On Taking Notes

I’ve tried most of the popular note-taking systems. I’ve had a Zettelkasten, an Obsidian vault with a hundred plugins, a second brain in Notion, a commonplace book in a physical notebook. Each one felt like the answer for about three weeks. Then the maintenance burden crept in, and slowly the system became the thing I was working on instead of the thinking I actually wanted to do.

The failure mode is always the same: you start optimizing for the system rather than for the thought.

What notes are actually for

Notes are not storage. Your brain is not a hard drive that needs offloading. Notes are thinking made visible — a way of slowing down enough to notice what you actually believe, and a record you can argue with later.

The best note I ever took was two sentences I wrote on a receipt after a long walk. I’ve returned to it dozens of times. It has no tags, no backlinks, no properties. It was just true and precise enough that it kept mattering.

The only rule I’ve kept

Write to yourself six months from now, not to a future archivist. That future archivist will spend all their time building a taxonomy and never actually read anything. Your future self just needs enough context to pick up the thread.

This means: write in full sentences. Capture the why of the idea, not just the what. Include the question that led you to the thought. Skip the highlight — write what the highlight made you think.

On synthesis

The moment a note becomes worth something is when it surprises you. That only happens when you’ve written enough of your own thinking that you can notice a pattern across it — not a pattern in what you’ve read, but in what you keep returning to.

That’s the only kind of note-taking I trust now: slow, selective, and written in my own voice. Not a capture system. Just a thinking practice.