Notes On Notes: Note taking fatigue
Today I’m going to incorporate not only blog posts but also a book and a video into this fortnight’s issue of notes on notes. Enjoy!
Josh Duffney: Note-taking became a full-time job, so I stopped
This is an interesting case study of how note taking can fail us:
Smart notes were meant to be a means to an end. It was supposed to remove writer’s block with endless idea generation and material. But when the faithful day came— there I sat staring at a blank screen.
Having read that post, I can’t help but notice the breathlessness of it all: Here was a person who had exhausted himself by writing notes (and producing an online course, and writing a short ebook, ...).
Maybe he tried to do too much?
Which leads me to my next item.
Söhnke Ahrens: Taking Smart Notes
This book is - at least in the English-speaking world - the classic on note taking using the Zettelkasten approach. I read the German original in the last two weeks (having read of Niklas Luhmann’s primary sources and a bunch of research on the topic and being a practicing Zettelkasten-adjacent note taker myself for about 15 years) and wanted to recommend it. It is quite good and very actionable.
If you try to implement this system, I advise you to keep it simple. It makes sense to start fresh with this approach and that feels great in the beginning, but many people burn out after the motivation of starting something new has worn off, just as Josh Duffney described. It happened to me (and not only once), too.
Taking notes in this way takes time and only makes sense when you make the Zettelkasten the central hub of all of your knowledge work efforts. Note taking is a craft. So taking care is not optional.
To end up being a “full-time note-taker”, the problem our first item pointed out, doesn’t feel so bad if it makes sense, though. That said: Making the system make sense takes effort and the will to change things around, sometimes substantially. Nothing in life comes without cost.
Dan Shipper: The Fall of Roam
Taking notes can lead to fatigue. Here’s another case study. Dan Shipper blames the tool for his fatigue - Roam Research, a kind of pricey note taking web app that Söhnke Ahrens nowadays uses, too. I personally wouldn’t fault the tools for a dead system. The question posed here is interesting, though: Could Roam have made it easier to keep his notes system alive?
It’s all too easy to dismiss this question. It will always take effort (on the author’s side) to keep a notes system of non-trivial complexity alive. Luhmann himself wouldn’t have blamed the paper, the pen or the wood for the death of his Zettelkasten, if it would have ever come to that. Take my preferred tool Obsidian as an example: Just the fact that it renames the links when you rename a file - meaning you can skip unintelligible file names that are just IDs - was a revelation for me.
Strictly speaking, I don’t need this feature. I used to use Evernote to maintain my notes system before, which didn’t have this. But it is nice. It being nice makes me want to work on my notes. Hence forming a positive feedback loop. As much as effort matters, tools matter, too.
Nicole van der Hoeven: How to process notes in Obsidian // Readwise Official Obsidian plugin
Nicole van der Hoeven illustrates how a modern “from highlight to note” workflow could look like. She uses Readwise, a service that makes it convenient and easy to collect highlights from many sources and saves them for further processing to Obsidian.
This video illustrates my point about making your notes system your central hub and not overdoing it at the same time. I have a very similar workflow myself.
I am also looking forward to Readwise’s Reader-App, which hopefully will come out sometime soon.
Final Thought
A big thank you to everyone who reads this little thing and an even bigger one to those that sent me feedback. One valuable hint I got was to make clear how to contact me for giving feedback, hints, links and ideas: Just reply to this email. Or contact me on micro.blog. I’m looking forward to it.
-Martin