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Andy’s Notes

Author: Andy Matushak Publish Date: No date Review Date: 2022-3-23 Status:🌐

  • Skillful reading is generally non-linear

  • Books are almost always written with highly linear structures, and the form of the medium itself encourages the reader to move through the text linearly. But skillful readers rarely read linearly. Sometimes they read with intention—looking for how the book can help them answer a specific question. Or they might do a sparse first pass to understand the book’s structure. Or they might start with the index and focus on the most relevant passages.

  • Tasks left undone, observations left unrecorded, replies yet to be written—these swirl about our minds, as if we’re rehearsing them over and over again to make sure they’re not forgotten. To get rid of this nagging and create a “mind like water” (to use the term in Allen, 2015), build systems to reliably close these open loops.

  • For instance: for operational to-dos, this means (Allen, 2015):

  1. You should be able to record a task anywhere
  2. You regularly drain tasks from this list
  3. You regularly delegate, refactor, or delete tasks which you can’t prioritize
  • Taken together, these properties ensure that when you record a task, you can stop thinking about it. Ubiquitous capture isn’t enough, as most to-do systems demonstrate. If you don’t regularly review your task list and decide to delete or re-strategize lingering tasks, you won’t be able to trust that you’ll follow up on tasks you record.

  • Evergreen notes are written and organized to evolve, contribute, and accumulate over time, across projects.

  • This is an unusual way to think about writing notes: Most people take only transient notes

  • In contrast to Evergreen notes, Most people use notes as a bucket for storage or scratch thoughts These are very convenient to write, but after a year of writing such notes, they’ll just have a pile of dissociated notes. The notes won’t have added up to anything: they’re more like fuel, written and discarded to help the author process their ongoing experiences.

  • Most people use notes as a bucket for storage or scratch thoughts

  • People don’t want to forget an idea or a conversation or a task or quote from a book, so they write it down in Evernote or something. What’s the purpose? Probably: “To make sure I don’t forget.” Maybe: “Just writing it down helps me remember.”

  • In this conception, notes are a way to Close open loops not to accumulate insight. The “real” work happens outside the notes; the notes are just a reference system which stores information which might help, or a write-once pile of “messy” thoughts

  • That’s because these practices aren’t about writing notes; they’re about effectively developing insight: “Better note-taking” misses the point; what matters is “better thinking”

  • Lots of people write about solutions to the problem that Note-writing practices are generally ineffective The vast majority of that writing fixates on a myopic, “lifehacking”-type frame, focused on answering questions like: “how should I organize my notes?”, “what kind of journal should I use?”, “how can I make it easy to capture snippets of things I read?”, etc.

  • Answers to these questions are unsatisfying because the questions are focused on the wrong thing. The goal is not to take notes—the goal is to think effectively. Better questions are “what practices can help me reliably develop insights over time?”, “how can I shepherd my attention effectively?” etc

  • Evergreen notes should be atomic

  • It’s best to create notes which are only about one thing—but which, as much as possible, capture the entirety of that thing.

  • This way, it’s easier to form connections across topics and contexts. If your notes are too broad, you might not notice when you encounter some new idea about one of the notions contained within, and links to that note will be muddied. If your notes are too fragmented, you’ll also fragment your link network, which may make it harder to see certain connections

  • These are often declarative or imperative phrases making a strong claim. This puts pressure on me to adequately support the claim in the body.

  • If I write a note but struggle to summarize it in a sharp title, that’s often a sign that my thinking is muddy or that this note is about several topics

  • in both cases, the solution is to break the ideas down and write about the bits I understand best first.

  • I use nouns and noun phrases in note titles only to define core terms (which other notes generally orbit around)

  • I often begin by writing a note without knowing what the title will be. The title often emerges from the text as it’s written. When a note suggests a strong title with a clear claim, that’s a good sign that it’s starting to make sense.

  • Concept handles, after Alexander https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/02/20/writing-advice/

  • A “concept handle” is a memorable noun phrase representing a complex, often abstract topic. For example: “prisoner’s dilemma,” “Overton window,” “belief in belief,”

  • Successful concept handles can really amplify a vague idea which many people sort of understand but can’t point to and talk about. If you give that vague notion a crisp, catchy name, you can unlock a lot of conversation and reflection.

  • When writing Evergreen notes it’s tempting to write notes like “X is bad” or “Y doesn’t work.” Prefer instead to write note titles which express the property or requirement in a positive sense.

  • If you’ve thought them through, negatively-oriented notes usually contain a descriptive theory of why the missing/flawed property is important. By bringing that theory to the foreground, you make it easier to see the claims in a systematic context, which, in turn, makes it easier to build on.

  • Evergreen notes should be concept-oriented

  • It’s best to factor Evergreen notes by concept (rather than by author, book, event, project, topic, etc). This way, you discover connections across books and domains as you update and link to the note over time

  • The most straightforward way to take notes is to start a new note for each book, each project, or each research topic. Because each note covers many concepts, it can be hard to find what you’ve written when a concept comes up again later: you have to remember the name of each book or project which dealt with the topic

  • When you read another book which discusses the same concept, you’ll write a new note on that book. With this approach, there’s no accumulation

  • Your new thoughts on the concept don’t combine with the old ones to form a stronger whole: you just have a scattered set of notes on the concept,

  • it’s not just about accumulation. There’s also no pressure to synthesize your new ideas on the concept with your prior thoughts about it.

  • novel connections tend to appear where they’re not quite so expected. When arranging notes by concept, you may make surprising links between ideas that came up in very different books. You might never have noticed that those books were related before

  • Organizing by concept makes note-taking a little harder, but in a useful way: when writing new notes, we have to find where they fit into the whole. So we explore some part of our prior web of notes, which may lead us somewhere unexpected.

  • Prefer associative ontologies to hierarchical taxonomies

  • Let structure emerge organically. When it’s imposed from the start, you prematurely constrain what may emerge and artificially compress the nuanced relationships between ideas.

  • Our file systems, organizational structures, and libraries suggest that hierarchical categories are the natural structure of the world. But often items belong in many places. And items relate to other items in very different hierarchical categories.

  • Worse, by presorting things into well-specified categories, we necessarily fuzz their edges. Things don’t always fit exactly. Maybe once enough new ideas are collected, a new category would emerge… except you can’t see its shape because everything’s already been sorted. And because everything’s already been sorted, further sorting requires undoing existing structure.

  • It’s better to let networks of related ideas to gradually emerge, unlabeled: Let ideas and beliefs emerge organically. Once you can see the shape, then you can think about its character

  • Close open loops

  • Tasks left undone, observations left unrecorded, replies yet to be written—these swirl about our minds, as if we’re rehearsing them over and over again to make sure they’re not forgotten. To get rid of this nagging and create a “mind like water” (to use the term in Allen, 2015), build systems to reliably close these open loops.

  • For instance: for operational to-dos, this means (Allen, 2015):

  1. You should be able to record a task anywhere
  2. You regularly drain tasks from this list
  3. You regularly delegate, refactor, or delete tasks which you can’t prioritize
  • Taken together, these properties ensure that when you record a task, you can stop thinking about it. Ubiquitous capture isn’t enough, as most to-do systems demonstrate. If you don’t regularly review your task list and decide to delete or re-strategize lingering tasks, you won’t be able to trust that you’ll follow up on tasks you record.

  • Executable strategy for writing

  • A naive writing process begins with a rough inkling about what one wants to write and a blank page. Progress from this point requires an enormous amount of activation energy and cognitive effort: there’s nothing external, so you must juggle all of the piece-to-be in your head.

  • By contrast, if you’ve already written lots of concept-oriented Evergreen notes around the topic, your task is more like editing than composition. You can make an outline by shuffling the note titles, write notes on any missing material, and edit them together into a narrative.

  • In fact, because you can Create speculative outlines while you write you might find that the first of these steps is already accomplished, too. And writing each note isn’t hard: Evergreen notes permit smooth incremental progress in writing (“incremental writing”)

  • nstead of having a task like “write an outline of the first chapter,” you have a task like “find notes which seem relevant.

  • Evergreen notes permit smooth incremental progress in writing (“incremental writing”)

  • Evergreen notes’ atomic size (Evergreen notes should be atomic) and link structures (Evergreen notes should be densely linked) make it easy to stop and resume work. This helps us Close open loops

  • These small, self-contained notes represent regular checkpoints. Each note takes only a few minutes to write, but because they’re Evergreen notes, each note is solid ground to stand on—fairly complete relative to its own concept (Evergreen notes should be concept-oriented). Of course, we’ll iterate on their contents over time, but each time we do, that note will remain a mostly-complete, self-contained unit.

  • By contrast, when we’re working on a large work-in-progress manuscript, we’re juggling many ideas in various states of completion. Different parts of the document are at different levels of fidelity. The document is large enough that it’s easy to lose one’s place or to forget where other relevant points are when one returns. Starting and stopping work for the day feel like heavy tasks, drawing heavily on working memory.

  • Create speculative outlines while you write

  • When you write a new note, add it to one or more outlines you’re maintaining, creating a new one if necessary. Substantially-complete writing projects will naturally emerge.

  • Normally, we start an outline when we start a writing project. This forces us to start with a blank page. By contrast, if we write new notes every day and notice how they relate to each other, these can accumulate into potential writing projects. When an outline feels “ripe,” we can pluck it and turn it into a manuscript without the exerting herculean start-up effort that comes with a blank page.

  • Maintaining already-written notes in an outline is comparatively easy: just look at a pair of notes and ask: which comes first? (Pirsig)

  • Ahrens, S. (2017). How to Take Smart Notes: One Simple Technique to Boost Writing, Learning and Thinking – for Students, Academics and Nonfiction Book Writers.: Developing arguments and ideas bottom-up instead of top-down is the first and most important step to opening ourselves up for insight. Steven Johnson, who wrote an insightful book about how people in science and in general come up with genuine new ideas, calls it the “slow hunch.” As a precondition to make use of this intuition, he emphasises the importance of experimental spaces where ideas can freely mingle (Johnson 2011). A laboratory with open-minded colleagues can be such a space, much as intellectuals and artists freely discussed ideas in the cafés of old Paris. I would add the slip-box as such a space in which ideas can mingle freely, so they can give birth to new ones. “When I am stuck for one moment, I leave it and do something else.” When Luhmann asked what else he did when he was stuck, his answer was: “Well, writing other books. I always work on different manuscripts at the same time. With this method, to work on different things simultaneously, I never encounter any mental blockages.”

  • Use notes to avoid preconceived conclusions

  • When writing manuscripts, one often begins with a conclusion (or at least an angle) in mind, and then we write or do research with an eye to supporting that idea. If we’re not careful, those preconceptions will distort our thinking. But if we begin by writing Evergreen notes should be atomic, we can let the conclusions and topic emerge from our careful thinking.

  • The very moment we decide on a hypothesis, our brains automatically go into search mode, scanning our surroundings for supporting data, which is neither a good way to learn nor research.

  • Ahrens, S. (2017). How to Take Smart Notes: One Simple Technique to Boost Writing, Learning and Thinking – for Students, Academics and Nonfiction Book Writers.

  • The linear process promoted by most study guides, which insanely starts with the decision on the hypothesis or the topic to write about, is a sure-fire way to let confirmation bias run rampant. First, you basically fix your present understanding, as the outcome instead of using it as the starting point, priming yourself for one-sided perception. Then you artificially create a conflict of interest between getting things done (finding support for your preconceived argument) and generating insight, turning any departure from your preconceived plan into a mutiny against the success of your own project. This is a good rule of thumb: If insight becomes a threat to your academic or writing success, you are doing it wrong.

  • Knowledge work should accrete

  • Many activities in Knowledge work seem to be ephemeral efforts, their outputs mostly discarded after they’re completed. You might wake up to a really tricky email and realize that it connects to something you’ve been thinking about for a while. You might spend an hour writing a careful reply, capturing your latest thinking. And now… it lives in your “sent” folder, and briefly in the impression on your and your colleague’s mind. The effort accumulates only insofar as that work subtly influences you and your colleague’s thinking over time. Likewise, Most people take only transient notes

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