In the creative process, also worked out on theĪs you write down more notes and keep connecting them, your notes will gain complexity up to the point where, let’s say a year later, you will find surprising connections between new thoughts and old notes. Just collecting stuff is not the same as understanding it. So ideally notes are really an ecosystem rather than just a storage container. This implies that you make your pre-understanding or prejudice explicit so that it can can be challenged in dialogue with something other, whether that is another person with a different background in teaching or a book you are reading. The philosopher Gadamer for example describes how understanding requires you to go into dialogue with whatever you are trying to understand. There is a hermeneutical principle at work here. Similar to how your ability to teach is a good indication of whether you understand the essence of something, just so is note taking a way to see if you really get the main point of for example a paper that you are reading. Note taking improves the depth of your understanding for various reasons, but the least superficial is that writing down thoughts forces you to think more coherently by requiring you to make thoughts explicit. Instead, it will improve the depth of your understanding. If you connect your notes heavily by creating links between them, though, eventually your Zettelkasten will do more than fill memory gaps.
Some note archives never move beyond a storage of thoughts and stuff you need for reference. See for example a quote from this post on the benefits ofĮxtending your mind and memory through note taking Ideas about how note taking structures your thinking are worked out by the Zettelkasten (indexing cards) system that I found while writing this article. If knowledge is your business (if you are a writer, academic, or something of the like) spending some time to optimize your note taking is worth it. The overall goal is to start building a personal plain text ecosystem where notes are linked together in such a way that they do not only help me remember things, but also positively stimulate the process of thinking and writing. This guide assumes you make notes in Markdown, but you can adapt everything to your needs. This is my guide for achieving the above.
everything in plain text: future proof, portable, searchable.I have some requirements for such a system. This posts explains how we can use Vim to build a personalized note taking ecosystem of interconnected notes, only using plain text. Vim is my preferred tool for making notes and organizing my thoughts.
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