I think a lot of this is individual but after trying many, many tools over the years I’ve found that a broad folder structure with tagging and good search serves me quite well.
I do prefer when tags can be applied in specific areas of a longer document (along with having an outline), this makes searching much cleaner for me.
Often I’m looking for or researching something specific, at least topically.
Perhaps I’m writing a new email series and I’m looking for copywriting reference material.
There’s no scenario, for me, where I cannot browse through my resource library either by person or topic with a good folder/tag structure (especially where you can create smart folders or search for a tag within a folder.
I fail to see where backlinking is useful to me at all, again very individual.
Workflowy is actually quite good at all of this if you take notes in bullet point formats. And they have image/file exports in beta now.
Ulysses is excellent at this at the document level where you can easily have an outline as well as an easy to see list of annotations and highlights in the sidebar. It’s “tagging” system (keyword manager) is not the strongest but the things you can do in the document for self-reference are excellent.
Apple Notes works well for me too, mostly because the search is so good and so fast.
My ideal tool would have:
Tagging, with search populating at the sentence or word level
Excellent search
Foldable content
Table of Contents
Ability to quickly find notes within a note
Visually pleasing
I will look at Bear when they release Panda in Q2 but I don’t think they will have #1.
I’ve largely abandoned print for digital. (I make an exception for photobooks, museum exhibit catalogues, and the like—i.e., the kinds of texts where fondling the physical object is, for me, part of the reading experience.) But in doing so, I’ve had to learn to be disciplined about highlighting: it’s too easy for me to highlight a whole page in a rainbow of colors, extract the highlights, and think I’ve somehow mastered the material and committed it to memory for later use. I’ve made myself a rule: every highlight has to have a note attached that is at least a first-pass attempt to capture why the passage was highlighted in the first place. When I can’t think of what I should write in the note—and it has to be more than something like “this is important”— I know I haven’t really digested the material in the highlighted passage and put it in the context of other things I know or things I’m trying to know more about.
Re summaries: It’s hard to do, but nothing helps me engage with a text more than trying to write a brief summary of its key points. W-a-a-a-y back when I was an undergrad in (an analog world), one of my professors made us write a 10 page précis of a 500 page book and it was honestly one of the most useful assignments I was ever given.
Going back to the article originally posted at the beginning of this thread, seems like some people here might also find some resonance in this:
(Apologies if someone’s already posted this in another thread.)
What you have discovered is an aid not to memory, but to reminiscence, and you give your disciples not truth, but only the semblance of truth; they will be hearers of many things and will have learned nothing; they will appear to be omniscient and will generally know nothing; they will be tiresome company, having the show of wisdom without the reality.
—King Thamus to the god Theuth, inventor of letters
This is, of course, one of the archetypal dangers of technology in general. The human condition, the condition of the tool-using animal, is to be perpetually vulnerable to mistaking instruments for ends.
My takeaways:
intentionality in capturing, summarising and connecting thinking has high value in the retention of ideas
many of the contemporary note-making tools aim to reduce friction in capturing, summarising and connecting ideas
some friction is useful in cultivating intentionality
note-making ≠ thought; note-making = a tool for thought
Also this:
…which really helped me to unpick my thinking about what I was really doing when I highlighted something:
When we highlight parts of a book we highlight based on an assumed understanding, but later, we review some of these highlights and find them completely useless. We say, “I don’t remember what this means.” In reality, we never knew what it meant. We were simply acknowledging the gist of the passage, but later we’ re confused by the same passage.
The gist is an impulse, not a thought. The gist come from the gut. It doesn’t have words. The gist isn’t understanding. The gist is simply an emotional reaction to reading something that resonates with us. This is why, while extremely uncomfortable at times, it important to put ideas into our own words. When we do so we find that we not only begin to engage different parts of our brain, but also we begin to unravel layers of meaning that weren’t apparent in the gist emotion.
Again, I offer these references as someone who really does appreciate the function and utility of PKM systems when they’re adopted and used in a thoughtful way…
Very helpful articles. I’m glad my experience of spaced repetition was not unique!
In a way, what I was doing was stealing the Madeleine from Proust and re-purposing it for my own needs. I know that if I can remember the experience I’m having at the time of learning something, then by remembering the stimulus I can pull that part of the book out of the deep storage in my brain.
I’ve been fascinated by the connection between place and memory of an audiobook. I often walk and listen to Audible; returning to a place can often cause me to remember a book I read years ago.
Having a trigger is key, and summarisation is an effective way of making note taking an active process. I’m changing the way I take notes as an experiment (again). I’m going to take day to day notes in Goodnotes electronically - most of them are destined for the bin. I’m going to reserve my good quality notebook and fountain pen for keeping a miscellany; individual summaries - generally not more than a page - of ideas I come across, indexed for future access. If I’m keeping a book I can even write in it or add a note pointing to the notebook and relevant page(s). It’s not dissimilar to a Zettelkasten but without continual review and extensive linking. It can sometimes be useful to retain earlier thoughts, even if superseded.,
Maybe I should write my miscellanies during walks!
This is actually a well known pre-writing method for remembering. It’s the equivalent of a memory palace where something is stored in memory along a known journey. Retracing the journey in your mind brings back to memory what you placed there. For it to work it needs good imagery, but it does work and is phenomenally powerful. Some people have boasted having 100,000 memory places. As I’ve said elsewhere on this forum, a second brain could be detrimental to your actual brain as failing to see the power of the human brain can cause us to store stuff written down that our brain can easily handle.
I have read this article when it came out and glad to find it discussed here. While I’ve always been cautious about the raving about “revolutionary” note-taking methodologies and apps, and therefore not against the article’s point in abstract, I’m not so sure about the validity of the author’s argument. To what extent the observation that “Roam is falling” is a statistically supported fact, or merely an anecdote from the author’s field of view? To what extent the problems of Roam are indeed design flaws, or merely the author’s personal peeve resulted from their failure to plan and maintain a sustainable system? The article doesn’t distinguish between these fine lines and I reserve the doubt that subjective factors are partially to be blamed.
It’s hyperbole, otherwise known today as click-bait. Nothing to do with stats or facts. If the headline was “Roam concerns me”, there would be fewer affiliate link-clicks.
In my Agile project management world, we use the Kaizen concept in reference to making tiny changes that we think will improve our way of working, and then, in a week or so we reflect on those changes, and we either keep them or discard them.
I like this idea for PKM, too, in that we should continually look at our way of working, making small changes, and keeping the changes that help.
I LOVE Readwise cuz I can add my own notes about the highlighted passage in the notes section, at the time that I’m making the note…explaining / reminding myself WHY I marked this passage, how I thought it’d apply to me, etc. When Readwise resurfaces it later, (or I go in to review all the highlights from that book (aka read my pertinent summary of the very long book), I am SO glad I took the time to make the notes. Otherwise, most of the time I’d just think “HUH?” – Makes my highlighting meaningful for sure!
Oops, I already replied so someone else re how I love Readwise cuz I can make notes as to WHY I highlighted a certain passage, how it applies to me, etc. w/o yet reading your comment here – And I see now I’ll aim to do as you describe: really don’t even BOTHER to highlight, if I can’t explain to myself WHY this is important enough to retain (even if it’s just “contemplate how I can apply this to XX situation” if I don’t know for sure yet…) Thanks for the idea!