Notes on Notes

Published: 23 Apr 2021

For a long time I wasn’t happy with my note taking process, but I’ve been getting better at taking notes. I figured that I would share a little about what I’ve learned about note taking by writing a review of two books that recommend cohesive note taking systems. The two books I’m reviewing are The Bullet Journal method and How To Take Smarter Notes.

The The Bullet Journal Method: Track the Past, Order the Present, Design the Future by Ryder Carroll doesn’t advertise itself as a book about taking notes. On the surface it is a journaling method. In particular it is a journaling method that is optimized for speed. Bullet has two meanings: bullet as in “as fast as a bullet” and bullet as in “bullet point.” It might seem strange that I would start a post about note taking books by talking about journaling.

The reason I think starting with a talk about this book is appropriate is because of the way our minds work. What I’ve observed is that we have two systems in our minds. One is adapted for speed. The other is adapted for thinking well. We have to make tradeoffs along this time dimension because of limited mental bandwidth. As the name implies, the bullet journal is a system that is highly adapted to working quickly. As a result it works well as the component of a note taking system that acknowleges our time constraints.

Other good note taking and task handling strategies acknowledge this need as well. The mechanism by which many suggest doing this is a sort of note inbox. Quick notes go into it like it is a queue and then get processed later.

I’ve found that the bullet journal method is a better place to put these types of quick notes. The journal produces a more durable log rather than a queue which is thrown away. So it ends up producing more value over the long term. The journal also sees itself as a more general and holistic system. It accepts more inputs and is more adaptable to my needs.

In the inbox abstraction people expect you to process the queue implicitly. In the bullet journal method each day starts with the process of moving notes from the daily log to the next daily log. That steps is a natural point for the log to be processed and prioritized. Some entries get moved forward to the next day, but sometimes journal entries which are concerned with tracking the year, month, and week are updated.

In doing that we’ve just moved across time scales in our fast thinking system. The inbox abstraction is treating your notes as things to be processed and pushed to a task management system too, but it forgets an important element of good database design - keep a log to reconstruct the past. It is perfectly fine to treat that log as a queue, but it isn’t a queue. A queue doesn’t let you reconstruct the past: that is what a log does.

Not a lot of people talk about the bullet journal using this sort of language. People who post their journals publicly are spending a lot of time on form rather than function, which is fine from an athestic point of view, but rather against the spirit which motivates the use of a bullet journal methodology. In practice, the Bullet Journal isn’t so great for art using the default spreads. It is great for controlling attention and keeping track of things when there is little time available to do so.

I think and feel that this confuses most public discussion of the bullet journal. People don’t tend to meditate on the performance aspect, because the pretty is what is most visible. So a lot of people confuse using the bullet journal method with drawing pretty pictures.

The Bullet Journal was created to solve a particular problem for Ryder. He has ADHD. He needed to be able to control his attention and work with his fast thinking mind. That is what the journal helped him to do.

So if you’re using the bullet journaling methodology, you shouldn’t adopt an inbox methodology, but if you are using the inbox technique it is probably worthwhile to upgrade your inbox by transitioning to a bullet journal. If you don’t take any notes at all though, this is a place to start. Critically, don’t be confused by why you are using the system. People will draw pretty pictures and because they are pretty that is what you will see from people using the Bullet Journal, but that isn’t the point of the Bullet Journal.

Sprint to Smart

You have to be real time. So I covered the speed aspect of note taking first. Now I’m going to move on to getting more and more value from your notes over time.

How to Take Smart Notes: One Simple Technique to Boost Writing, Learning and Thinking – for Students, Academics and Nonfiction Book Writers is a book by Sönke Ahrens. It is the best book I’ve encountered on the subject of note taking. Sönke is one of the authors who realizes that our mediums are part of the thinking process, though like many, he limits this idea that our environments are thinking environments to just the idea that our writing is our thinking environment.

This is a common error: mediums have natural incentives and incentives control behavior. So mediums end up influence what is produced within them. They aren’t neutral. Since in practice writing has better incentives for thinking, it is the natural medium for good thinking. People recognize this and end up thinking that writing is thinking. In reality, all our interactions with the environment are a part of thinking, writing just tends to be incentivize better thinking and other mediums tend to corrupt it.

What the book is really about though isn’t so much note taking in general as it is a specific note taking strategy. To oversimplify for the sake of communicating the main idea, there was a person who was not formally educated who innovated in the methodology that he used to take notes. This innovation led to his notes becoming such a powerful tool that he leveraged them to produce upwards of fifty books. So great was the enhancement to his productivity that it stood out notably and became an object of study based on the merit of its enhancement.

The actual note taking methodology itself can be described very simply as two big ideas. Write notes as paragraphs ready for publication and link those paragraphs together in a graph. This is simple to say, but more profound in practice.

Graphs come up a lot when we are doing work. As an example, when we are writing a book, we might encounter a point in which there is a question that is asked in the book and an answer is needed to that question. In order to answer the question we need to research the answer. Then we need to write the answer. We have choices about how we could go about doing this, because this sort of problem will come up more than once over the course of a book.

We could plan out what we are going to create from the beginning and then do the work. Alternatively we could keep taking the next step as it becomes natural. Or we could operate somewhere in the middle, doing up-front planning sometimes and not following natural continuations at other times. In writing circles people call use the label architect and gardener to describe the difference between these approaches. In software engineering people use the labels waterfall and agile. Regardless of the label this is just the ordering of certain types of work. The important point is that we have a graph structure that represents that work and we are choosing how to expand that graph.

In recognizing that these graphs exist and that we need to fill them in eventually we can structure out note taking process in accordance with the work that we already suspect that we will need to do. Even though we might not be writing a book yet, we assume that we are. Then we write the natural continuations as we take notes and interact with our existing body of notes.

In a traditional note taking system, writing a book is a task that we do. In this note taking system books are written as a side-effect of expanding our notes. A person could become a published author by extracting a walk from the graph of their notes instead of by explciitly setting out to write a book by creating that same graph.

Although simple to explain to someone who is already familiar with both the web and writing the combination of mediums has surprising power and is worth reading the book to understand more fully. Especially since there are many other valuable insights about note taking in the book.

The thing is, the act of writing these larger paragraphs represents real cognitive investment. You’re basically using your note taking process to do what people often think of as homework - writing essays or truly ambitious work - writing a book. Or more to the point - you’re thinking. In practice that means that this method of taking notes requires time. It doesn’t fit well into our real time working environments. It is a system that works very well as a processing step which goes after the initial inboxing work. It is a system for developing thoughts. It is basically solving the problem of thinking about the notes we take and then getting value from those notes in the future.

This process - encoding your notes so as to be walked on a graph - is extremely powerful. This isn’t just a technique you can use to increase the amount of writing you do via your notes. It is also a technique of memory. The memory palace technique encodes facts into a format that can be parsed later so as to produce knowledge and it is also stored in a graph: a walk through a place that you know. Ahrens is quick to dimiss memory techniques in the book and his writing on them comes across as deeply ignorant of the field. So he doesn’t discuss this and ends up arguing that graph walking and good encoding of information isn’t wortwhile when he discusses memory techniques.

In a certain sense, I don’t want to recommend Ahrens because of this intellectual laziness, but at the same time the integration of graph walking structures into the note taking system is too brilliant to not encourage. It is one of the cleverest things you can do to improve your note taking process.

Conclusion

I want to point out something. If we look at good database systems they have the same properties as the combined form of these two note taking systems. They have a log. They process that log to produce a graph structure. That graph structure can then be queried to fetch information. The reason I’m thinking my note taking process has gotten better is because I’ve seen parallels with the design of information retrieval systems emerge in my note taking process.