From time to time I attempt to answer questions about note-making on Reddit.
It’s a tough job with few perks, but someone has to do it and for no obvious reason that person is me1. So here’s a fresh bunch of my recent comments, with a disclaimer that, field-tested as they are, they’re not guaranteed to make you rich, famous or even mildly handsome, even if that’s how it’s worked out for me. I guess life is unfair like that.
Anyway, here goes.
Question: Where does AI fit into your note taking?
“I considered using AI to scan and auto link related ideas, but even this seems like robbing me of the chance to “think” as I examine possibly related ideas, so for now I am trying to be totally manual in the slip box. Anyone else tackling these questions? What successful strategies do you have for getting the thinking benefits while still getting the busy work benefits of AI?”
My Answer: The temptation to skip the thinking process is far from new.
In 1924 Sergey Povarnin, yes that Сергей Поварнин, Soviet author of How to Read Books for Self Education was warning of it:
“There are readers who think that with such ‘card indexes’ they can replace their mind… In short, a new ‘improvement’ in our culture. No need to work with the mind. Ready-to-wear boots, ready-to-wear pants, ‘ready-to-wear’ thoughts.”
He was OK with the card index itself; the problem was imagining you could use it to stop thinking.
And for the last 17 years I could have outsourced my note-making to a service like Freelancer. But I didn’t even consider it back then, so why consider it now? It would be like hiring someone to go to the gym for me (which I admit I have contemplated).
Question: Should I keep my Zettelkasten?
“I have now essentially two systems of notes, and I’m not sure how to reconcile them. Should I rework these new notes back into my Zettelkasten and just focus on publishing that? Should I keep two systems of notes? Has anyone run into this issue before?”
NB: A Zettelkasten is a box with paper slips in, a once-popular way for scholars and writers to make and keep their notes, and by extension it’s the name of a contemporary method for making digital notes too; but is there a Zettelkasten method?
My Answer: Just give everything a unique ID so you can link to it from anywhere.
I’ve had this issue to some extent, but it was the Zettelkasten that freed up my writing. Before that I’d write sprawling stuff that was all over the place. This kind of writing felt like it was too digressive, so I’d try to focus — but this made me just clam up. Or I’d write a long piece but get bored part way through and drop it before finishing.
The Zettelkasten approach helped me focus without making me feel like I was writing the wrong things. Then I started stitching my various notes together to create longer pieces of work. Eventually the practice started freeing me up to write digressive pieces again, without feeling irrationally guilty about it. So now I have my structured Zettelkasten and a whole pile of longer pieces in various states of completion.
My ‘solution’ to this (though is it even a problem?) is to give each and every piece, however short or long, a unique ID.
That way I can always refer to any piece of writing, and always find it again.
I’m inspired by Niklas Luhmann, who didn’t just write sociology notes, he also wrote many manuscripts in several drafts. Towards the end of his life he mainly worked on the manuscripts since he had a backlog of publishing to get through. Like him I’m ultimately more interested in publishing than in perfecting my notes system.
Question: Highlighting for literature notes
How do you highlight content? I’ve always tried progressive summarization, but I feel like I don’t have that much time.
My Answer: For me, highlighting is a shortcut to nowhere.
I’ve found my highlights don’t get used for anything. My conclusion is that highlighting may look like useful work, but in practice it just isn’t.
Resulting rule of thumb: if it’s worth highlighting it’s worth writing a short note about it; and if it’s not worth writing a note, it’s not worth highlighting.
What I do instead: write a note. If I read something and think “that’s interesting”, I make a note and force myself to record why I find it interesting. This seemingly slows me down, but then I don’t waste time creating unused highlights that looked interesting for reasons I didn’t record and have now forgotten.
Caveat: while reading, I write literature notes that include bibliographic details, followed by a list of interesting points I notice, together with a page reference. I might write: “Opinionated summary of ‘My Neighbour Totoro’ - p.127.” I’d follow that with a reference to the note that expands on this. In practice, I don’t actually get round to writing a new note for every reference. Some never get followed up. The Zettelkasten approach is a way of triaging my thoughts, creating useful friction so I only follow up what really matters to me.
Question: Should Mini Essays Be Kept Outside of the Main Notes Folder?
I like writing mini essays to help me understand things better, but I’ve read that main/atomic notes should be short and focused on one idea. Should mini essays go in a separate folder, or can they live with my main notes?
My Answer: Your ‘mini-essay’ concept has been tried and tested for many decades and it works. Keep them with your notes so you can easily reference them and expand them.
Maybe tag them ‘mini-essay’ so you can review them collectively in future.
I’ve found - once my Zettelkasten got big enough - I tended to work by assembling clusters of atomic notes, rather than jumping straight to mini-essays. The Zettelkasten approach facilitates this ‘bottom-up’ method of writing.
Andy Matuschak shows how he wrote a modular mini-essay made out of about 60 atomic notes. He redrafted it and turned it into a polished essay which he then published. The original mini-essay is called Enabling environments, games and the Primer. It’s clearly a work-in-progress, but it’s a lot more comprehensive than just a single atomic note. It’s an example of what he calls ‘evergreen notes’ in the sense that it grew from a seed into a larger plant (though I’m not actually sold on that metaphor, but still).
I described the process in full, in an article which is itself assembled from modular components:
How to write an article from your notes.
I certainly keep my ‘mini-essays, or ‘sub-assemblies’ or ‘intermediate packets’ or ‘alpha drafts’ or whatever, in my main collection of notes. This enables me to link to them and add future links to them. But one very important step is to ensure that where the writing is made up of smaller parts, the backlinks are clearly noted, so I’m not inadvertently self-plagiarising.
To me a mini-essay is just a structure note, but with the contents of the linked notes transcluded and then lightly edited together. You can certainly see this with Andy’s note, referenced above. Parts of that note are little more than hyperlinks connected together with connecting phrases. But the hard work is precisely in connecting disparate ideas by means of writing. This kind of stitching work doesn’t usually produce a publishable article straight off, but it does help with an early draft.
That’s all for now, but if you’re strangely hooked on this stuff (not your fault, and no one here is judging) you might now like to go even further with:
- I read the top ten Zettelkasten posts on Hacker News so you can do something more wholesome with your day
- Five links with worthwhile writing advice
- The thing about advice is that people do what they want with it
- The value of feedback depends on how you use it
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