Note taking

You may notice that this post uses a lot of semicolons (;) and em-dashes (—). That’s not because I used AI, it’s because I recently decided to start making an effort to use more punctuation, and to use it more correctly. It sucks that we have to defend ourselves from “AI allegations” whenever we use em-dashes, but that’s the world we live in, unfortunately.

I am very interested in note-taking, certainly much more so than the average person. Notes are part of pretty much everyone’s life—writing shopping lists, jotting down some quick thoughts, or elaborate personal knowledge management systems—but most people likely don’t read and think about various methods and characteristics of note-taking much. Well, I do. Not because I think doing so will make me a productivity beast, or because I think it will change my life in some fundamental way, but because I find it interesting, and I’m weirdly fascinated with the idea of note-taking.

There are many reasons why I love notes so much. I tend to have lots of thoughts, try to remember lots of things, and get very anxious at the idea of having forgotten something. Notes are a fantastic way to help cope with that! Whenever I think of something worth remembering, or get told something I’ll have to act on, or receive critical information in any other way, I try to write it down in my notes. This makes it so that my mind doesn’t have to be cluttered with thoughts I don’t need at the moment, making me anxious and distracted; I can instead trust that everything important will be in my notes. In the words of David Allen, “The brain is for having ideas, not storing them.”

I also love thinking of my notes as a large, comprehensive repository of knowledge I’ve created, one I can draw on whenever I need to recall some tidbit of information, find out how something is done, or remember how I approached solving an issue in the past. I strive for my notes to be the first place I search for something, before going to DuckDuckGo (or Google, or Kagi, or whatever search engine you prefer). I’ve reached a point where sometimes I will look in my notes for something before searching anywhere else, and find exactly what I was looking for. And that always feels great.

My journey with note-taking was certainly not an easy one. At the very beginning of my obsession, I was interested in the wider idea of productivity, and specifically productivity apps. More specifically, I was in love with Notion. I came across some people on YouTube who were using Notion, creating elaborate dashboards, and databases, and whatever else it is that people make in Notion, and I was instantly sucked in. I liked (and still like) creating systems to manage every part of my life, so my fascination with Notion should come as no surprise to anyone familiar with it. Unfortunately, I was (and still am) terrible at it.

What stopped me from ever actually making effective use of the systems I so loved crafting was my perfectionism. Whenever I wanted to create a new note or task, I would get so caught up in thinking what the best placement, tags, properties, etc., were for it, that I would end up anxious to the point of giving up and not making the note at all. Also, apps like Notion require you to follow a pretty rigid system, because they’re, at their core, folder-based. When starting out with a system I guessed how my notes would be best categorized, and created folders accordingly. This never worked out. My perfectionism stopped me from putting a note in a good-enough folder, so creating one would entail not only the aforementioned panic about how to place it within my system, but also modifying my whole system to better accommodate the note I wanted to create. As you can imagine, all this work and anxiety just to create one note was a bit… much.

Principles

Throughout the years, after my rocky start with notes involving Notion, I read, watched, experimented, and eventually managed to come away with some ideas, or rules, that greatly inform how I take notes, and which help me make note-taking useful and enjoyable. I’ve also learned about many note-taking systems, and created (a rough outline of) one that works pretty well for me (more about that later), but I believe these core principles are much more important than trying to adopt any particular system. Importantly, in my experience, most of the difficulty lay not in discovering these ideas, but in “accepting” them—learning to appreciate their importance and apply them when taking notes.

If you leave this post having learned one thing and one thing only, let it be this: the worst thing you can do is not write something down. This might seem obvious, or stupid, or trivial, but it’s something I’m still struggling with, and something I think is very important. This might not be the case for you, but like I mentioned, whenever I want to make a note I get so hang up on all these details—how to name the note, where to place it, how to connect it to other notes, what tags to apply, etc., etc.—that I end up not making the note at all. It’s crucial to remember that no matter how imperfect a note is, it will always be more useful than no note at all. After all, even a horrible note, named by smashing random keys and written haphazardly, has a chance of being found when you need it. You can search for keywords within the notes, if using a computer, and you can always randomly stumble upon it, potentially finding it valuable. And even if you never see the note again, the very act of making it down can still be helpful¹.

One way in which that is true is through the generation effect, a phenomenon whereby information is more likely to be retained and understood if it is written down in our own words. This is because in order to write a note about a concept, one must understand it deeply; it’s certainly possible to copy a passage without any understanding, but attempting to rephrase it in a way forces us to thoroughly understand a given idea. Furthermore, it’s often much easier to understand what was meant by something if we have written it ourselves—we are used to our own way of thinking and writing, so reading notes phrased in a way natural to us can make it so that we can glance their meaning more easily and quickly than if they were copied verbatim from a source.²

Attempting to write a note in our own words may also reveal that we have not actually understood a given concept. This often happens to me, when I, for instance, try to write a note about an idea contained in a chapter I’ve just read and realise that I cannot. This shows that I haven’t really understood what was said, and prompts me to read the chapter again, perhaps more carefully. This is connected to the popular idea of teaching something to someone being a great way to learn it; writing a note in our own words is essentially the same as explaining to someone, and as such it requires the same level of understanding.

A principle foundational to my current notes, and one that finally solved the problems with note-taking I had, was the idea of connecting, linking notes. At its core, this is a very simple concept—notes are “linked” to each other as connections between them occur to the note taker. Many digital apps have built-in functionality for linking notes, which makes it very easy to create and follow links, but it’s also possible to connect notes when writing on paper or in an app lacking said functionality; you can simply assign a numerical (or alphanumerical) ID to every note, and, on a given note, write down the IDs of notes you want to link it to.

A common selling point of this practice is its reported helpfulness in the learning process. Many claim, and I would agree, that linking concepts and ideas to ones that are in some way connected can be very beneficial, and is likely to result in increased understanding of the topics as well as in new, creative ideas forming. Indeed, our brains learn new information by connecting it to information we already have, so having a note-taking system that follows a similar paradigm can be a good idea.

The aspect of linking notes potentially most helpful to me is the idea of emergent structure. This is the idea of a structure emerging from a collection of notes as new connections are made, instead of being created beforehand and strictly enforced. Instead of creating folders and placing notes inside one of them, you simply create notes and link them to whichever notes are relevant. This approach is much more flexible: a note can be linked to many other notes, links in apps are usually bi-directional (meaning you can see notes linking to and linked from a given note), and it is very easy to create and remove connections as you see fit. I find the immense flexibility very helpful; I like creating “index” notes, which are simply lists of links to notes (for example a list of lecture notes from a given subject). This is similar to folders, in that notes are listed together based on some trait, but it’s much more flexible, because notes can be listed in many different “index” notes, and can be removed or added to such indexes easily.

This also means that notes can be found from many different angles, so to speak. The links create metaphorical pathways between notes—one notes links to another, which links to another, which links to another—which can be traversed freely. A system of interlinked notes will have many unique pathways, which makes reaching a note possible in many different ways.

I often forget what a note was called, but can sometimes remember what it was linked to. For example, I might be looking for the note on a book I read, but only remember who recommended me that book, not the book’s title. Then, links allow me to find this note by viewing the note related to the person in question, and seeing what notes include links to the person’s note.

Linking, in my experience, really does help us improve our understanding of any given subject matter, as well as find new, interesting ideas. We rarely learn things in a vacuum—most often, as we learn connections will occur to us naturally, and it is nice to have an established framework for acknowledging and permanently marking these connections.

Linking is both a form of very flexible organising, and of creatively creating connections between ideas. The ease with which I can now organise notes is truly not to be underestimated. Naturally, your mileage may vary, but I’ve found this concept to be of extreme help in writing and systematising my notes.

Lastly but not leastly (I’m keeping that), bullet points! I’ve often felt the (internal) pressure to make my notes look very professional, so I made desperate (and futile) attempts to write all my notes in strictly formatted prose, avoiding mental shortcuts. This was, obviously, pretty exhausting and annoying (especially considering that English is not my first language³). Bullet points allow me to fool my brain into thinking that the notes I write are, indeed, very professional, while also making it very easy to quickly express thoughts. For me, structuring notes with bullet points, including nested ones, works well, so that’s what I do.

Systems

Firstly, it’s essential to note that note-taking and approaches to it are extremely personal. What works for you might not work for others, and what works for others might not work for you! I initially fell into the trap of searching for a system I could adopt and religiously follow. That didn’t work; all of the systems I came across had some aspect that didn’t suit me, and trying to follow them would have just caused unnecessary annoyances. I would even go a step further and say that modifying existing systems is also not the best idea—instead, I think you should study and use existing systems as inspirations for your own, but eventually craft it from scratch. This will ensure that your system contains only the principles that resonate best with you. Which, of course, doesn’t mean your system can’t, or shouldn’t, end up almost exactly the same as an existing one; if that happens, it just means that that system turned out to suit you really well.

Your system can also be as formal or informal as you like. Personally, my “system” is just a loose set of principles and guidelines (like “link notes” or “use index notes”)—because I found everything else too constraining—and a collection of situational tips (like “in situations X, do Y”).

Zettelkasten is a very cool system, and one that mine is heavily based on. It is almost certainly the system that resonated with me and made sense to me the most out of all the ones that I’ve come across. Now, if you’re hoping for a good explanation of Zettelkasten, I’d recommend reading the book How to Take Smart Notes by Sönke Ahrens, or frankly anything other than this blog post. I’ll do my best, though.

Zettelkasten, a system developed by one Niklas Luhmann, is extremely simple, but it is in no small part in its simplicity that its greatness lies. The systems is created around the “slip-box”, which was originally just a box where Niklas placed cards containing his notes, but can now be a digital folder on your computer. The system’s most important principle is the concept of linking notes together, much like what I described excessively a few paragraphs before. Zettelkasten also has the idea of atomic notes⁴—small, importantly self-contained, notes. They should communicate only a single idea, and do so without relying on anything else; that is they should be able to be understood without having to look at anything else.

In an ideal world, I’d probably use something almost exactly like Zettelkasten. Unfortunately, our world is far from ideal, and I from a person who could ever write perfectly atomic notes, linking them with perfect conceptual connections. I try, and sometimes I do, but it is what it is.

Tools

When I was first starting out with note-taking, I thought the app I was using was by far the most important thing. I didn’t think in terms of systems or principles, I thought in terms of apps. Now, I longer believe the app is important to my notes in any essential way.

Quite the contrary, actually. I want my note-taking system to be as independent from any app I happen to be using as possible. The thought of losing all my notes because an app broke, or lost my data, or went out of business, is absolutely terrifying to me. As with most things, with notes I’m of the view that if it’s not an actual file, on my actual computer, that I can do whatever I want with, it doesn’t actually belong to me. And since to me it’s non-negotiable that my notes should belong to me, I never want to use any app that doesn’t store my files in a plain text⁵ format right on my computer.

Despite how largely unimportant an app is, having one that feels good to you and helps you write notes is great. Personally, I use Obsidian, which is really cool, feature-rich, and—of course—stores notes as regular files on my computer. Recently, I set it up with a nice pink accent colour, and, as stupid as that may sound, it genuinely makes me feel slightly more joyful when opening my notes, and I don’t think that’s entirely vain or pointless. Having a workspace that feels comfortable has been proven time and time again to be really beneficial to productivity, and what is a notes app if not a digital workspace.

A digital garden is a term that I learnt pretty recently which seems very interesting and appealing. There is no one clear definition of what a digital garden actually is, but, basically, it’s a way of posting to the internet alternative to blogging, where instead of having posts arranged chronologically, you have notes (or posts, ideas, seeds, or whatever else) which are linked together. A digital garden will usually evolve over time, with notes maturing and changing, and new connections being created. All this, importantly, happens in public view, with every web visitor being able to stroll into your garden and watch your thoughts grow. It’s common for people to publish parts of their regular notes as a digital garden. I’ve seen some people concerned that this would jeopardise privacy but there is no need to share all notes—it’s perfectly fine to pick and choose only the notes that you’re entirely comfortable sharing. Obsidian has many solutions for doing this.

Attitudes

There are two (stereotypical and exaggerated) types of people I’d like to highlight, when it comes to note-taking. One will wax lyrical about different note-taking systems, methods, and applications, and is likely to tell you that adopting their way of taking notes will save you thousands of hours, make you 100% more productive, and who knows what else. The other type will say that all this thinking about note-taking is a huge waste of time and that you should just stick to randomly jotting things down on paper or in any app that happened to be pre-installed on your phone.

This may seem surprising, seeing as I’ve just written a huge blog post about note-taking, but I’m actually much closer to the second type. I don’t think that a note-taking system or method exists that will, without fail, improve your life in any significant way. It definitely can benefit you, but I believe 80% of that benefit comes from just writing things down, wherever, and however.

However, all this is just very interesting to me. I like thinking about ways of taking notes, I like taking notes, and I love the idea of having a cool system of personal notes. This means that even if I get no benefit from it, and even if I waste 10 times as much time as I gain from doing this, it will have been worth it, since it’s simply fun for me.

But I wouldn’t want to force my enthusiasm or approach on anyone. If none of what I wrote about is interesting to you, and if you think you won’t benefit from any of those approaches, don’t use them. And if you’d like just one short piece of advice on note-taking—just take notes. Seriously. Just write things down. You’ve got a piece of paper? Great, write on that. Do you have a computer? Even better, download any one of the approximately ten thousand different note-taking apps and get going. Whenever you have a thought, an idea, something you need to remember, just write it down, and you probably won’t regret it later.

References

[1] P. A. Mueller and D. M. Oppenheimer, ‘The Pen Is Mightier Than the Keyboard: Advantages of Longhand Over Laptop Note Taking’, Psychol Sci, vol. 25, no. 6, pp. 1159–1168, June 2014, doi: 10.1177/0956797614524581.
[2] Hyde, ‘Over/Under #29 with Elizabeth Tai’. Accessed: Oct. 19, 2025. [Online]. Available: https://lazybea.rs/ovr-029/
[3] J. Hooks, ‘My blog is a digital garden, not a blog’. Accessed: Oct. 19, 2025. [Online]. Available: https://joelhooks.com/digital-garden/
[4] T. Forte, Building a Second Brain: A Proven Method to Organize Your Digital Life and Unlock Your Creative Potential. New York: Atria Books, 2022.
[5] M. Appleton, ‘A Brief History & Ethos of the Digital Garden’. Accessed: Oct. 19, 2025. [Online]. Available: https://maggieappleton.com/garden-history
[6] S. Ahrens, How to Take Smart Notes: One Simple Technique to Boost Writing, Learning and Thinking: For Students, Academics and Nonfiction Book Writers. North Charleston, SC: CreateSpace, 2017.

If you have any thoughts or comments please feel free to contact me.