Why do I have a note system while others do not?

The following quote from Anna Havron made me think about why I’m not falling into this category – the category without this issue.📝

You make a lot of notes for yourself (btw IRL most people do not do this, just sayin’)

What she is touching here is true. I have not found anybody working the same with their thoughts as me. The one exception is notes written for work. But these tend to be a lot less structured and connected.

So why am I doing it, then? What is my goal or motivation to write all these notes? I write all these notes so that I have a system where I can see what I’m thinking about.

The reaction post from Tracy Durnell (Discerning the value of note-taking) goes into a similar thought (emphasis mine):

I’ve seen a related sentiment from many places that note-taking is not particularly productive for most people and that knowledge management can be somewhat a fool’s mission. To each their own, but personally, I have found my mind garden to be a huge spur in my thinking. I wanted to dig into why I find my mind garden worth the time and effort when others do not.

Thoughts over time

As for Tracy, working with my notes helps me clear up my thoughts. And it shows me patterns over time in my thinking. This is especially helpful with mental health issues, as you tend to forget the positive aspects of your life and focus on the negative thoughts. And as a perfectionist, this tendency is reinforced a lot more.

Before note-taking

Before I started with note-taking, I was thinking about an exciting topic, and at some point, I lost interest. The results of what I was thinking about were not recorded.

I forgot them again, and after some time, I returned to the same topic and started thinking about progress from the beginning. Instead of building up on top of my previous work.

With the note system

When I think about a topic or have an idea, I record the idea. It also allows me to dump my thoughts out of my ram, freeing up my brain for other topics without the fear that I lose something. It allows me to save the thoughts outside of my mind and return where I left off later.

Organisation - how do I solve the struggle?

And like most other people, I struggle with cleaning up and organizing my notes. But I’m getting better at it. The important part is to regularly curate your notes. And look at them again.

Having a set of curated thoughts in my notes makes it simpler to find them again. Currently, I try to have at least one curation session per week. It only works for some weeks. And the sessions are not on a specific day. And most of the time, I start with one note and then fall down a rabbit hole when I find an old note with an exciting thought in it.

• /note-taking