I’ve read the article. I have… many thoughts. I don’t think I have an overall theme here, just some observations about notes, note-taking, and note-keeping in connection with this article. Then, at the end, I have some response to the questions that @ibuys raised.
First, I agree with this,
We don’t write things down to remember them. We write them down to forget.
Perhaps you are familiar with a similar message from Through the Looking Glass
“The horror of that moment,” the King went on, “I shall never, NEVER forget!”
“You will, though,” the Queen said, “if you don’t make a memorandum of it.”
Alice looked on with great interest as the King took an enormous memorandum-book out of his pocket, and began writing.
Notes and memoranda are records of things that we will forget, but want not to forget. So, we preserve them.
Second, rather ironically in light of the previous point, is that often the very act of writing things down does result in us remembering the information.
I once was cleaning my closet and found a goals list I had written out on a piece of paper. It was five years old. As I looked through it, I was shocked to discover that, apparently without ever consulting that list after I had written, it I had accomplished a large number of my listed goals. Additionally, I had discovered some unachieved goals that I had written down and thought I forgot about, but which happened to be on my then-current goals list. I hadn’t even realized that they had ever occurred to me in the past. How can that be? I wrote something down as a goal, didn’t achieve it, forgot I had ever even made it a goal, and later made it a goal. WHAT?
I think the process of taking notes of this type — things that one likes, that one wants, or that describe oneself — come from a very deep place inside us. The note isn’t necessarily the result of new thinking but drawing out and making conscious something that is in you but seemingly sub-conscious. It’s like mining your own mind.
I don’t claim anything scientific about this point. It’s just me trying to understand and clumsily explain what I imagine to be happening in my brain when I take notes.
Third, going back to the point of making notes to forget, I think what note-takers and listmakers hope for is some magical way to have those forgotten thoughts, quotations, citations, and data, bubble up organically when we are in a context to do something with those particular notes. That’s probably why Zettlekasten is built around links and cross-references. That’s why David Allen likes organizing “general reference” material in an A-Z file. That’s why Evernote elevated the tag to the pinnacle of its organizational system.
In my work, for example, clients and witnesses often share pieces of factual information that may be important for their case at times when I’m in no position to deal with that fact. Maybe, it’s about how a document was created or some other person who knows something about some issue in the case. For me, I’ve set up a series of buckets where I dump information that I know that I’ll need later. For every case, as an example, I create a blank document for closing argument notes. Whenever I have a brainstorm, I add it to the notes. I don’t do anything with those notes until I’m wanting to work on my closing. Then they are at my finger tips (not buried in yellow pads or strewn throughout my email repository). I can then organize, sometimes excise, and revise those notes into what will be my final argument.
This is my key-dish system. I always know where to find the keys, because I have a key dish to put them in. Unfortunately, most of my notes, though, are not stored in a systematic key dish. This brings me to my next point….
Fourth, as I organize my notes more using, say, tags, those tags proliferate and then I am just as likely to forget that I have a tag that organized what might be a useful note in a given context. So, I am back to the issue of being able to find and review a note that I took in the past.
Often, I have great notes on a subject, but it’s still easier to just search google for the information after I can’t remember where I might have categorized it. That really is only an issue when I have notes that could just as easily be categorized in multiple ways (and I’ve forgotten which way I picked!). Certain types of notes that are very discrete are, for me, almost universally easy to find.
I have gone to great efforts to systematize my tags, print out an index of tags, and create a system to manage them. This, so I don’t forget that I have something buried somewhere that is useful to some particular things I’m trying to do at that moment. Even that is not ideal, but it helps.
Fifth, I do not agree that we don’t get much value out of most of the notes we keep.
I get the author’s issue that maybe we only use some 1% of what we’ve captured. I’m not sure that the real figure is quite that low, but let’s assume it is. What I find really cool about notes that I’ve taken is, for many of them, I don’t know what part of them will be useful or not later. I have old spiral notebooks that are filled with pages of notes, but I consult notes on two or three of those pages regularly and otherwise have no use for the remainder (or so it seems!).
I have class notes from classes I took 30 years ago. Occasionally, there is some gem in them that is useful or interesting. I took great notes on one particular class in undergrad, and late last year I discovered that they form a great outline for a potential book on the subject.
Here’s another personal example. I love music. I don’t play an instrument (yet?) and I’m not a musicologist. Still, I take copious notes on composers, artists, genres, instruments, and the like. It gives me a connection to something I enjoy, and it’s fun to go back and see what caught my interests and how I thought about something years ago. Those notes will not likely ever be “used” for anything important. (But it does make me annoying at some trivia games.) It’s possible nobody would have ever even known they existed had I not mentioned it here. Yet, they are precious to me. Maybe those notes even help me to understand myself a little better; certainly they help me appreciate the world around me a little better.
Sixth, I have found that my memory of a note that I took ages ago is often enough to enable me to find it today.
I get what the author states about note-tool search tools not being so good. More than that, one’s memory (mine at least) of the words that were written in the note that I can use to search for is often hazy. I know I wrote something thus and so. I search for it, but can’t find it.
That’s rare, though. I have found in the vast majority of cases, the memories of taking a note—what I was doing, why I was doing it, where I was, the writing instrument, and various other contextual clues—enable me to at least find the note by brute force. Sometimes that effort is rewarded with having surfaced a note that is not really all that useful. Other times I have retrieved exactly what I need that answers a question or saves me or a team member a ton of work.
Conclusion
I don’t know where this journey I’ve taken you on leads, save to say this. Note taking and note-keeping, for me, is one of those little things that bring out the joy and endless variety of life. It is, for me, such a useful pursuit for so many things. As a distance runner, I have running journals from almost two decades ago, and it’s remarkable the little insights I’ve been able to discern from glancing back over them from time-to-time.
Like so many of us, I’m looking for the perfect tools and methods for making note taking more useful and more accessible. Still, whether I’ve taken my notes on a post-it, typed them in Vim, scrawled them in an Apple Quick Note, put them in an e-mail to myself, or what have you, the utility is the same. Some of my more useful notes were taken on the back of a credit-card bill’s envelope, scanned, and saved in my file system. Some of my notes make zero sense if I look at them the week after I took them.
To answer the original question,
I will offer my unqualified “yes,” we are getting ton’s of value. And, my unqualified “no,” that it is not an unnecessary burden. (Maybe one qualification, there may be more efficient ways to gather and capture the information to minimize the burden.)
My own view is that we should enjoy our note-taking and note-retrieving—and not stress about it—as part of the process of life and of our life’s work. Even if those notes do nothing more than to help the note-taker and are never seen by anybody other than the note-taker, they do wonders. Whether they be practical notes (my closing argument notes, @Medievalist’s process of understanding and writing, quick reference things like @NiranS mentioned, and the like), productivity notes, or even our own personal-development notes, note-taking helps us to grow, develop, get things done, understand ourselves, and maybe even understand each other.
