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I love this, and I love how disturbing it is for a lot of people (especially those who only read the title)! We think we write to remember, but it's really the

I love this, and I love how disturbing it is for a lot of people (especially those who only read the title)! We think we write to remember, but it's really the act of letting go as the article gets into as a theory, that really lets those notes become effective to us. We can revisit these notes at a later date, with fresh eyes, having forgotten about it entirely. It adds value, not because the original idea or note was particularly great, but because of what we are then combining it with (action and experience). This is also why blindly making notes isn't effective as a form of memorizing. You are writing just to write, you have to revisit them blindly in a new way for them to become effective with a new combination. As if you are a chemist creating a new concoction previously thought impossible. So let your notes app become a giant trash pile. It's better for you, and they should do their job with proper search anyways. Don't spend time optimizing for note link graphs or any of that BS that doesn't help you and you absolutely will stop caring about those "features" in 5 months anyways. Such features are just productivity industry nonsense to make you feel productive while the content remains elusive to your mind.

systems_glitch 3y ago
Tim Hunkin uses a similar explanation in "The Secret Life of Machines" when talking about computers vs. human mind: that the real strength in the human mind is the ability to forget things!
- slt2021 3y ago
  forget & rediscover & recombine old knowledge with new knowledge to synthesize new ideas.
  - fsckboy 3y ago
    so in other words, not actually forget... a pov with which i agree
  - dizhn 3y ago
    I am not sure about the rediscover part or that there's any synergy going on there. For me the value of notes is that they cure my "fear of forgetting". File it away knowing that it will be there if it's necessary. I don't have to spend mental energy and have the nagging feeling of losing something. You can then accumulate new things and do the same thing to them if they are not immediately useful/necessary. This is the gist of what I got from the part of the GTD book I read too. Though everybody is different of course.
    - systems_glitch 3y ago
      That's why we all have massive ZFS pools, right? It's so much easier to "blow away" a workstation and move on to a new one when you know you have the entire disk saved :P
  - systems_glitch 3y ago
    Shoulders of giants.
- WorldMaker 3y ago
  It was also a running thread in Carl Sagan's "The Dragons of Eden" that a lot of the history of communications tools and writing formats is the ability to externalize memory and what that means for how we think and behave and what brain power that opens up for other things when we can externalize those memories to focus on other tasks.
kajecounterhack 3y ago
I use plain text files (1 markdown doc per day) + grep so kind of in line with your recommendation here. But I've also tried Obsidian/Logseq and stuff like that for complex topics with interlinking, and I still think backlinks & knowledge graphs are useful and maybe better than just grep. Basic search relies on you to remember some keyword you want to search on, but networked notes let you traverse your old notes in faster more productive ways. I revisit old notes maybe once a month, and every time I do that I wonder why I still haven't migrated fully to Logseq. > Such features are just productivity industry nonsense to make you feel productive while the content remains elusive to your mind. Don't forget that everyone has a different workflow and what works for you might not be ideal for someone else. Also Obsidian/Logseq are both free vs Roam/Notion/etc -- some people just intensely incorporate notes as a part of their workflow.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- waboremo 3y ago
  Are they faster more productive ways though? You're still operating off keywords. It combines the mechanical effort of tags, with the mental upkeep required to remember which notes can be linked. Not great. I do agree everyone has a different workflow, but also you're a really good example of why the productivity is so massive despite the very little improvement to productivity brought on by these additional services: everyone is so desperately trying to convince themselves a better workflow is right around the corner. That someone else has a superior workflow, you just have to use that new app or service. Repeat every time a new gimmick comes out.
  - zmgsabst 3y ago
    But synthesizing your notes into tags and remember the index of tags is learning! Isn’t that the goal — to process your notes, so as to come to new insights and connections?
    - melagonster 3y ago
duncan-donuts 3y ago
> we think we right to remember, but it’s really the act of letting go I’ve found this to be true with writing music as well. Prior to recording stuff I found I’d play stuff that I had written a lot. The act of recording lets me forget those things and write more (and usually better) song ideas.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
rjh29 3y ago
It's also not worth organising or even deleting your pile of note trash. Just make sure your notes are searchable if/when you need them later.
langsoul-com 3y ago
Indeed, I have read my notes from younger self. Absolute dog pile. Like was thinking about a fully virtual avatar, not a person. But the tech wasn't there, and still ain't, to generate decent conversation, virtually rendered body with humanistic movements and facial expressions. Not to mention being able to select an interest field, Ie likes tech, hence tech conversations. Back then I thought it was a brilliant idea. Now, it's quite impossible and better left sometime in the next 10ish years.
distortionfield 3y ago
My interpretation of the article was to stress the "publish or perish" mentality of writing. Your notes are serving no one any good, put the work in to publish something or else it's probably not actually worth much.
- RajT88 3y ago
  You'd be surprised. I publish a lot of notes to internal wikis, with the thinking that, hey, maybe someone will find this useful. I get to see page views. The pages I'm really proud of nobody reads. The pages with the most page views are boring stuff (related to process, navigating my company's org structure, etc.). More broadly, I've noticed that the things you do which have massive impact aren't always what you'd think. I once wrote a VBScript (long enough ago, it predated powershell) for a friend of mine to just run a program if there was no already running process by that name. He worked at an engineering firm, where for some inane reason some engineering software was always exiting and requiring a long init time to restart. The script kept it more or less always ready when you needed it. Years later, I'd forgotten about it when he mentioned that it was a massive productivity boost. Every engineer at his company who had seen it in action, wanted it for themselves. Dozens of engineers were saving hours of productivity every week because of a throw-away script. Madness.
RajT88 3y ago
> We think we write to remember I do exactly that. The act of writing helps me solidify that information in my brain - I have to process it to commit it to words. Paper works better than a text file, but a text file has the advantage of being faster and searchable. Once I've taken notes, I rarely go back and look at them. (Conversely, if I don't take notes, I'll wish I had) I definitely do not take notes to abandon the information. Information I don't see the value in, I browse the web while listening. Some of that still sticks with me anyways.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- karma_fountain 3y ago
  Writing as a means to internalize information and make ideas your own is good.
ShadowBanThis01 3y ago
Yeah, I was all ready to post a scornful or dismissive comment... but first (of course?) I actually read the whole thing and found myself smiling at the truth of it. I do diligently record things in Apple Notes, since they finally added categories (or groups, or whatever). I used to use Outlook notes the same way. It's really all I need. And I DO truly refer to them, although sometimes it's a long time later and I find way more detail and cool ideas than I remembered having come up with. But browser bookmarks... these are mostly a waste. I have a big collection of them, again organized in groups. But it is vanishingly rare that I use them instead of just doing a new search.
vladvasiliu 3y ago
I kinda agree with your point, and hate spending time organizing or following some "system" for my notes. Search is great, and is the thing that almost killed my paper notebook. However, one feature I would really love to have but never seen, is a combined todo - notes app. I often jot down notes as in "things to note / remember", but also, in the same flow, I'd note thinks I'd need to do. I would love to be able to gather those automatically in a view, and be able to see them as done when I revisit the initial note after marking them as such from the "todo view". The closest I've seen was some VimWiki, but I've found that fairly unwieldy (though I love the idea of taking notes in vim).
- pillefitz 3y ago
  You can do that with Obsidian. Also, the DataView plugin allows you to run arbitrary queries over your notes to create new views
  - SpaghettiX 3y ago
    I tried doing that (I pay for Obsidian Sync, and have a lot of plugins so I run only the bare minimum plugins I need on mobile), but app start time and syncing time on mobile makes this quite a bad experience. Instead, when I need to write something quickly, I create a temporary Google Keep note. When I'm back at my laptop, I merge it into my Obsidian Vault.
    - punkspider 3y ago
      Damn. That is my process exactly.
    - DirkH 3y ago
      I recommend LogSeq with Syncthing for your use case. I'm using that right now for both TODO and notetaking. I have syncthing set up so that it syncs my vault across 3 devices (including my phone). Very easy to set up (tho admittedly also easy to mess up the set up process). Have had minor hiccups the past 5 months but nothing that would make me want to stop using this setup. All this is free. I feel like I've found a gold mine that nobody else seems to know about.
chillfox 3y ago
My notes have always been a huge messy pile with a tiny amount of well structured/formatted/linked notes. The well structured ones got that way because I returned to them many times and improved on them a tiny bit each time. The quality of a note is really just a reflection of how much time I have spent on a subject.
drawkbox 3y ago
Writing is part of the creative process. Writing it down helps to solidify an idea into the heap from the stack, maybe even take it from hot storage to cold storage. It allows you to jot it down while it is still fresh and offload it to focus on it later. This is super helpful in ideas, jokes, thought streams, todos, one pagers on some projects, etc. It does help you remember but also allows you to move to the next thing for now. Writing down ideas is like a sketchbook, ideas/actions/iteration of thoughts both good and bad. It is important to write thoughts down though because how many times have you had a great idea and you are like "I'll never forget this" and then a while later you are wondering what that was or you entirely move on because life moves fast. Creatives, writers, comedians, developers, or just projects, are better when writing is involved in ideas to realization of those ideas. Writing it down and notes is a form of brainstorming. Brainstorming allows ideas to be spontaneous and allows improvisation to get to better ideas. Even writing down bad ideas because somewhere in it is something good. I use notes apps but more now just a repo (super easy with github.dev everywhere) and notes have easy history that way and you can freely add/remove without feeling like notes are lost. When I use notes apps or even Google Docs, yes they have history but it isn't as fluid/quick as github for that. The important thing is find something that works for you that makes the barrier to writing it down almost non-existent. It needs to be very easy to write things down in between busy days and to capture these fleeting moments.
bazinga30 3y ago
Superbly said - “it's really the act of letting go” I think if we look at note taking as a sorting / filtering function, then maybe this article isn’t that painful to read..

systems_glitch 3y ago

Tim Hunkin uses a similar explanation in "The Secret Life of Machines" when talking about computers vs. human mind: that the real strength in the human mind is the ability to forget things!

slt2021 3y ago
forget & rediscover & recombine old knowledge with new knowledge to synthesize new ideas.
- fsckboy 3y ago
  so in other words, not actually forget... a pov with which i agree
- dizhn 3y ago
  I am not sure about the rediscover part or that there's any synergy going on there. For me the value of notes is that they cure my "fear of forgetting". File it away knowing that it will be there if it's necessary. I don't have to spend mental energy and have the nagging feeling of losing something. You can then accumulate new things and do the same thing to them if they are not immediately useful/necessary. This is the gist of what I got from the part of the GTD book I read too. Though everybody is different of course.
  - systems_glitch 3y ago
    That's why we all have massive ZFS pools, right? It's so much easier to "blow away" a workstation and move on to a new one when you know you have the entire disk saved :P
- systems_glitch 3y ago
  Shoulders of giants.
WorldMaker 3y ago
It was also a running thread in Carl Sagan's "The Dragons of Eden" that a lot of the history of communications tools and writing formats is the ability to externalize memory and what that means for how we think and behave and what brain power that opens up for other things when we can externalize those memories to focus on other tasks.

kajecounterhack 3y ago

I use plain text files (1 markdown doc per day) + grep so kind of in line with your recommendation here. But I've also tried Obsidian/Logseq and stuff like that for complex topics with interlinking, and I still think backlinks & knowledge graphs are useful and maybe better than just grep. Basic search relies on you to remember some keyword you want to search on, but networked notes let you traverse your old notes in faster more productive ways. I revisit old notes maybe once a month, and every time I do that I wonder why I still haven't migrated fully to Logseq. > Such features are just productivity industry nonsense to make you feel productive while the content remains elusive to your mind. Don't forget that everyone has a different workflow and what works for you might not be ideal for someone else. Also Obsidian/Logseq are both free vs Roam/Notion/etc -- some people just intensely incorporate notes as a part of their workflow.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
waboremo 3y ago
Are they faster more productive ways though? You're still operating off keywords. It combines the mechanical effort of tags, with the mental upkeep required to remember which notes can be linked. Not great. I do agree everyone has a different workflow, but also you're a really good example of why the productivity is so massive despite the very little improvement to productivity brought on by these additional services: everyone is so desperately trying to convince themselves a better workflow is right around the corner. That someone else has a superior workflow, you just have to use that new app or service. Repeat every time a new gimmick comes out.
- zmgsabst 3y ago
  But synthesizing your notes into tags and remember the index of tags is learning! Isn’t that the goal — to process your notes, so as to come to new insights and connections?
  - melagonster 3y ago

duncan-donuts 3y ago

> we think we right to remember, but it’s really the act of letting go I’ve found this to be true with writing music as well. Prior to recording stuff I found I’d play stuff that I had written a lot. The act of recording lets me forget those things and write more (and usually better) song ideas.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

rjh29 3y ago

It's also not worth organising or even deleting your pile of note trash. Just make sure your notes are searchable if/when you need them later.

langsoul-com 3y ago

Indeed, I have read my notes from younger self. Absolute dog pile. Like was thinking about a fully virtual avatar, not a person. But the tech wasn't there, and still ain't, to generate decent conversation, virtually rendered body with humanistic movements and facial expressions. Not to mention being able to select an interest field, Ie likes tech, hence tech conversations. Back then I thought it was a brilliant idea. Now, it's quite impossible and better left sometime in the next 10ish years.

distortionfield 3y ago

My interpretation of the article was to stress the "publish or perish" mentality of writing. Your notes are serving no one any good, put the work in to publish something or else it's probably not actually worth much.

RajT88 3y ago
You'd be surprised. I publish a lot of notes to internal wikis, with the thinking that, hey, maybe someone will find this useful. I get to see page views. The pages I'm really proud of nobody reads. The pages with the most page views are boring stuff (related to process, navigating my company's org structure, etc.). More broadly, I've noticed that the things you do which have massive impact aren't always what you'd think. I once wrote a VBScript (long enough ago, it predated powershell) for a friend of mine to just run a program if there was no already running process by that name. He worked at an engineering firm, where for some inane reason some engineering software was always exiting and requiring a long init time to restart. The script kept it more or less always ready when you needed it. Years later, I'd forgotten about it when he mentioned that it was a massive productivity boost. Every engineer at his company who had seen it in action, wanted it for themselves. Dozens of engineers were saving hours of productivity every week because of a throw-away script. Madness.

RajT88 3y ago

> We think we write to remember I do exactly that. The act of writing helps me solidify that information in my brain - I have to process it to commit it to words. Paper works better than a text file, but a text file has the advantage of being faster and searchable. Once I've taken notes, I rarely go back and look at them. (Conversely, if I don't take notes, I'll wish I had) I definitely do not take notes to abandon the information. Information I don't see the value in, I browse the web while listening. Some of that still sticks with me anyways.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
karma_fountain 3y ago
Writing as a means to internalize information and make ideas your own is good.

ShadowBanThis01 3y ago

Yeah, I was all ready to post a scornful or dismissive comment... but first (of course?) I actually read the whole thing and found myself smiling at the truth of it. I do diligently record things in Apple Notes, since they finally added categories (or groups, or whatever). I used to use Outlook notes the same way. It's really all I need. And I DO truly refer to them, although sometimes it's a long time later and I find way more detail and cool ideas than I remembered having come up with. But browser bookmarks... these are mostly a waste. I have a big collection of them, again organized in groups. But it is vanishingly rare that I use them instead of just doing a new search.

vladvasiliu 3y ago

I kinda agree with your point, and hate spending time organizing or following some "system" for my notes. Search is great, and is the thing that almost killed my paper notebook. However, one feature I would really love to have but never seen, is a combined todo - notes app. I often jot down notes as in "things to note / remember", but also, in the same flow, I'd note thinks I'd need to do. I would love to be able to gather those automatically in a view, and be able to see them as done when I revisit the initial note after marking them as such from the "todo view". The closest I've seen was some VimWiki, but I've found that fairly unwieldy (though I love the idea of taking notes in vim).

pillefitz 3y ago
You can do that with Obsidian. Also, the DataView plugin allows you to run arbitrary queries over your notes to create new views
- SpaghettiX 3y ago
  I tried doing that (I pay for Obsidian Sync, and have a lot of plugins so I run only the bare minimum plugins I need on mobile), but app start time and syncing time on mobile makes this quite a bad experience. Instead, when I need to write something quickly, I create a temporary Google Keep note. When I'm back at my laptop, I merge it into my Obsidian Vault.
  - punkspider 3y ago
    Damn. That is my process exactly.
  - DirkH 3y ago
    I recommend LogSeq with Syncthing for your use case. I'm using that right now for both TODO and notetaking. I have syncthing set up so that it syncs my vault across 3 devices (including my phone). Very easy to set up (tho admittedly also easy to mess up the set up process). Have had minor hiccups the past 5 months but nothing that would make me want to stop using this setup. All this is free. I feel like I've found a gold mine that nobody else seems to know about.

chillfox 3y ago

My notes have always been a huge messy pile with a tiny amount of well structured/formatted/linked notes. The well structured ones got that way because I returned to them many times and improved on them a tiny bit each time. The quality of a note is really just a reflection of how much time I have spent on a subject.

drawkbox 3y ago

Writing is part of the creative process. Writing it down helps to solidify an idea into the heap from the stack, maybe even take it from hot storage to cold storage. It allows you to jot it down while it is still fresh and offload it to focus on it later. This is super helpful in ideas, jokes, thought streams, todos, one pagers on some projects, etc. It does help you remember but also allows you to move to the next thing for now. Writing down ideas is like a sketchbook, ideas/actions/iteration of thoughts both good and bad. It is important to write thoughts down though because how many times have you had a great idea and you are like "I'll never forget this" and then a while later you are wondering what that was or you entirely move on because life moves fast. Creatives, writers, comedians, developers, or just projects, are better when writing is involved in ideas to realization of those ideas. Writing it down and notes is a form of brainstorming. Brainstorming allows ideas to be spontaneous and allows improvisation to get to better ideas. Even writing down bad ideas because somewhere in it is something good. I use notes apps but more now just a repo (super easy with github.dev everywhere) and notes have easy history that way and you can freely add/remove without feeling like notes are lost. When I use notes apps or even Google Docs, yes they have history but it isn't as fluid/quick as github for that. The important thing is find something that works for you that makes the barrier to writing it down almost non-existent. It needs to be very easy to write things down in between busy days and to capture these fleeting moments.

bazinga30 3y ago

Superbly said - “it's really the act of letting go” I think if we look at note taking as a sorting / filtering function, then maybe this article isn’t that painful to read..