Note taking
My learnings
- notes to develop lines of thought not an archive
- siloed notes, not making connections between notes
- connections are important, many insights are about connecting two separate ideas
- integrate readings by breaking it down into separate notes, one per idea
- for developing thoughts, not building an archive
- used by Niklas Luhmann
- unique id for each note
- hierachical numbering
- does not seem to be used today, instead a timestamp is used
- debate about note sequence Folgezettel
- tags, body with links, references
- links should explain the relationship
- see Schmidt2018
- atomic
- concept-oriented
- densely linked
- prefer associative ontologies to hierarchical taxonomies
- write notes for yourself by default, disregarding audience
- https://maggieappleton.com/evergreens
- found wiki to be the right fit, easy linking and one thought/fact
- prefer association over hierachy
- prefer wiki links to using numbered ids
- Mills’ “On Intellectual Craftsmanship”
- write in your own words
- blog archive
Beatrice Webb Appendix C: The art of note-taking
- break up reading into individial cards and rearrange them
- atomicity: one sheet one subject-matter/event
- date, source of information
- finding the best arrangemet of notes is part of the discovery process
Related literature
- How to Make a Complete Map of Every Thought You Think
- Commonplace book
- Building a second brain, PARA
- Hack 17, “Write Magnificent Notes”
- Weinberg on Writing: The Fieldstone Method
- Keith Thomas’s working methods
Implementation:
- Tiddlywiki
- needs a plugin for saving locally
- able to save to github/gitlab
- Fossil’s wiki
- self-hosted
- standalone pages or part of the repo
- org-mode in Emacs
- single file
- org-mode has shortcuts to easily edit
- org-mode in Vim
- single file
- no special support for org-mode
- custom format in vim
Other tools:
timeline
- earliest note is from 2006-12-29
- repo with org files started 2014-01-13