them down, then setting fire to the paper and scattering the ashes to the wind.
Almost.
Here are a few note taking insights I’ve discovered along the way. Maybe you’ll find some of them useful.
Avoid too many repositories
There is a tendency we often have to enter ideas, information, meeting notes, task lists, and other tidbits in a specifically identifiable location. That’s great in theory, but in practice it’s a nightmare. In an hour’s time I might read a quote I want to remember, receive an email from my boss to send him some information, get a text with someone’s contact information I want to use later, read an article I want to reference for a future project, notice there’s no cereal in the cupboard and I need to buy some, and so on.
Spending the mental time to decide where to put that information can often be a roadblock to doing it. Sure, it’s logical that eventually contact information ends up in my phone’s contacts, a friend’s birthday goes into my calendar, and a quote I want to remember goes into the document in which I store my favorite quotes. However, taking the time to make that decision and access all those storage locations in real time can become burdensome.
I avoid this dilemma by usually dumping everything into a single note file. Periodically I scan through the note file and move those that are better stored elsewhere to those locations. Sometimes I do this daily. Sometimes weekly. Sometimes less often.
I partition that single note into “immediate” and “whenever” sections so that I only need to regularly scan the immediate section. Entering a note from my boss to complete an important task goes into the immediate section while a random thought about a future article I might write goes into the whenever section.
Get real with yourself
As I scan my notes, my most useful action is the delete function. I take so many notes that it’s inevitable some of them turn out to not be needed. Or they time out. That weird idea for an article? Maybe it was a bit too weird and I know I’ll never write it. That quote I want to save? Upon reading it again more closely I discover it’s not something I’d want to elevate by repeating elsewhere again.
It's a good idea to capture as much of what goes through your brain as you can. But it’s also a good idea to delete as much of the garbage as you can too. What’s garbage and what’s useful is something only you can determine but get real with yourself about things you want to retain or you’ll end up with a pile of garbage you’ll never sift through adequately to make sense of it all.
Never think for a moment that capturing what ends up being useless information or ideas is a bad thing. That’s how our brains are supposed to work. Not every idea is a good one. In fact, most ideas aren’t good. Landing on good ideas is often a numbers game, throwing a lot against the wall realizing only the standout few will stick.
Find a note taking app or process and stick to it
It’s so tempting to blame the digital note taking app or your specific note taking process for your quagmire of too many or disorganized notes. It’s likely not the app or your process. It’s that you have been led to believe by the barrage of self-help and productivity articles and books that there’s always a superior way to do it. Rarely is that the case.
Evernote to OneNote, Moleskins to Field Notes, Roam to Obsidian. We blame the tools, the techniques. Surely they’re to blame. A new app will be better.
Then we dump our newest thoughts into it, try the latest features to organize notes, until we’re back to safely forgetting things. Then the illusion gets shattered again, and we’re on to the next new thing.
Yet maybe the apps worked all along by letting us forget. We didn’t need bookmarks and notes as much as we needed the safety of letting go. Anywhere we could save our thoughts was enough.
As I reflect on all of the note taking apps I’ve used (and I’ve used many) and the various strategies I’ve utilized over the years, they all worked pretty well. It was the act of doing it that mattered, not so much the specific mechanism of doing it. Don’t get hung up on constantly jumping apps or processes. Focus on the doing, not so much on how you’re doing it.
Create and use simple long-term repositories
Some places you store information will present themselves as the logical location. Contact information goes wherever you store your phone’s contacts. Important dates go into your calendar. Immediately important tasks go wherever you store and revise that list you look at once or a few times a day.
For other types of information, create storage locations that are simple to access and maintain. I store all of my favorite quotes in a document named Quotes. I store article and writing ideas in a spreadsheet that allows me to quickly sort on a few categories when I’m deciding what to write next. All of my medical history with checkup and treatment dates and medical provider details are stored in a single document named Medical Information. I have a filed named Web Resources and it contains headings under which I keep links to articles, learning resources, information portals, useful websites, anything that can be linked to that I want to remember or reference in the future. I paste in the full web address rather than create hot linked text because that way I “see” the actual link and that’s proven to be useful. It also takes less time. Keep it simple. Simple in concept and simple in functionality.
Speaking of simple functionality, usually a database is a lousy way to store personal information. I know, as a techie that flies in the face of many of my tech-savvy friends’ experience, many of whom likely create elaborate databases they use for personal information storage. Good for them. I used to do that too. I stopped. Inevitably it was far more complicated than I needed to run something as simple as my life. Databases are vital for running a business. They’re not so vital for running a life.
Backups! Backups! Backups!
I don’t want you to learn this lesson the hard way. Figure out a way to back up all of your information repository files. If you’re someone who still sticks to paper-based note taking, keep all your notebooks in one location so if your house is on fire you can grab them and run. Your notes can be among the most valuable things you have. You won’t realize that until you don’t have them.
That said, the backup directive is something I wish everyone did for 100% of their digital files. I’ve lost count of how many friends have bemoaned losing weeks of work or forever lose important writings and information because they didn’t have a good backup process in place.
I used Dropbox to sync and backup all active files to the cloud. I use another backup service, Carbonite, to back up my laptop to the cloud twice a day. At a minimum of once a month I backup my entire laptop’s data files to one of two rotating external hard drives. I pay for a service that backs up my phone’s contacts to the cloud in real time as I enter them. The moment I snap a photo on my phone it’s immediately backed up to the cloud in real time. Storage is so cheap nowadays that there’s no excuse not to back everything digital in your life up somewhere for safekeeping.
Years ago I worked at a law firm as their network software manager. One morning at 2am I got beeped (it was long enough ago that we didn’t have smartphones, just beepers). A team of attorneys was working on a multi-million dollar court filing due that morning and they had just lost their most important files. They were in panic mode. I jumped in my car, drove to the office, walked into the computer room, grabbed the backup tape cartridge for the latest backup I had run (which I did twice daily, unbeknownst to them), and told them “your files will be available in 15 minutes.” I was heralded as a hero by the firm.
Truth is I was just doing my job because I knew a companies most vital asset is its information. The same is true of yours.
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