[rollinDyno]

I am a strong believer in taking-notes so that I don't have to face a blank canvas every time I want to start a new essay.

My issue is that when I am in "the zone", I can't write. When I am very intensely focused on a topic, I am informing my internal conversation very efficiently by skimming papers. If I interrupt that with taking notes, then I am adding unnecessary friction that slows me down.

When I write notes, I feel that my ideas race ahead of my typing speed, and my working memory is not large enough to keep these ideas in a buffer. This is an issue I have had my whole life but only recently noticed it is an impediment and only now can I describe it.

All that being said, even if this wasn't an issue, there's a trade-off between how quickly you move across text and how much of it you store on notes. There's an optimal point, of course, and this can be raised with technology, focus, and practice.

[gumby]

Try taking them on paper. That may reduce the friction dramatically and keep you in the zone.

I take all my notes on paper. Then at the end of the day I put them into the computer. For some notes, that means writing a little more than I had put on paper. For other notes, it means they don't deserve the transition.

A big change for me was not to curate the notes beyond the above. That is, I have a huge emacs file and just use search to find things of interest or relevance.