Note taking - Purpose and Benefits

As the Chinese proverb goes, “The palest ink is better than the best memory.” If you don’t capture the thoughts and notes and put into a form that can be easily retrieved later, the information that you have in this moment will be lost.

Clearing our minds also helps us access deep concentration, so if stray worries or thoughts persist, do a quick ‘brain-dump’ – something as simple as scribbling in a notebook, or even sending an email to yourself about everything on your mind. “We know we can’t hold a lot of things in our mind at once. While you’re focusing on deep work, minimise the number of things in your mind. Don’t connect to everything else.”

Taking down notes

1. Taking down notes helps with reducing distractions. If you are just really busy right now, and if you have a thought about something that you are not working on in the current moment, jotting that thought down in a notebook nearby will help.
2. After jotting it down, your brain doesn’t have to worry about remembering the thought.
3. Your brain can just relax, instead of tapping you on the shoulder every 10 minutes saying, ‘Don’t forget,'.
4. Time and attention are valuable.
5. Get your ideas out of your head first. Plan and prioritize them later.
6. No matter how big or small the task is - write it down. This will help with the following things.
   1. If it is small, you can pick it up between tasks and knock it off.
   2. If it is big, you can think about the action plan for it and break it down into smaller tasks. Each smaller task will now be a task that you can pick up and knock off without getting overwhelmed by the overall task.

Organizing thoughts and knowledge

We need to have a theory that we could be working on for a very long time. When we read something, we need to try to plug it into the theory. We need to know the full outline of the theory. The theory grows and grows and grows. We will know where to put everything. If we read something, we can immediately recognize the slot in our theory for that specific thing.

As we start to consciously learn, use and apply more ideas in our lives, we have to ensure that we avoid the common pitfall of building a ’list’ rather than a ’latticework’ of knowledge. A list has separate items that stand in isolation from one another. By its nature, the items on that list will be harder to remember and less impactful.

Effective learning is largely about building on and connecting with prior knowledge. Isolated, unrelated information simply won’t last in your mind, let alone be applied. Instead, when learning something new, ask ‘how does this relate to other things I know and use?’

Even after we identify how and where we’ll apply the thoughts and how they relate to other thoughts, it is likely we’re going to forget them. That is why we need to write them down. This is where mindmaps and zettelkasten method comes into play. We need to capture points and our broader thoughts on how we’ll use it. These notes are an essential way we can personalise and integrate new ideas/thoughts/models into our thinking and our context.

It’s like practicing an instrument. If you practice every single day you won’t really be able to tell the difference from day to day. But if you stretch that time frame out over the weeks months even years you suddenly see how much you’ve changed and the progress becomes real and tangible.

Note-taking facilitates and fosters understanding through writing. When we take notes in a proper way, we do it using our own words. Force yourself to write notes in your own words. The translation by yourself to yourself happens when we write that note down. Any time after that, when we look at that note, everything becomes clear in a matter of seconds.

If we cannot write about something, it means we don’t understand it.

Clear thinking becomes clear writing. One can’t exist without the other. - William Zinsser

Build a Bank of Ideas

1. Build a bank of ideas that we can draw from whenever we need.
2. With apps like org-roam and obsidian, with just the click of a button, they slap us in the face with this massive network of nodes/knowledge.
3. Because the nodes are tagged and connected to similar ones, we can just jump anywhere into this network and find some inspiration on what to read/learn/write about.
4. We can open up this entire graph to reveal a 100 maybe a thousand different entry points of knowledge.
5. There’s just so much to talk about that you really never run out of ideas with this.

The science behind this

TODO

Question: What is the part of the brain that works when we offload an idea by writing it down?

1. Psychologically speaking: your brain on writing https://uwaterloo.ca/writing-and-communication-centre/blog/psychologically-speaking-your-brain-writing
2. The Science Behind What Writing Does to Your Brain https://www.craftyourcontent.com/science-behind-writing-brain/
3. How Writing Rewires the Brain: Neuroplasticity Insights https://www.yomu.ai/blog/how-writing-rewires-the-brain-neuroplasticity-insights
4. What the Heck Is a Brain Dump https://www.goalswon.com/blog/brain-dump
5. Why Brain Dumps are So Powerful for Great Content and How to Have an Effective One https://thebreezycompany.co/article/why-brain-dumps-are-so-powerful-for-great-content-and-how-to-have-an-effective-one/

High Effort, High Reward

1. Why go through all this trouble taking notes? What’s the point? Yes, these are short to write but they still take a lot of time and effort. So what’s in it for you? Why would you even bother putting in the effort to write these?
2. They will take a lot of time and effort. But we will gain so much wisdom and perspective in return.
3. These are a large investment of time and effort. They do take time and effort - but in spite of that, the reward we receive in return is so worth it. Every single minute of writing those notes is absolutely worth our time, 100%.
4. With this method, I see improvement in two areas of life that really mean a lot to me. These notes are so good for our reading and writing.

These notes improve our reading quality

1. The first huge benefit of these nodes is something that every reader would kill for. It’s the ability to remember and understand what we read - enough to close the covers of the book and say, I am confident in what I just read, and I can now go and use this and recall the ideas in our daily lives.
2. These nodes help us achieve that by exploiting something called the Feynman technique. If Richard Feynman uses it as the backbone to his success, then you bet you can too. It’s something that anyone can use. It’s flexible. It’s simple. Arguably, it’s the best learning strategy ever.

Forgetting curve

You read something, or you hear a lecture, or watch a video and 48 hours after it, you forget it. Research shows that you forget 80% of what you learn if you only hear it one time.

Practise Active externalism. Do not forget the ideas that you learn.

How to not forget the good ideas in articles or videos that you randomly find online?

1. By learning something new every day and writing down your thoughts, we will create a deeper understanding of the world and the different types of unique people who inhabit it.
2. Today, we all must be curious and open to learning something new every day.
3. With knowledge so readily available, it now comes down to a willingness and dedication to learn.

Practise Active externalism. Don’t try to hold everything in your brain. Write it down.

When you learn something new by reading an article, watching a video, or anything like it, don’t just read the article and leave it at that. Take down notes. What is the main idea behind the article or the video? Write it down in your own words. Writing is a very powerful thought process.

1. If you encounter something in a book that you find really interesting - something that resonates with you - write a mini essay on it.
2. That is true for any piece of content - whether it’s a book, whether it’s a video, an article, tweets, or even something that someone told you one day.
3. It doesn’t matter where these ideas come from - as long as a good idea stands out to you, it is worth writing about.
4. To put it simply, write about ideas that you find interesting.
5. Write it as if you are going to teach it to someone else. It is so powerful.
   1. Note taking - Methods - Write it as if you are going to teach it to someone else

Novelty + Interest = Output

Repetition and Retention

Listen + See + Do Hands-on + Repeat = 90% Retention For the first 2 hours, we repeat a few concepts to help you retain them. .

Repetition is the mother of learning.

Repetition is also the heart of instruction.

Absort textbooks like a sponge

• by Matt DiMaio

Scenario: We are dealing with a chapter

1. Do not start at the first page and read till the last page.
2. Flip through each page - don’t read anything - just look at the pages - just get a sense of the book
3. Go to the end of the chapter and see if there is a quiz. If there is, read the questions in the quiz first. You will know what to look for in the chapter.
4. Go into the chapter and read only the information in the bold print.
5. Read the first sentence (introduction) and the last sentence (summing up the paragraph) of each paragraph. You are doing this for exposure - not for comprehension.

Reading material

https://fortelabs.com/blog/progressive-summarization-a-practical-technique-for-designing-discoverable-notes/

Look at these articles:

1. The Ultimate Guide to Summarizing Books: How to Distill Ideas to Accelerate Your Learning]