Useful Notes

I started using Obsidian three or four years ago. Originally I used it to keep a journal,¹ but I quickly got sucked into the Personal Knowledge Management (PKM) vortex online. I watched YouTube videos and read books about note-taking. I was awed by the promise of zettelkasten and “second brains”. I am nothing if not a sucker for “lifehacks”.²

It hasn’t worked out

The promise of pretty much all of these PKM systems is that by capturing ideas with the right structure — atomic notes, linked together — insights present themselves and papers/essays/blog posts appear nearly fully formed in the threads of your notes. In practice, my notes became a jumble that I rarely revisited. With no purpose for my note-taking, I had no way to identify the ideas that were worth writing down. Instead, I ended up taking a lot of notes because practically everything could be useful — especially if the promise of linked notes begetting insights panned out. Those notes, in turn, had to be slotted into my existing notes with connections.

This began to feel like a drag on my reading. Reading became more like a chore because I was trying to extract ideas for notes rather than just reading the book. The process of adding new notes with connections to other notes became so tedious that I just stopped doing it.

I tried to manufacture some purpose for my notes by enumerating my twelve favorite problems, but this ended up feeling artificial. All I was doing was trying to re-frame topics that interest me in terms of concrete ‘problems’ to ‘solve’. But I am not actually trying to solve these problems. The reading I do, I do for my own enjoyment, and it’s fine — unsurprising, in fact — that I need to take very few notes as a result.

As Ralph Waldo Emerson (may not have) said, I cannot remember the books I’ve read any more than the meals I have eaten; even so, they have made me.

The notes I actually use

But my Obsidian vault (Obsidian’s term for the folder containing all of your notes) is, unfortunately, not a complete write-off. If it were, I could just delete the whole thing and be done with it. Scattered throughout the vault are reference notes to which I regularly refer.

• Model and serial numbers for appliances along with a service history for each appliance
• Various types of light bulbs required by different fixtures in the house and sometimes instructions for how to change the bulbs
• Different service professionals we’ve had do work on the house along with some impressions of how it went
• Workout routines
• Code snippets such as my CSS ‘reset’, Git tricks, and Linux how-tos
• Bookmarks
• Cool fonts
• Extra curricular programs my kid might enjoy
• Comics I reference often and have trouble finding

We can break these notes into, roughly, two types: reference notes, and a kind of log. Code snippets, serial numbers, fonts, and so on, are all just reference material. Having them in my notes saves me the trouble of having to reread documentation or run vague web searches that are unlikely to turn up the things I am looking for.

And then keeping a log of maintenance done on our appliances and the house, or notes about how my son felt about different summer camps just helps to fill in gaps in my memory. It’s convenient to maintain these kinds of impressions alongside the reference material that I’m already keeping in my notes.

And as you might imagine, there are very few links between these notes. I rely on folders and search to find the notes I need, not links. I know, I’m such a basic bitch.

The best system is personal

In his post Working with the end in sight, Belvadi touches on something that has been on my mind for some time regarding PKM (and productivity) systems:

I think the thing that a lot of these systems get wrong is that they focus on the system that worked for the author, and not on how the author developed the system. Task-management, note-taking — these are highly personal. What works for one person may not work for another. As Belvadi points out, Niklas Luhmann was an exception; most scholars in his time did not adopt a zettelkasten system.³

The hard part, then, is devising your own system. Reading books like How to Take Smart Notes or Building a Second Brain might help in that you may find pieces of their systems that suit you. And to the extent that these books talk about how the authors came up with their systems, they may help you reflect on your own needs in ways that allow you to invent your own system. But do not feel that you must adhere to the prescribed system in its entirety.

This post has been part of that process for me; reflecting on the notes that have actually proven useful in my life, rather than the notes I’m supposed to find useful for the type of person I want to be. I’m also trying to pay a little more attention to the times when I fail to remember something — such as what books I read this year — because those may be good candidates for things to add to my notes.⁴ I suspect that developing a good note-taking system for yourself is largely about learning to identify the kinds of information you are likely to want again in the future. The better you get at recognizing that, the better your notes become.