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

I've been learning illustrative drawing and while studying anatomy have reached this axiomatic conclusion, one which I've seen elsewhere: make it a laborious effort to take notes and your recall of them will subsequently improve.

You see, the way in which I've taken up the anatomy study is simply to copy every drawing in "Morpho" (a 300-plus page volume full of anatomical reference material, different perspectives and poses). This takes months, even with the relatively brief treatments I've giving to each drawing. No school class sits you down at the start and says "your assignment for the class is to copy every page in the textbook".

But the results speak for themselves. My understanding of figures and faces has improved a ton by simply going through the book and drawing what I see over and over. Where it's lacking the most is in the places where I haven't yet finished my study.

And it makes sense. We don't teach sports by quizzing athletes with lengthy descriptions of the situation, but by drilling the muscle memory in small chunks and then putting it together. There's no reason why learning of other topics wouldn't be the same.

But it's also high effort to put in that degree of drill. Most people searching for an ultimate knowledge system aren't willing to forsake that much and want to focus on the tools and the data collection process. But this isn't a good adaptation to an info-saturated world. Collection and organization is a professional field all its own: that's the type of thing a library scientist does. If you collect in an overly general way, you compete with the librarians. To do better than them you have to filter and apply the more intensive method to a smaller number of topics.

For example, a mediocre way to keep up with news is to consume predigested news products. The headline usually says about as much as is necessary; the rest is formulaic and designed for engagement. Looking to an expert is also misleading because they'll make a statement from within their own self-interest(e.g. medical professionals with disease) and build up an echo chamber around their seniority. To go deep on any one news subject you have to start compiling your own data, ask your own questions, pursue your own leads. But you can't do all of them.

What you can feasibly do(and which I do from time to time) is look at statements coming from within corporations and public institutions about data: earnings reports, surveys, and so on. While occasionally misleading, these modes of information are usually designed to clear up confusion and present credible explanations for stakeholders. They are not as exciting as gossip journalism, but they often signal underlying trends, and you can summarize those into small-p principles that you'll filter future data through. So then you become more efficient without changing any of your habits around consumption.

This is really cool, would you mind sharing the project code? I'd be interested in automatically updating/publishing my notes in such a way with org mode.

I'm a fully trained German lawyer and my method of knowledge acquisition at University was distilling books down to If-then-else statements, systematic relationships but mostly definitions and schemes. Putting it all in Anki and recording notes to audio files. My mantra was: I should know it all. I was working on the side to finance my studies 2-3 times a week as well. It was a full-time job 247 for almost a decade.

After University, I wanted to approach the same rigor to the topics I care about. Becoming the next Humboldt, Goethe and alike but all note-taking systems I have used over the past couple of years (PARA, Cornell Notes, Zettelkasten, Obsidian, Anki, recording audio files, simply writing in a text file, physical Journal, hope of simply remembering information etc.) always seemed promising first but eventually, I ran into the following problems:

1. Too time-consuming to maintain 2. Too detailed or too extensive to be useful to future me 3. Too constraining (Learning for me is a mix of organic accumulation [coming across same/similar topics over time] and guided thinking) and foreign to the way my brain operates 4. Not enough time for revision (big one)

... and probably many more problems I haven't discovered yet.

Since then, I've created my own system:

1. Using any text editor or pen and paper 2. I jot down my dominant feeling or dominant feelings after reading a piece of information (for example, I feel X after I've read Y) 3. Writing down answers to a couple of Why questions until I have found the root of feeling X 4. Writing out a thought experiment (if variable Z of [causes or root of feeling X] changes, how would it effect feeling X?)

A note-taking system should help you reflect on the information you take in and since we reflect in different ways, designing your own system will help you understand and remember information better. Occasionally wondering about the same topics over and over again and then remembering that you have already written about it a couple of times already, will start an inner dialogue that will get you further into a topic than you would have expected.

Learning for life and studying for a profession, is vastly different. It depends on whether you want to just know or to apply, and then throw as much time at it as you possibly can, in a way that enables you to differentiate between the important and irrelevant bits. Any note-taking system is just a platform for this process.

I usually vary my note-taking style a lot but my current favourite is to just use handwritten outline style (bullet points) and then later transcribe those to flowchart.fun for the useful visualization.

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