Ask HN: What is a sustainable methodology for taking notes of your learning?

Namely: Things like mindmaps and lots of little individual connected nodes (e.g. Obsidian) appeal in theory to human minds, because that's how our minds work.

But for me, I realized they weren't good tools for this because my brain is much much better at doing this than the software.

Ah, yes then: The software is good at 1) writing things down verbatim for detail and 2) re-reminding me of them when I go to look at them. The other stuff, the thinking and the connections, that's ME. That's NOT the software.

So for me that means. What I look at on the computer needs to be dense and well organized, not a mess of nodes. Which usually leads back to bigger, simpler chunks. I still use http://zim-wiki.org, but try to minimize the number of pages.

(To go broader, yes, this has very much deepened my skepticism of AI and machine-sentience)

2. When you produce content, consider (A) what you want to achieve by producing the content, and (B) how you want to find the content later.

3. Use one global namespace for named concepts. Category / taxonomy / tags belongs in metadata.

Why the goals? If your system supports your goals, you will continue to use it and get value from it. If your system doesn't support your goals, it becomes tedious to use, and you'll abandon your notes.

I encourage you to put your notes publicly on the web. Public notes have URLs, and there's no easier way to read content. You're going to remember notes.yourname.com/THING, or just go via notes.yourname.com to list / search.

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My information architecture consists of named concepts, journals and metadata.

Named concepts is the top level. Wikipedia uses this structure. There's one global namespace with sufficiently qualified names. You are going to remember your note by this name. Disambiguate in your global names.

Journals are organized by date. The advantage of journals is that you don't have to name anything. In general, it's nice to start with a journal, and collect named concepts on demand. Journals don't have to be discoverable.

Metadata helps you discover and index your notes. Categories and tags go here. But don't go nuts on categorization, think about what those categories should achieve. Remember the fact boxes on Wikipedia? Those are driven by concept metadata. Sometimes it's better to embed a table or a nested list on a concept page than introduce metadata. "Is this helpful to understand the concept?" - put it on the page. "Is this helpful to find/index your content?" - it's metadata.

Let's say you want to learn FUSE (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filesystem_in_Userspace). Create a journal page for learning FUSE, and tag it as "open problem". Make sure you can list open problems. Each time you've got some time, open your FUSE journal, and work to understand something. Read the man page. Read wikipedia. Read the source. But annotate! Take notes in your journal as you go. When you revisit your FUSE journal, you can easily rediscover where you were last time, and decide where you want to go next.

I create links in two situations: (A) when I'm reading someone else's content, or (B) when I'm working on my own content.

When I'm reading someone else's content, I want to understand what they mean. I try to do that by building on other things I know. I also want to think further than the author. Apply it to my context.

When I'm creating my own content, I want to build on ideas. Refer to examples, compare to other ideas.

I second this, I found that I truly understand the material when I am in the position to explain it, to ensure that, I write my notes as if I am an instructor and I explain things to a class under the assumption that they won't attend the lectures.

As I write notes, I find myself needing to further explain things - so as to fit the requirements - which results in consuming more material and reasoning about it.

This requires a non trivial amount of effort, and not everyone has the capacity to do it, but for a student, this probably works, the Feynman method and all that.