How to Take Smart Notes

I prefer the thinner lines of a 0.5mm pencil, but I'm old enough that it's pretty obvious I'm never going to learn to not break the tiny leads.

Edit: A Japanese friend introduced me to Pentel's black erasers. I've found what appears to be the same product in the United States, but they're shorter, so I generally try to find some place I can buy them from over there, despite the extra cost.

I have seen so many play-things in the note-space that I want to give just a few stats from my 6yo personal emacs setup:

I capture and refile into 14 .orgs indexed at varying depth using the agenda ag and helm for search as needed.

grep "\\" bmarks/*.org |wc etc say there are 5669 notes, 62652 lines 437644 words 3,663,683 bytes total.

since 3/14 I have annotated 111 pdfs, linked many more, captured 508 images. 300+ days logged before switching to a weekly format 201 weeks ago.

I can attest to the sentiment that there is actual communication going on between creator and such a system. :) a multi-media key takes me into capture and either a line-oriented popup for 'jots', a floating window or a full-screen distraction free mode where i can quickly see, that the great thing i discovered yesterday slipped from my mind 5 years ago.

The most important improvement to my note taking was realizing that, like Luhmann, I wasn't taking notes but curating an exo-brain.

I had seen emacs as a rinky-dink over-complicated under-documented religious thing -- and not as the low-stress 'does everything except long-lines really well and never crashes' thing that is now at the heart of my computing life. So.. to continue learning emacs for the next 30 years is definitely on my agenda because its worth it for the quality without a name .. absent elsewhere.

It was cool to see how his manual linking (not just tags) would force him to review the neighborhood he would place his cards in. I neglect that sometimes and so the epiphanies and understanding I get from integrating content have to sometimes wait a cycle or two or come when i check things in or close out the day.

Anyway? My point? Invest yourself into org-mode and take notes for a few years to learn how to take better notes while building something that can last you a whole life long. it worked for me. ty!

Keeping stuff in your head while thinking with the stuff in your head changes it. The same with memories. If you have not noticed this, please challenge the statement: Keeping stuff in your head does not work; you need to externalize in order to use your differential engine, aka brain in order to 'think.'

Having said all this, I think because I am. not the other way 'round! everything else that you may think is thinking, maybe emotional/felt or aesthetic judging, would come from deeper down the stack.

Anyway, tell me about these other media.. and show me how you're not driving complex symbolic insights with them!

its all reasoning by analogy for us anyway :)

I can learn like that, without any thinking at all!

We can only learn anchored in feedback, and if you can give yourself the feedback while writing, talking out loud alone, or better yet, with a listener, then you get feedback that keeps you thinking.

Verbalization and conversation maybe media, but writing, coding, sketching definitely are places where I notice my thinking.. What other 'media' did you have in mind?