Clickbait title: It’s just goddamn text files, how the fuck did you mess up text files.

Usual disclaimers

Obviously I take notes to remember things. I have sung the praises of Obsidian before and have since not been using it much, although many articles of mine are written in it.

Look this article will have immense overlap with the best video on note-taking culture.

What do I mean by note-taking culture? Really, I am including an incredibly wide range of productivity tools and “tips” surrounding text. The idea that spending time creating custom organisational systems are worth it. I will neither give a “takedown” of this culture, nor will I try to sell you on my way of doing things, but I will try to convince myself I was correct in never wasting my time on this stuff.

being a bit mean

The core argument for these organisational systems I think are born are from the opposite: Don’t you just hate it when you’ve got chaos and can’t find the thing you’re looking for? I find this emotionally compelling but from my personal experience it just doesn’t happen much to me. Basically ever since the invention of the search bar (or grep) I haven’t felt much grief about not finding something digital.

Right drilling deeper into the efficiency tutorial brained, maybe it’s not about the existence of access, but the ease of access. If we connect our “notes” or whatever and have an AI suggest new ones and we walk BFS on our obsidian graph, we get to unlock new connections? I think that’s what the “second brain” is part about. Eh, I think there may be value in just putting “like with like” to have a list of “just xyz”, but like the moment you get into tagging systems or individual connections, I do wonder how many notes people are writing. Are you making a new one for every single paragraph you read?

Again, not meant to be a takedown, but really I just don’t even know what kind of content one could ingest to take that many notes. I think the closest I could get to is when I took pen and paper notes during every class at university. And you know what? It sucked, my notes sucked, were bloated and had not focus on what was actually important. The understanding effort was replaced with writing down effort. The main benefit I derived is that I was so busy I could not go on my phone.

I find basically every graph-based solution with links and backlinks to be fundamentally flawed in its effort to compete with THE HUMAN BRAIN. Every link that you draw in these systems tends to aim for the “obvious” “easily justifiable”. I think there’s the real danger to treating it like Wikipedia. And Wikipedia is superb for when you don’t know much about the topic, but any statistician isn’t served by the blue link to the exponential distribution, because you gotta have that shit in your blood or understanding any deeper article is helpless.

Let me take another swing: Any connection you come up with whilst forcing yourself to link things between your notes to make a pretty graph will be one that you come up with easily and as such is not of much use to future you. Any connection that is based on some objective reality like “both of these papers are about topic xyz” is better served by just putting both of them next to each other in a bulleted list.

on efficiency and hours spent

I think productivity products tend to aim for some black hole in people’s soul where they do not feel “productive enough”. They sell you an imaginary bullet made out of mainly the toolbox fallacy. Really whenever I found myself in this mindset, the main problem I found to be in my way to doing the thing is the fact I was more comfortable watching YouTube videos about these productivity tools or the thing. Because doing the thing is scary, because the moment you start doing it it becomes real and all the real deficiencies manifest. And the same will happen with your note-taking system.

No plan survives contact with reality. Basically any note-taking system that requires immense rigour and self-discipline is doomed for me, I will abandon it the moment I can, unless I literally staked my entire self-worth upon it. Because here’s the thing, because these solutions tend to be born from your avoidance to actual engage with the material at hand, they tend to be always a second job you also have to do. They are taking hours away from you that you could spend time actually doing the thing.

Personally, what I found for me is that the main indicator of how skillful I am at something is correlated with the number of hours I spend in dedicated study. And basically whenever I found the world to be unfair because someone else unduly better than me at something, it turns out it’s the thing they’ve been spending 30 hours a week on for a decade. There are certainly methods which work better or worse, but in my humble opinion, these tend to be obvious for me. You will see a productivity increase from eliminating noise and being well-fed, the stuff you (should) notice quickly.

So if it’s this easy to just spend the hours, why doesn’t everyone just do it? First of all, many people don’t have the privilege to. Which to me also explains a lot about why people with the income to take time off have an easier time at hobbies. Secondly, because building real skills tends to mean being forced out of your comfort zone permanently, facing adversity. You tend to need some kind of carrot that keeps you going, be it competitiveness, aestheticism or needing to survive.

hypocrite much with your blogpost?

Let me unify this seemingly anti-note-taking stance with the fact that I indeed try to write more. I am actually pro-note-taking. In a simple text file, on your own time, with full focus.

The brain is a wobbly bit of meat that is really good at convincing itself that its abstract ideas are a lot more fleshed out than they actually are. This is what I mean with it threshing against actually manifesting these ideas. The moment you try to put them into the real world, all the gaps you were subconsciously filling in show up and you need to deal with them.

I find text to be the perfect low-effort medium to bring general thoughts into reality. You are forced to arrange words in a fixed order, which are more or less read the same way by people who speak your language. And you can do it so quickly, especially if you’re good at typing. So the activity I am doing right now is basically a litmus test for me and my own thoughts.

When trying to understand a complex topic, echoing every highschool teacher, I cannot understate just how important it is to someone phrase things in your own words. This is the same ideas “bringing things into reality”. An alternative is explaining it to a friend.

So if you’re for example someone who watches a lecture and only writes down what to you seem to be the keypoints, I think you are perfectly quizzing yourself on your understanding. Similarly if you go home and write a summary whilst looking at the slides. Or when you discuss it with a friend.

The problem I have with note-taking fundamentally is I think that it puts too much stake in the finished result. The process is 99% of what matters!! Unless you are publishing this as a book, you do not need to care that much.

It. does. not. need. to. be. pretty.

It needs to be real.