Now that you’re convinced about the value of writing and have some ideas on what you can/should write about, I want to point out the main limits of note-taking. Because writing alone, while very valuable, won’t necessarily help you go above and beyond. As we’ll see, knowledge needs to be connected, otherwise its value will remain limited in various ways.
One of the primary challenges with note-taking is the illusion of comprehensive capture. Trying to capture information verbatim does not help understanding the underlying concepts. This can lead you to capture shallow information, and to miss the most important parts.
Focus on understanding first, and writing second. Engage with the material (or activity). Ask questions, make connections to existing knowledge, and reflect on the information as you take notes. Discern key concepts, and translate those into your own words. This will help you better grasp the material, capture what really matters in a way that is meaningful to you. Ultimately this will help you better understand, retain more, and capture more valuable information.
That’s one of the reasons why I prefer to write using pen and paper whenever I can. Digital tools push me to capture more than I need since it is much easier. It’s a trap that needs to be avoided. Avoid “dumb” transcription. Also, digital tools tend to push us to multitask, which takes our precious attention and focus away
When we take notes, we tend to write very linearly. But knowledge is inherently non-linear. Knowledge is all about networks and graphs. While taking notes, consider that, and try to fight against linearity. Identify concepts, and try to capture their relationships along with their meaning. This will drastically improve the quality and value of the information you capture. Visualizations help a lot with this. Oftentimes, I draw graphs and mind maps to clarify my understanding of how concepts relate to each other. This applies to many domains. We’ll explore visualization techniques in 04. Learning.
Representing information more visually encourages holistic understanding, allowing you to see relationships and patterns that you might otherwise miss or fail to convey in your notes.
Moreover, if you take into account the value of networked knowledge, then you will structure your notes differently. I personally try to create short notes that I can link with one another (i.e., atomic notes). Shorter and focused notes tend to remain valid for longer periods of time and help create solid knowledge bases.
A common pitfall is capturing/writing more than necessary. Don’t measure your success with note-taking by the sheer volume of information you record. Instead, focus on quality, clarity, and depth.
Isolated notes lead to the creation of sterile and isolated knowledge. Taking notes but keeping those isolated from each other drastically diminishes the value of the activity. Active learning does help, but if you just keep the information you capture alone in a corner, it does not help you much in the long run.
I’ve taken hundreds of pages of notes while reading non-fiction books. I did this for years. And for a long time, those remained sad and lonely in my old notebooks. Then, someday I realized that I was missing out. I missed tons of opportunities to connect all that valuable information with the rest of my knowledge. I did retain a part of the information, which helped improve my thinking, but I really did not benefit as much as I could. I later discovered Personal Knowledge Management (PKM) techniques, and realized that I could get a lot more value out of my notes.
The same applies at work. If you are still writing isolated Word documents, then you’re also missing out. There is a whole lot more value in creating Wikis (i.e., networks of documents) than there is in accumulating isolated and sterile word documents, even if those “link” to each other through references. References are unmaintainable. They don’t scale. They break. They can’t deal properly with information versioning.
Connections between ideas are as valuable as the ideas themselves. Perhaps even more so!
Information fragmentation is a disease. When information is scattered across various notebooks and/or digital documents, retrieving and connecting related pieces is a real challenge.
Although people have quite some success with analog Zettelkasten systems (more on this later), I consider that analog note-taking solutions are way too limited in terms of searchability. In reality, it’s also true for base digital note-taking solutions. And Word documents are the absolute worst.
Many digital tools lack the ability to search across documents, to perform full text search, etc.