I prefer to takes notes on paper. All the time. Paper is immediate and always on. "But it is not digital!" they say. Doesn't matter. I don't use it like persistent memory - "disk" - but more like a RAM expansion for my brain. I have so bad - albeit fast - handwriting that I need to process it quickly anyway. And my process calls for that: I convert the notes into actionable and tangible outcomes quickly - and these are usually digital:
The latter is my way of ensuring long-term retention of new, relevant, or interesting concepts. I do not use Anki for memorizing facts but reminding me of concepts/habits/practices.
When you're reading nonfiction, do you have any systematic approach to choosing what to take notes on and what kinds of notes to write? Or is it mostly intuitive and ad hoc?
I wrote a related comment in Paper Trauma:
...I also have paper and pen with me all the time. A lot of people are trying to convince me to go digital - including my son - but I have yet to be convinced that there is a way to improve my workflow. Which is this:
- take notes and sketches making use of however much paper is available and being creative in size, positioning and alignment of text. Quickly.
- Clearly this doesn't digitize well. It will be ugly, hard to read and lack all the context that you have in your mind at that time. After all it is adding to your me
I generally find note taking slowing me down in my thought process.
If your goal is to not get slowed down then you could try seeing the paper as a canvas you can use in any way - not just in a formal 'note taking' way. Add visual memory to your brain. A bit like talking out loud - use the air and the acoustic memory as memory aid. Or like a conversation where your partner bounces ideas back and thereby adds memory (albeit with a filter).
My favorite note-taking software is CherryTree, but at work I use OneNote if installing new software is against company policy. Ultimately what I want is pages of plain text which are organized in a tree structure.
As a part of my work I make notes regularly. Each new task gets a new page: it starts with a link to Jira and a copy of task description; followed with all task-related facts I found, questions I want to ask/explore, etc. The purpose of this is to be able to continue if I get interrupted or on the next day, because my memory sucks. Sometimes I use writing as a form of rubber duck debugging. After finishing the task, the page is moved into a "completed" folder (sometimes organized by year and month) and typically not edited anymore. As a side effect, it allows me to provide an occassional summary when someone asks what I have been working on this year.
In addition to that, I also have a topic-oriented hierarchy. The top nodes are "company" for information about company in general (processes, colleagues...). A top node for each project I am working on (data model, API...). The last top node is "knowledge" (useful pieces of information about programming languages, frameworks, and tools). This information is updated when I learn something that seems useful, and referred to when I need to remember something I know I made a note for. I do not aim to have a complete documentation of something (that would take too much time) but rather to cache everything that I already spent time to find out.
(Sometimes my colleagues object when they see me making private notes. Like, why don't I update the company wiki instead? The answer is that my private notes are allowed to be idiosyncratic, incomplete, low-status; and I am free to use the most convenient tool for the job. Writing for others using tools selected by others is more than trivial inconvenience -- waiting a few seconds after clicking each button, fighting with the formatting... That said, yes, I also contribute information to the company wiki once in a while.)
At home, the top nodes in my hierarchy are "to do / planning / projects", "finance", "various know-how", "mathematics", "computer science", "programming", "useful software", "games", "books", "internet"...
I am using this kind of system for several years. Previously I tried to develop my own software (Notilo) optimized for my personal quirks, but it was quite lame, and when I had kids it became impossible to maintain it, so I switched to CherryTree. Unfortunately, I have a lot of notes in the old format, which I hope to convert (probably by manual copy-pasting individual pages) one day.
What role does note-taking play for you? Is it a way to focus your attention? To make extracts from the text for easier reference later? To comprehend the material better through the act of making notes?
All of the above, with different parts of the system optimized for different purposes. Generally, there is a "diary" part and a "reference" part; the former helps me focus on something at short term and sometimes serves as a log in long term, the latter allows finding things easily later.
The particular technology stack I use for notes on reading is {Instapaper, PDF Expert on iPad} -> Readwise -> Roam Research -> Summarize it.
To answer your specific questions:
If I plan on summarizing, I tend to only highlight important bits. I write down any connections I make with other concepts. Readwise reminds me of 15 highlights I've taken in the past per day, which I've been doing for about half a year. I'm not sure if it's helpful, but the time cost is low, so I continue.
Sometimes if I want to know what I thought about specific posts. If it's just high-level concepts, I'll generally just skim the relevant material. If I find myself looking something up more than twice, I'll put it into anki.
No, but I only really study technical things. I find it difficult to summarize/remember history, plausibly because I don't change the way I take notes.
Roam Research seems pretty good. RemNote is similar and incorporates more spaced repetition. SuperMemo allows one to create flashcards as they read (readwise does something similar, but the functionality is worse, I think [I've never used SuperMemo, but plan to try it]).
Attention, future reference, and comprehension are all goals. The primary goal seems to be forcing connections with other ideas and forcing myself to have an opinion about what I'm reading at all.
forcing myself to have an opinion about what I'm reading at all.
This connects for me. One type of note I frequently take is "question notes," where for each paragraph of the text I start by writing a question for which that paragraph could serve as an answer. Sometimes, I do this before I've even read the paragraph in detail. Having that question in mind in advance really helps me feel like I comprehend the main points. That way, information isn't just a stream of data, but has a purpose.
Is Roam Research/RemNote just a piece of editing software? Or does it in some way force a unified format or structure to your notes?
I find that taking notes is very helpful for building understanding and learning in the first place. My system is methodical and uniform, producing notes that are a more useful future reference tool than the original text (if need be). I find that I learn so much more, and get so much value out of the notes, that I no bother to read much for school/work purposes unless I can take notes as I go. I consider myself to not have really absorbed an idea at all unless I've taken notes on it; it's my operationalization of what constitutes "learning."
The exception is when I'm reading blog posts, where it's a half reading/half conversational medium.
For me, I thought printed notes were usually (not always) a hinderance to learning. And copying down teacher notes as the absolute pits. Writing things down myself seems to be a great memory aid, but to work that way, the notes had to be my work, that I thought about as I composed them. (or "what the.. consult the textbook, relevant paper cos I didnt get it"). Learning content is what textbooks are for - a spoken content should be exposition and for that you need concentrate not copy.
To expand on 5:
I may be explaining Scrum for a job interview, and completely forget that the sprint review is a thing. Ask me about the sprint review however, and I can make a cogent case for (or against) the necessity of the dev team being involved (customer interactions are the purview of the project owner! agile methodologies emphasize cutting red tape! or something on those lines).
I use notes as reminders/pointers rather than longform descriptions (adopted from "The Bullet Journal Method", ch 2 "Events"). This helps with three things:
When I was young (high school, uni), then didnt really bother. I had excellent memory for anything that engaged me. I would note on paper things to look further into because I didnt immediately understand or wanted to further reference (still do this) but not much else. With textbooks, it would be turn straight to problems section and work backwards. This approach did not age well.
I heard about MindMap methods at a DEC user group conference and I started using those. I found drawing them was an excellent way to get stuff into my memory but that I seldom referenced them. (Seldom kept them even). Best of all though, the practice of using them helped me notice what was important to note (as it triggered other memories etc).
Memory now isn't what it used to be and I find notes very important. Writing on paper seems to be good for committing to memory but terrible for retrieval (cant remember where I put that piece of paper. :-) and my handwriting is terrible and getting worse). For quite a while, I used a hardback note book and put everything in it. I now transfer smartly to Google Keep as can search easily and it is available on phone or main computer. What is actually on those notes though is pretty cryptic to put it mildly. I stick to noting the "nodes" that I would use in mindmap. So far works well enough (started using Keep in earnest 5 years ago) but we will see how it goes as age continues to degrade memory.
I like using a wiki for notes. Something like this: http://evergreennotes.com/. There are a lot of ways to set up a wiki.
1) How consistently do you take notes when you're reading up on a new skill or subject?
I take notes for things that I want to eventually write something about, so for most things I don't end up taking notes.
2) Do you regularly refer back to old notes?
Sure. Especially keeping track of relevant sources is super useful for future me.
3) Do you approach note-taking differently for different subjects or purposes?
For notes that I don't want people to see because they involve private information, I just use a repository with some files and folders on my computer. For anything that I'd be ok with people reading, I use this wiki: openquestions.wiki.
4) Have you adopted a specific note-taking method and used it consistently for more than a few months?
Yep.
I'm not sure if the method has a name. For my personal notes I have a folder for free form babble type thoughts. Each filename is just the date that I'm writing. Then I later go through and find anything related to some topic I want to do more work on and copy past the good bits into files separated by topic.
Some of those notes in my private repo end up being something I'd like to share with friends, so I post 'em to my wiki.
5) What role does note-taking play for you? Is it a way to focus your attention? To make extracts from the text for easier reference later? To comprehend the material better through the act of making notes?
The free form writing helps me to get down my thoughts quickly for possible future reference. Sometimes I go back to what I wrote 5 months ago and find some gems.
Sometimes when I'm researching a topic, just copy pasting links and relevant text has been useful.
Taking notes helps me keep track of fragmentary ideas for future processing and helps me do the processing.
Also make sure to check out the other posts with the note taking tag if you haven't seen them already: https://www.lesswrong.com/tag/note-taking
I like the idea of setting up a wiki or using a wiki-like note taking app. I use Evernote a bit like that, crosslinking pages, but it's not really optimized for that. My main concern with using an app like Evergreen Notes is that a hobby project built by one person seems like a fragile place to leave a part of my brain.
With your method, do you ever go back to old free form notes and find yourself unable to reconstruct what you originally meant? Or find the task of wading through your old free form notes unpleasant, since they're not polished?
I guess in that case the extra canvas will rather distract you instead of helping.
If your mind wanders I guess the lecture is not engaging you enough. Did you look into the Procrastination Equation?
My current note taking art is abysmal. In order for notes to be of use, I think they need to be timely, and refer to your current goals. My life is too transient at this point to really benefit from note taking.
In the past it was honestly the most important thing I did in terms of organizing my thinking, my time, and my effort - especially my thinking about all of those things and how they related back to me.
I had worked at initially using a single notebook to act as sketchbook, journal, planner and organizer. I developed a system of notation and indexing to be able to reliably refer back to important info, ideas, or sketches. But as my ideas grew, I found I needed to start keeping my journal separate from my sketchbook and from my ideas book, so I developed an organizing system for the different books and worked at attempting to create basically a paper filing system I though of as a paper based database.
It allowed me to study information hierarchy, and learn all kinds of different things about data structures and the meta structures needed to make them easily retrievable and to be able to integrate them.
I even tried my hand at attempting to encrypt them, to make it difficult for anyone who might get access to them to be able to make a lot of use of the information. My last relationship ended badly, and while I can't prove anything personal or creative content was leaked, in my less generous moments I wonder.
But currently, it's all sitting in a couple of boxes in the living room under some dust cloths, but I was unable to keep up with it for 4 years, only just recently got it back, and while I leaf through them once in awhile, I pretty much just imagine what could have been. There are still some good ideas, but I'm not in a position to do anything with them right now, so there's no real reason to take notes like that right now.
Bullet Journaling - I got into it several months before it became a big thing all over Youtube several years back.
My experience is that it's possible to use a combination of your memory + looking stuff up ad hoc for a concrete problem in an area that I understand well. For example, if I'm working on a programming project using a new library, I often don't have to take notes. I can just look stuff up as I go along.
By contrast, if I'm learning a new and potentially complex skill, or am trying to gain knowledge for its own sake (like learning biochemistry for a class), I absolutely depend on notes. For example, I was recently trying to figure out how to synthesize a particular chemical of interest. This process involved converting the article that describes the procedure into my preferred note format, integrating cost and methods information from other sources, and then re-formatting the whole document so that it was easy to use, neat and clear.
This helps me feel like I know what I'd be getting into if I were to go ahead with it.
Over the last few months of studying "effective scholarship," I've concluded that a key skill is note-taking. In the near future, I plan to write fairly extensively on the subject. For now, I'm curious to hear how the LessWrong community takes notes. Some particular questions:
1) How consistently do you take notes when you're reading up on a new skill or subject?
2) Do you regularly refer back to old notes?
3) Do you approach note-taking differently for different subjects or purposes?
4) Have you adopted a specific note-taking method and used it consistently for more than a few months?
5) What role does note-taking play for you? Is it a way to focus your attention? To make extracts from the text for easier reference later? To comprehend the material better through the act of making notes?