The value of having notes. Why do I make notes.

Story time!

At one point in my life I had a memory crash. Which is to say once upon a time I could remember a whole lot more than I was presently remembering. I recall thinking, "what did I have for breakfast last Monday? Oh no! Why can't I remember!". I was terrified. It took a while but eventually I realised that remembering what I had for breakfast last Monday was:

1. not crucial to the rest of my life

2. not crucial to being a function human being

3. I was not sure if I usually remember what I ate last Monday; or if this was the first time I tried to recall it with such stubbornness to notice that I had no idea.

After surviving my first teen-life crisis I went on to realise a few things about life and about memory:

1. I will not be remembering everything forever.

2. Sometimes I forget things that I said I would do. Especially when the number of things I think I will do increases past 2-3 and upwards to 20-30.

3. Don't worry! There is a solution!

4. As someone at the age of mid-20s who is already forgetting things; a friendly mid-30 year old mentioned that in 10 years I will have 1/3rd more life to be trying to remember as well. Which should also serve as a really good reason why you should always comment your code as you go; and why you should definitely write notes. "Past me thought future me knew exactly what I meant even though past me actually had no idea what they were going on about".

The foundation of science.

Observation

There are many things that could be considered the foundations of science. I believe that one of the earliest foundations you can possibly engage in is observation.

Evidence

In a more-than-goldfish form; observation means holding information. It means keeping things for review till later in your life; either at the end of this week; month or year. Observation is only the start. Writing it down makes it evidence. Biased, personal, scrawl, (bad) evidence all the same. If you want to be more effective at changing your mind; you need to know what your mind says.

Review

It's great to make notes. That's exactly what I am saying. It goes further though. Take notes and then review them. Weekly; monthly; yearly. Unsure about where you are going? Know where you have come from. With that you can move forward with better purpose.

My note taking process:

1. get a notebook.

This picture includes some types of notebooks that I have tried.

1. A4 lined paper cardboard front and back. Becomes difficult to carry because it was big. And hard to open it up and use it as well. side-bound is also something I didn't like because I am left handed and it seemed to get in my way.

2. bad photo but its a pad of grid-paper. I found a stack of these on the middle of the ground late at night as if they fell off a truck or something. I really liked them except for them being stuck together by essentially nothing and falling to pieces by the time I got to the bottom of the pad.

3. lined note paper. I will never go back to a book that doesn't hold together. The risk of losing paper is terrible. I don't mind occasionally ripping out some paper but to lose a page when I didn't want to; has never worked safely for me.

4. Top spiral bound; 100 pages. This did not have enough pages; I bought it after a 200pager ran out of paper and I needed a quick replacement, well it was quick – I used it up in half the time the last book lasted.

5. Top spiral bound 200 pages notepad, plastic cover; these are the type of book I currently use. 8 is my book that I am writing in right now.

6. 300 pages top spiral bound – as you can see by the tape – it started falling apart by the time I got to the end of it.

7. small notebook. I got these because they were 48c each, they never worked for me. I would bend them, forget them, leave them in the wrong places, and generally not have them around when I wanted them.

8. I am about half way through my current book; the first page of my book says 23/7/15, today it is 1/9/15. Estimate a book every 2 months. Although it really depends on how you use it.

9. a future book I will try, It holds a pen so I will probably find that useful.

10. also a future one, I expect it to be too small to be useful for me.

11. A gift from a more organised person than I. It is a moleskin grid-paper book and I plan to also try it soon.

The important take-aways from this is – try several, they might work in different ways and for different reasons. Has your life change substantially i.e. you don't sit much at a desk any more? Is the book not working; maybe another type of book would work better.

I only write on the bottom of the flip-page, and occasionally scrawl diagrams on the other side of the page. But only when they relevant. This way I can always flip through easy, and not worry about the other side of the paper.

2. carry a notebook. Everywhere. Find a way to make it a habit. Don't carry a bag? You could. Then you can carry your notepad everywhere with you in a bag. Consider a pocket-sized book as a solution to not wanting to carry a bag.

3. when you stop moving; turn the notebook to the correct page and write the date.

Writing the date is almost entirely useless. I really never care what the date is. I sometimes care that when I look back over the book I can see the timeline around which the events happened, but really – the date means nothing to me.

What writing the date helps to do:

• make sure you have a writing implement

• make sure it works

• make sure you are on the right page

• make sure you can see the pad

• make sure you can write in this position

• make you start a page

• make you consider writing more things

• make it look to others like you know what you are doing (signalling that you are a note-taker, is super important to help people get used to you as a note-taker and encourage that persona onto you)

This is the reason why I write the date; I can't specify enough why I don't care about what date it is, but why I do it anyway.

4. Other things I write:

• Names of people I meet. Congratulations; you are one step closer to never forgetting the name of anyone ever. Also when you want to think; "When did I last see bob", you can kinda look it up in a dumb - date-sorted list. (to be covered in my post about names – but its a lot easier to look it up 5 minutes later when you have it written down)

• Where I am/What event I am at. (nice to know what you go to sometimes)

• What time I got here or what time it started (if its a meeting)

• What time it ended (or what time I stopped writing things)

It's at this point that the rest of the things you write are kinda personal choices some of mine are:

• Interesting thoughts I have had

• Interesting quotes people say

• Action points that I want to do if I can't do them immediately.

• Shopping lists

• diagrams of what you are trying to say.

• Graphs you see.

• the general topic of conversation as it changes. (so far this is enough for me to remember the entire conversation and who was there and what they had to say about the matter)

Sexy.

That's right. I said it. Its sexy. There are occasional discussion events near to where I live; that I go to with a notepad. Am I better than the average dude who shows up to chat? no. But everyone knows me. The guy who takes notes. And damn they know I know what I am talking about. And damn they all wish they were me. You know how glasses became a geek-culture signal? Well this is too. Like no other. Want to signal being a sharp human who knows what's going down? Carry a notebook, and show it off to people.

The coordinators have said to me; "It makes me so happy to see someone taking notes, it really makes me feel like I am saying something useful". The least I can do is take notes.

Other notes about notebooks

The number of brilliant people I know who carry a book of some kind will far outweighs the number of people who don't. I don't usually trust the common opinion; but sometimes you just gotta go with what's right.

If it stops working; at least you tried it. If it works; you have evidence and can change the world in the future.

"I write in my phone". (sounds a lot like, "I could write notes in my phone") I hear this a lot.  Especially in person while I am writing notes. Indeed you do. Which is why I am the one with a notebook out and at the end of talking to you I will actually have notes and you will not. If you are genuinely the kind of person with notes in their phone I commend you for doing something with technology that I cannot seem to have sorted out; but if you are like me; and a lot of other people who could always say they could take notes in their phone; but never do; or never look at those notes... Its time to fix this.

a quote from a friend - “I realized in my mid twenties that I would look like a complete badass in a decade, if I could point people to a shelf of my notebooks.” And I love this too.

A friend has suggested that flashcards are his brain; and notepads are not.  I agree that flashcards have benefits. namely to do with organising things around, shuffling etc.  It really depends on what notes you are taking.  I quite like having a default chronology to things, but that might not work for you.

In our local Rationality Dojo’s we give away notebooks.  For the marginal costs of a book of paper; we are making people’s lives better.

The big take away

Get a notebook; make notes; add value to your life.

Meta:

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Review of our LessWrong Hamburg Meetup - Diet

After I was approched a few times about another meetup I scheduled it on short notice and six of us met yesterday evening at my place.

Summary

It was an mostly unstructured talk where we discussed diet from different angles and a few other tangential topics. I also reported from my participation in the LW Berlin Meetup a few weeks ago (which led to a side-track about polyphasic sleep).

We discussed the benefits and risks of misc. dietary recommendations and seemed to agree on most points, most of which coincide with those discussed on LW before:

Links about polyphasic sleep:

Other LW Hamburg Meetup reviews

We all deal with a lot of information. What are your strategies of taking notes for new information?

Do you take any notes on paper? If so do you scan them or otherwise digilatize them?

Do you have specific strategies for deciding which information to write down?

How do you write notes to capture all important information?

Do you tag your notes?

If you use Evernote, or a similar system how private are your notes? Would you allow friends to read in them? Your spouse?

I've found most graphing software too clunky, or having too much mental friction, for my purpose of creating graphically represented plans, to convert written diagrams into digital form, or to do preference inference based on the structure of my goals (amongst other things).

So far the only tool that I've seen that reduces this friction is GraphViz [1], since I think I can literally just list down connection after connection in markup, with no care for structure or reasonableness, and then prune connections after I see how the entire thing looks. Point and click is for suckers.

However, I also like the approach of Freemind that quickly outputs a visual map that is easily traversable; but it doesn't do much for me when the causality is more involved.

Are there any alternatives that anyone is aware of?

[1] If you are not familiar with GraphViz, see this amusing introduction that maps the social network in R. Kelly's hit hip hopera, "Trapped in the Closet".

Recently, I've collapsed (ascended?) down/up a meta-learning death spiral -- doing a lot less of reading actual informative content, than figuring out how to manage and acquire such content (as well as completely ignoring the antidote). In other words, I've been taking notes on taking notes. And now, I'm looking for your notes on notes for notes.

What kind of scientific knowledge, techniques, and resources do we have right now in the way of information management? How would one efficiently extract useful information possible out of a single pass of the source? The second pass? 

The answers may depend on the media, and the media might not be readily apparent. Example: Edward Boyden, Assistant Professor at the MIT Media Lab, recommends recording in a notebook every conversation you ever have with other people. And how do you prepare yourself for the serendipity of a walk downtown? I know I'm more likely to regret not having a notebook on hand than spending the time to bring one along.

I'll conglomerate what I remember seeing on the N-Back Mailing List and in general: I sincerely apologize for my lack of citation.

Notes

• I'm on the fence about Shorthand as a note-taking technique, given the learning overhead, but I'm sure that the same has been said for touch-typing. It would involve a second stage of processing if you can't read as well as you write, but given the way I have taken notes (... "non-linearly"...), that stage would have to come about anyway. The act of translation may serve as a way of laying connective groundwork down.
• Livescribe Pens are nifty for those who write slowly, but they need to be combined with a written technique to be of any use (otherwise you're just recording the talk, and would have to live through it twice without any obvious annotation and tagging).
• Cornell Notes or taking notes in a hierarchy may have been the method you were taught in high school; it was in mine. The issue I have had with this format is that I found it hard to generate a structure while listening to the teacher at the same time.
• Mind-Mapping.
• Color-coding annotations of text has been remarked to be useful on Science Daily.

• Speed Reading Techniques  or removing sub-vocalization would seem to have benefits.
• Once upon a time someone recommended me the book, "How to Read a Book". Nothing ground-breaking -- outline the author's intent, the structure of his argument, and its content. Then criticize. In short, book reverse-engineering.

• Spaced Repetition. I'm currently flipping through the thoughts of  Peter Wozniak, who seems to have made it his dire mission to make every kind of media possible Spaced Repetition'able. I'm wondering if anyone has any thoughts on incremental reading or  video; also, how to possibly translate the benefits of SRS to dead-tree media, which seems a bit cumbersome.

(I've also heard a handful of individuals claim that SRS has helped them "internalize" certain behaviors, or maybe patterns of thought, like Non-Violent Comunication or Bayes Theorem... any takers on this?)

• Wikis, which seem like a good format for creating social accountability, and filing notes that aren't note-carded.  But what kind of information should that be?
• Emotionally charged stimuli, especially stressful, tends to be remembered to greater accuracy.
• Category Brainstorming.Take your bits of knowledge, and organize them into as many different groups as you can think of, mixing and matching if need be. Sources for such provocations could include Edward De Bono's "Lateral Thinking" and Seth Godin's "Free Prize Inside", or George Polya's "How to Solve It". I'm a bit ambivalent of deliberately memorizing such provocations -- does it get in the way of seeing originally? -- but once again, it could lay down the connective framework needed for good recall.
• Mnemonics to encode related information seems useful.