Incremental Note-Taking | thesephist.com

Metadata

• Author: thesephist.com
• Full Title: Incremental Note-Taking | thesephist.com
• URL: https://thesephist.com/posts/inc/

Highlights

At its best, a good collection of notes is like a powerful extended memory.

The mind is like an iceberg: most of our everyday thoughts go unnoticed. By this, I mean: Most productivity solutions focus on the 10% of our thoughts that are easy to categorize and structure, like lecture notes, meeting minutes, people’s contacts, and highlights of readings. But the vast majority of thoughts we think – the other 90% – still hold underrated, underestimated latent value. In these 90% are things you pick up in conversations, only to forget by the next minute. These are the shower thoughts and ideas that slip past you so elusively, and to-dos that you let yourself forget because they’ll come back if they’re really that important. Without the right tools, our minds are hopelessly leaky. We forget much of what we think.

Paper is cheap. Paper is universal. Paper doesn’t run out of battery. Paper doesn’t vanish into the shadow realm when I close the window. Paper can do anything I can do with a pencil. Paper lets me turn back pages in the notebook and scan over for things that have yet to be done.

Time is essential to how we remember, and should be a first-class concept in a good note-taking system.