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How I take notes

  1. Intro
  2. Types of notes
    1. Daily log
    2. Topic notes
    3. Evergreen notes
    4. Project notes
  3. References

Intro

After reading a lot on the topic of taking notes and practicing note taking for almost 8 years, I realize that having a good system of accumulating notes on relevant topics is far more important than noting things down for storing purposes.

There are multiple ways to take notes. The tools I use is irrelevant. What I need is a system of taking useful and long lasting notes and making sure that I don’t let incomplete, useless and transient notes pile up. I do believe that taking notes digitally is more scalable and secure.

I use Obsidian to take all my notes

Types of notes

Daily log

  1. These are my daily notes titled in the format yyyy-mm-dd (yay, automatic sorting) which I typically write at the start of the day.
  2. These are templatized to get me started quickly. They should be the most low friction notes.
  3. Here, I write a rough outline of my day, of what all I want to do and some thoughts around them.
  4. Everything from meeting notes to ideas around tasks go here.
  5. The most important thing in this document is: Daily Highlight, where I write down the single most important thing that I want to do that day.
  6. Once I get better at it, I can create daily log of future dates where I plan my action items in advance. I can jot down some ideas that I want to think about in the future to de-clutter my brain.
  7. I also note down whatever useful I consume from unstructured resources (Youtube videos, adhoc article etc.).
  8. At the end of the week, I review all the daily notes of the week and extract out anything useful and move them to Topic notes. I am able to this 80-85% of the time.
  9. Note: This is not a To-Do list. It is much more than that.

Topic notes

  1. These are the notes of useful topics that I would like to remember.
  2. These are my understanding of a particular consumed source
  3. Typically scraped from my Daily log, but they can also directly come from other sources.
  4. These includes: Thoughts, prompts, quotes, sources, etc.
  5. 1 inbox note contains stuff around a single topic (eg: Stoicism, Web 3 or Docker).
  6. Ideally, they should be transient notes, similar to when I am researching for a topic and I read up a lot of stuff and collect resources on them.
  7. These notes contain thoughts that are not our’s, but rather someone else’s, which is fine for some topics, but if I want to get better and dig deeper on some topics, I move on to Evergreen notes.

Evergreen notes

  1. This is where the fun begins. I can’t explain it better than Andy Matuschak, so I’ll link his work here.
    1. TLDR: These notes are atomic (about a single topic or idea) and accumulate over time and projects. They are also our thoughts and learning on the topic.
  2. I don’t need to write evergreen notes for each and every topic I encounter.
  3. I’d be fine if I have Topic notes on medium-important topics.
  4. I don’t have a lot of evergreen notes, but I have started creating them more often.

Project notes

  1. These are notes around a single project
  2. They can contain a list of all relevant Evergreen notes or Topic notes
  3. They can serve as an index, and or be linked to the Daily log

I still haven’t figured out a systematic way of physically organizing my notes (folder structure etc.). I’ll write about it as and when I create one.

References

  1. This is a gold mine! Andy Matuschak
  2. Smart notes in obsidian