For me note taking is to: - cognitively offload things for later and preserving work in progress; - archive things without processing (like a data lake); - bui

For me note taking is to: - cognitively offload things for later and preserving work in progress; - archive things without processing (like a data lake); - build a corpus of knowledge to both improve my understanding of a subject and have a reference material that I can later look up. I have spent a significant share of my life organizing my notes in a mnemonic tree and also writing code to improve it's usability but the dividends are starting to pay off. It's good to have a functional 'external brain' to perform in a digital world that is filled by 'trash'. A decade ago you could find a good answer for 'everything' on Google. Today, besides a few islands of knowledge, you mostly find SEO optimized machine-generated stuff.