Note notes

I tried a lot of note taking systems.

• Tried a Tiddlywiki. Used it for one day; half the time was spent wrangling “tags” that I never looked at again.
• Read about “Zettlekasten method” stuff. Spent more time breaking notes into single ideas than I spent taking notes.
• Got intimidated by Obsidian and Notion.
• Dont want to learn a whole new editor to use org mode. (Sorry.)

Eventually I decided that computer notes just weren’t for me. I always took notes in class on real notebooks anyway, guess that was good enough. Then I accidentally found the note taking system that did work for me: the loose pile of markdown files.

The best way to take notes is to actually take notes

The best note-taking system is “whatever one lets you dump as many words onto the page as you can, as fast as possible”. If your note-taking system is getting in the way of taking notes, pick a different one that gets in your way less.

I had to forcibly break up ideas for the sake of crosslinking them in the Zettlekasten system, and then didn’t end up doing anything interesting with the crosslinks anyway. Sometimes I avoided writing about something because I didn’t know how to break it up. The sacrifice was never worth it. Spend more time typing and less time thinking about how to type.

I often never look at the hard-copy notes I create in class, but I still do better when I take them. The act of writing solidifies things, and turns out that’s regardless of longhand or typed. I should have took that to heart when I started reseraching computer notes – the computer doesn’t have to be a fancy part of the system. It can just be a big notebook.

You just have to write.

A lot.