Note Taking

Note taking is broadly the process of writing things down. Its a pretty all-encompassing term, so I'll talk about something much more specific.

If you write something down, you probably want to then be able to access that thing later, and you probably never want to forget it. With these two constraints, you need a system that actually scales, infinitely.

How do the largest repositories of knowledge in the world scale to millions of pages? What sort of sophisticated systems and workflows and apps and acronyms do they use to do this?

Flat files of plain text, in a single directory, with search. Why don't folders work? Imagine organizing the English Wikipedia into folders. It would be a MONUMENTAL task. What if you got it wrong? What if in 10 years you wanted to organize things ever so slightly differently? You'd have another MONUMENTAL task. It just doesn't work.

I won't advocate for any kind of system other than this. If you have these notes, you also need to be able to link between them.

Why do all this?

The most obvious thing you have after taking notes is something that you can go back to later and remember. Imagine never forgetting anything, ever again. It's pretty nice.

But there's something else. To write something down, you have to know about it. It's amazing how thoughts and ideas seem so clear and well thought out in your mind, and how they are just not when you go to write them down.

Excuse me while I talk about this idea, because I think it's really cool. If you think all this highfalutin note taking talk is nonsense, you can skip this paragraph. Memory is an abstract concept in your mind. I don't know what it is, but I know what it does for me. I can think of something now, and then think about that later. If I want to remember something, I could try to do that in my own head, or I could write it on a sticky note that I'll see later. When I need to recall something, I might remember that though in my head later, or I might read the sticky note. These aren't different things. There's nothing about memory that can only happen in your head. Whatever happened on that sticky note, it IS memory. Thought, and recollection, are the same way. When you think about these processes like this, you now get the choice of where to do them. Do I trust my own head more than a sticky note? Definitely not. My own brain would be the absolute last place I would choose to remember something! That's basically the answer of "why?".

But doesn't all this note taking stuff take a lot of time?

It's quite the opposite. I've got a few thousand notes, which means I've made 2-3 of them every day, on average. Of course anyone who's brain works like mine knows that means most days I made 1 note, and some days I made 20.

Every 6 months or so, I download all the photos off my phone onto my computer. Because I happen to use an iPhone and a computer running NixOS, this process is significantly more difficult than it should be. It took me like half an hour to figure out the first time. And then I wrote it down, and now I never have to re-learn how do it.

It's also important to remember that the maintenance overhead of a properly simple note system is zero. If what you wrote down was true yesterday, its true today, and it will be true in a decade. It never needs to go away. As you learn more about something, you can fill in the gaps in your knowledge, but then its there, and it will always be there.