Notes aren’t a record of my thinking process. They are my thinking process. – Richard Feynman
We need a reliable and simple external structure to think in that compensates for the limitations of our brains.
Only if we know that everything is taken care of, from the important to the trivial, can we let go and focus on what is right in front of us.
The more you become interested in something, the more you will read and think about it, the more notes you will read and think about it, the more notes you will collect and the more likely it is that you will generate questions from it. It might be exactly what you were interested in from the beginning, but it is more likely that your interests will have changed - that is what insight does.
Better thinking through accrued knowledge recorded in permanent notes for your convenience and understanding
makePermanentNote :: MessyThoughts -> PermanentNotes
researchTopicOld :: GoogleQueryString -> TemporaryBrainStorage -> FinishTaskAtHandM ()
researchTopicNew :: QueryString -> PermanentNotes -> FinishTaskAtHandM () -- side effect: improved quality of [PermanentNotes] and stored in ExternalBrainNoteSystemThese are easy to write, but what will the end result be after a year?
How will your permanent notes help you think?
A permanent note on how you debugged a tricky Template Haskell issue might be useful, but what could be more useful?
Perhaps a Template Haskell permanent note covering the most relevant concepts to you.
If your permanent note isn’t more convenient than a web search, you need to figure out how it can be or consider it might not be worth recording.
We tend to call extremely slow writers, who always try to write as if for print, perfectionists. Even though it sounds like praise for extreme professionalism, it is not: a real professional would wait until it was time for proofreading, so he or she can focus on one thing at a time.
How do you plan for insight which, by definition, cannot be anticipated?
Imagine if we went through life learning only what we planned to learn or being explicitly taught. I doubt we would have learned to speak. … The best ideas are the ones we haven’t anticipated anyway.
There is a big focus on messily recording a few important things and letting the most important pieces emerge.
This is one reason some people refer to their external system as a digital garden
It can be easy to want exhaustively write everything about everything you know, but resist the urge…
Note down only the vital things, then if it’s important it’ll come up again and you can focus more energy on improving it.
In this way you emergently create your own external brain containing a body of knowledge most important to you.
So for instance I might have Template Haskell is great, Template Haskell sucks, and then one day I might decide to try and get to the bottom of things in Is Template Haskell great or does it suck? where those pages will be linked to, but the new page will be wholly different.
This might be random thoughts or ideas through the work day
Take these while reading things. This should be a summary of things that are useful and relevant to you and your personal thinking and thinking you’ll learn to do within your external notes system.
For instance, while reading the Haskell wiki article on Template Haskell and summarizing my understanding of all of the concepts or just the most important to me.
The focus here is on your thinking, novel ideas, and making things easier to understand and locate via search for future you.
Example - Adding ‘The Golden Circle’ to my smart notes (10m, we’ll skip around a lot though)
Example article: My Product is My Garden (3m or so)
note how he doesn’t get everything immediately, and when he tries to think with his notes he notices something missing
There is a symbiotic (aka mutually beneficial) relationship between creating notes and trying to think with them.
Each time you try to use your notes and they are missing something, that’s an opportunity to strengthen them.
The economics are up to you to decide, but you can imagine accrued knowledge that you refine in this manner could become very valuable on some topics.
note the visual difference between fleeting and literaturee notes in the video here
See how the literature note on My product is my garden spawned the idea for a permanent note on Bootstrapping a startup
and then when creating the permanent note how he started with an outline or index of the things involved in that
A wiki is for reference material typically, which your notes may hold, but your notes system should take on it’s own grammar.
You should always be thinking about not just how to write things in your own words, but how to write things in your second brains words so you can link to those concepts.
Weekly tasks, what I need to do, might be helpful for reading articles
Seems challening to use to “think through” the day and finish work given the variety of things we work on. (paraphrasing heavily by Cody)
Cody: Uses mostly for personal stuff recently, but used to use for work a lot. Using for work again recently.
System Crafters Live! - Can You Apply Zettelkasten in Emacs? (most of video is editor/platform agnostic and good Zettlekasten/smart note taking applicable, very high quality)
This book aims to fill this gap by showing you how to efficiently turn your thoughts and discoveries into convincing written pieces and build up a treasure of smart and interconnected notes along the way.
Huge, but he goes through his entire process.
