Get your second brain with a note-taking habit
There are hundreds of note-taking apps and websites out there. But to make your notes useful, it matters less which app you use and more how those notes are taken and the habit you make out of them.
You have this powerful thing inside your head. But it is also forgetful. It has to forget so you can keep learning new things. As you build new connections from your new learnings, old ones may start to fade away. And that’s ok, but how to make sure they can be recalled later if needed?
Arguably the Internet is there for that. The greatest source of information, they say, the largest database. The way we use our memory is changing because of it, no doubt. Instead of storing knowledge in our brains, we can now keep pointers to what we assume is our knowledge, but created and stored by someone else. And then all it takes is a search on the Internet to retrieve it.
It’s not all it takes. The pointers we are storing are pointers to information. But the power of our brain comes from the associations it creates between them. These associations are unique to you. They are your knowledge, and no one can create it for you. You can retrieve the information on the Internet, but not the associations. Not the knowledge. If you haven’t stored that yourself, you will have to create it again.
More specifically, neither the Internet nor the pointers you store are frozen in time. Their plasticity increases the complexity of even finding the information we are looking for. Our memory and the Internet are also not reliable. We may think we remember something when, in fact, we replaced that memory with something else without even realizing it. And the Internet, ah the Internet, is full of unverifiable information sources that keep changing all the time.
Back in 1945, Vannevar Bush wrote: “There is a growing mountain of research. But there is increased evidence that we are being bogged down today as specialization extends. The investigator is staggered by the findings and conclusions of thousands of other workers — conclusions which he cannot find time to grasp, much less to remember, as they appear.” Imagine how Vannevar would feel today when the information available and its pace of change is millions of times more than back in the 40s.
The solution to keeping up with those growing changes in information is storing the associations we create. Or, in other words, the solution is note-taking but in a particular way. In a nutshell, here’s how you do it: each note you take should refer to one central idea. Keep it small, keep it simple. As you type, whenever a related idea surfaces, you create a link to the note associated with that other idea. If this other note doesn’t yet exist, it can stay empty except for one small but important detail. The tool you use should automatically create a backlink for you back to your original note. This way, you start to slowly build a graph of your associated ideas.
If you heard of zettelkasten before, that is exactly what I’m talking about. Zettelkasten is a note-taking and knowledge management method hundreds of years old. But age doesn’t mean much if you can’t use it. Before software came along to help, this is what a system with 90,000 notes looked like:
Unless you are ready to write, maintain, and later peruse thousands of indexed paper notes, this is not exactly an ideal method to adopt. So zettelkasten only started to grow in popularity more recently. Its feasibility increased with the advent of software to help support it. But which software specifically to use almost doesn’t matter. As long as you have one that helps you associate ideas together and later retrieve them, you are golden.
The right tool for the job
Let’s go through a few (non-exhaustive) suggestions.
We start with Notion. It is probably the most trendy these days, with a $2 billion valuation to match. Notion does a lot, so it can be a bit hard to grasp at first. But it only released support for backlinks recently, finally making it a candidate for the zettelkasten method.
Roam (or in its full, Roam Research) is in its essence a zettelkasten tool. It has a much smaller feature set than Notion, but that’s almost by design. Roam thrives by focusing on optimizing how you associate ideas.
Both Notion and Roam have something on top of backlinks that makes them more powerful: transclusion. This means you can link a document’s snippet into another: Change the original document, and all the snippets get updated. On Notion, however, transclusion is still unofficial (video of how you can do this), while on Roam this is a first-class feature. Notion and Roam are also both web applications. You know the deal with those, right? Paid subscriptions, privacy issues, and data available only online are things you will have to compromise on.
The most readily available alternative is probably Obsidian. It is a free desktop application where all your data is stored locally. The application helps you organize Markdown files using the zettelkasten method, similar to how Roam does it. One of its main drawbacks is that it doesn’t support transclusion yet.
Finally, there is Emacs. If you know it, you know how much you can tailor it to match precisely your workflow. If you don’t, be aware, the learning curve is steep. To use Emacs with zettelkasten, you will need the org-mode extension and others built on top. The most popular among those is perhaps org-roam. Emacs and most of its extensions are also free and open-source applications. You will be in full control if you are willing to invest the time.
If not, any of the other software will do just fine.
Create a note-taking habit
More than the software is creating the habit. One note alone won’t do much for you. One or two ideas written down every day are more important than spending a whole weekend researching tools and later forgetting them. The value you get from these notes you take will compound over time.
Start small
“It is so easy to overestimate the importance of one defining moment and underestimate the value of making small improvements on a daily basis.” (James Clear, Atomic Habits, p. 15)
If you have never consistently written notes before, start with a single sentence. A journal could be a good place to start. If the zettelkasten method is about one central idea per note, write that one sentence that defines each day for you. You will feel the drive to expand your thoughts more and more as days go by.
When that starts to happen, notice recurring ideas that keep coming back. Link those notes. Create a note for a particular idea where you can expand it. One idea will lead to another; create a second, third, and fourth notes for those. Not even realizing it, note-taking will become part of your daily routine for more and more tasks.
Depth before breadth
It is easier to start with one topic. You can connect ideas within, say, knowledge management more easily than between music and geology. By focusing on one topic, reading its source materials, and exploring the thing you are trying to understand first-hand, you are getting to the bottom of it. The synergy to associate ideas will be there naturally.
Stay within your circle of competence at first. You will be able to more easily read, take notes, and connect ideas about things you already know. There is always something new to discover. And if it’s in a topic you are already familiar with, you can build on that knowledge by getting closer to it. It was the photographer Robert Capa who famously said, “If your pictures aren’t good enough, you’re not close enough.”
Work the material
Remember, note-taking is how you will be registering the associations you create from thinking about a topic. Thinking must come first, and that takes time and effort. Otherwise, you might fall into the Collector’s Fallacy trap. That is, you can feel good about storing a link to a webpage and categorizing it, so you 'know about something'. But that is not the same as 'knowing something'.
Take the time to understand the topic. Ask questions and seek answers by yourself. As you build your understanding, try to generate concrete examples and explanations for it. A straightforward way to test your knowledge is this: If someone explains something to you, can you explain it back to the person in your own words?
Finally, put it in writing. Writing down your understanding will force you to bring clarity to it. As the cartoonist Guindon once wrote, “Writing is nature’s way of letting you know how sloppy your thinking is.” Keep the zettelkasten method in mind. Write one central idea per note and connect it to others as you expand your understanding.
Wrapping up
Slowly, one small note a day at first, you will be building a graph of your own knowledge. And its value will compound over time. The more you connect your ideas, the more you will discover from them. As you explore your interconnected notes, serendipity will enable you to play with your knowledge in unexpected ways. Your writing will improve, you will be better at recalling information and forming new ideas, and, ultimately, you will improve your thinking. It’s like you now have a second brain.
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