February 1, 2023

a quick note on notes

Hello, it’s me again. I wrote that thing about social media and having some reflections on alternative ways of being and then I just… tuned out. From everywhere. I realized I kinda needed to do a reset. And what do you know? Ideas began to emerge as soon as I stepped back. Anyway, here’s one of those ideas. More will follow, I’m sure, at some yet-to-be-determined point in the future.

The notes

Note taking. It’s important, it’s the foundation for a knowledge worker’s practice, it’s something we spend a lot of time (though often still less than we should) thinking about. It’s something that an endless string of thought leaders and thinkfluencers will sell you processes and tips and systems and tools to improve, optimize, or otherwise elevate. Before you know it, I’m on another rant about “tools for thought” and the cult of ultra rationality. Not today! (though perhaps there’s one simmering in the drafts). Anyway.

I was recently asked to give a lunch and learn on note taking, which I thought came together pretty well — it was called “note taking for insight” and it was a synthesis of a couple of similar sessions and internal training documents I’ve written over the years.

I have to admit, the session was a bit of a bait-and-switch. Note taking was used as a frame through which to talk about what an insight is and how to listen in a way that leads you to those insights.

At the center of this presentation was The Ladder of Inference, from the original Double-Loop Learning paper¹. I find this diagram to be a helpful reminder of what’s happening when we’re collecting data, and how many steps there are before we get to an insight, which sit somewhere between meanings and beliefs. You might even say an insight is a potential belief, one that ultimately informs a hypothesis about an action you might take.

In a previous version of this presentation developed with a some colleagues², this framing showed why good note taking was important. Notes are part of the process of capturing data, and good notes don’t just show how the data was captured, but trace your journey scurrying up the rungs of the ladder of inference.

One of the points we raised, and which I’ve tried to emphasize as I’ve iterated on the original, is that while transcripts give us a record of what was actually said, and thus serve an important role in checking our work, it’s important to not see transcripts as a shortcut around taking notes at all. Notes are important because they show the messy, sometimes meandering journey. In fact, in a world where most of my interviews are currently mediated by Zoom (with near-realtime transcripts and recordings), I find my notes focus more on what I’m thinking about what I’m hearing. Getting the inner voice out of my head and calling out specific things that cut thorough the noise. In practical terms: lots of blue text and timestamps.

This is important. As researchers, and as humans, we’re constantly making sense of our world though the information—data—we collect, the meanings we give it, and the assumptions we make based on those meanings. And maybe you see where I’m headed here, but taking notes goes beyond conducting research.

So now, after a rambling preamble³:

The idea that came to me in the pause went something like this

note taking should be an everyday activity and wait a goddamn minute that’s just journaling!

So there is it. Journaling. Something that, based on the ways I’ve found good research notes make it easier to write research summaries, will likely make other types of writing a bit easier too. Something I’m going to experiment a bit with this year. Something I intermittently attempt and then inevitably abandon. Or at least, something I always thought I abandoned.

Journaling in public: blogging, microblogging… tweeting?

Part of what provoked this reflection was seeing clearer edges of what I rely (relied?) on Twitter for, and what the various alternatives just couldn’t replace. One of those missing pieces was the ability to search back through things I was thinking about. The “musing in public” aspect is one of the more unique features of Twitter, and one I have yet to see well-replicated anywhere else. And ignoring the benefits that “in public” provided, somehow Twitter’s search was actually halfway decent (most of the time)[^this has recently become less of the time] at helping me trace back times I was thinking about something or seeing connections between my various lines of thinking. This passive collecting and semi-passive connecting of thoughts is something I want to put more time and effort into, in a way that yields a durable system I can rely on for the foreseeable future.

I believe this is a crucial piece of my ever-developing practice. The part that comes before durable notes or atomic insights or zettlekasten or whatever. The compost pile for my growing knowledge garden is, I think, journaling.

In a future update, I’ll sketch out whatever my journaling practice is starting to look like. For now, it looks like this:

It took me entirely too long to figure out how to do the CSS for these images. Don’t yell at me if it looks like hot garbage in your email client. My semi-professional HTML email coding days are long gone.

And serendipitously, just the other day, @leeloowrites sparked yet another insightful Twitter thread chock full of ideas I’ll most certainly be experimenting with:

So on that note, if you have a journaling or note taking practice that works well, I’d love to hear about it⁴. Bonus points if you post it as a reply to Lisa’s thread so we can all learn together.

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And now, some links that are (probably) connected to all those words I just wrote:

• Raul Pacheco’s collection of posts on note taking — which I have learned so much from and find myself revisiting regularly.
• Create a Zettelkasten for your Notes to Improve Thinking and Writing
• Going From Reading To Notes, by DT Sheffler — though be advised, the topic of “note taking” appeals to some of the more… erm… reactionary, conservative, western traditionalist tendencies (if you catch my drift), so, uh, read his other writing through that lens.

P.S. I’m working on a version of the note taking presentation that incorporates this “journaling is the key” insights and is less focused on note taking in a research/work context — please let me know if you’d like to see an early draft in the next week or so.