> For example, you could memorize the fact that arteries are red and veins are blue. This is not a "fact", it's just a common convention used in medical drawings. The actual fact is that arteries are bright red, and veins are a dull red.
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How to Take Smart Notes
31–40 of 116 posts
Re: How to Take Smart Notes
#32Simply keeping a list of ideas has made a huge difference for me. Instead of feeling distracted by an idea when I should be focusing on something else, storing it somewhere means I can come back to it. Reviewing the idea list inspires me and gives me something to do when I'm bored. Finding articles or papers related to an idea, or capturing random thoughts about it is as easy as dumping it in a folder (eg in Dropbox…
Any chance you still have that article around? I would like to read it if possible.
I'm not able to find it, but it wasn't much more than a blog post exposing the points I mention in the edited comment. If anyone can remember it (it was a HN post), that'd be great!
Re: How to Take Smart Notes
#33Note-taking seems to have gained popularity on HackerNews over the past few weeks (or my attention has been biased towards these submissions, at least).
I've long been interested in the domain of "personal knowledge engineering" and this clearly seems a common thread within our community. As a brief overview of the "SOTA:"
* Emacs and Vim users skew towards Org-mode or Vim wiki.
* Roam Research is sort of a recent web-based alternative.
* There's a lot of competition in the domain of fully-fledged note taking apps. Evernote has long been viewed as a king of note-taking but lost its edge over time (bad editor, bugs, lack of attention to their users). Memex seems to be gaining popularity even though their software looks somewhat buggy at the moment.
* Otherwise, people naturally develop their own (similar) systems. I myself have independently developed a custom-made Vim wiki before starting research into this topic. It basically consists of a few grepping/Vim aliases to search/create Markdown in a `~/.notes` folder, backed up to GitHub. `mod+-` is bound to an i3 sratchpad where Vim is constantly open to `~/.notes/index.md`. This drastically reduces friction when making new notes.
In any case, seems interesting that a lot of the personal note-taking systems have separately adopted similar principles to what Zettelkasten proposes:
1. Heavy reliance on tagging
2. Some sort of deep linking
3. Preference to making small, independent "knowledge chunks"
Re: How to Take Smart Notes
#34Interesting the first few principles are not about note-taking, but writing in general. If you believe in the power of the written word to drive clarity (e.g. as in Amazon-style 6-page narratives), these principles are gold: Principle #1: Writing is not the outcome of thinking; it is the medium in which thinking takes place Principle #2: Do your work as if writing is the only thing that matters Principle #5: Standard…
I vigorously conquer principle #5: standardisation is the enemy to creativity
The author has two main points:
1. That the creative part should be applied to first creating the standard, and then when dealing with the ideas, deal with the ideas, not the process.
2. That a standardized process makes creating easier because you're not trying to do it all at once.
It's hard to argue with either one of these. Additionally, constraints are often very helpful in the creative process. Let's say you're developing a character for a novel. Would you rather face a blank page or a character profile? You're still free to break the standard as necessary, but you've at least got some kind of foundation to stand on. Even being a hacker is about being creative in the face of standard processes...
Re: How to Take Smart Notes
#35Re: How to Take Smart Notes
#36Note-taking seems to have gained popularity on HackerNews over the past few weeks (or my attention has been biased towards these submissions, at least). I've long been interested in the domain of "personal knowledge engineering" and this clearly seems a common thread within our community. As a brief overview of the "SOTA:" * Emacs and Vim users skew towards Org-mode or Vim wiki. * Roam Research is sort of a recent we…
Any comparisons between Roam and DynaList?
Re: How to Take Smart Notes
#37Is there an app for that? Seriously.
I believe this is what Roam[1] is kind of built for, whether they intended it or not. I haven't used it but was inspired to take another look at it after this article. [1] https://roamresearch.com/
Has anyone given this a try whose also used by analysts in the past? I'm curious how they compare
Re: How to Take Smart Notes
#38Note-taking seems to have gained popularity on HackerNews over the past few weeks (or my attention has been biased towards these submissions, at least). I've long been interested in the domain of "personal knowledge engineering" and this clearly seems a common thread within our community. As a brief overview of the "SOTA:" * Emacs and Vim users skew towards Org-mode or Vim wiki. * Roam Research is sort of a recent we…
> 1. Heavy reliance on tagging
> 2. Some sort of deep linking
This makes me think of Ted Nelson’s Docuverse [0]. Thanks for the note-taking review.
Re: How to Take Smart Notes
#39Earlier quoted context omitted.
Any chance you still have that article around? I would like to read it if possible.
I'm not able to find it, but it wasn't much more than a blog post exposing the points I mention in the edited comment. If anyone can remember it (it was a HN post), that'd be great!
maybe this one:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10513015
Re: How to Take Smart Notes
#40The most important improvement to my note taking was the elimination of a computer. Ideas, digressions, illustrations, concerns, and more are difficult to translate to a machine using a keyboard or mouse. A tablet is better, but the fidelity of a drawing app isn't as good as paper.
Paper, it turns out, is always "on". There's no battery to worry about, no booting up and loading the app, and no Slack notification interrupting your flow. Paper calms you, because you know it never ever interrupts.
I've really enjoyed evolving the tools I use for notes. Right now I take all notes in a large dotted moleskin using a Rotring Pro. Turns out the more enjoyable a tool is to use, the more likely you are to use it. The notebook is the lower end Moleskin ($20 for a 3-pack), and that's a nice balance between quality and feeling comfortable "wasting" a page.