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by thecodrr
1029 days ago
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Anyone who says X must be done in Y way is most absolutely wrong. Who is Tiago Forte to tell how I should organize my thoughts? Am I a robot to follow so simply in the footsteps of another? I would like a more general approach, please. Any serious note taker eventually realizes that the way their brain works doesn't really fit into any PARA, ARPA or any other standarized system. Note taking is a messy business. It's not supposed to be organized because you take notes to become more organized, not to organize more notes. Just take your notes. Organization will automatically happen. Humans are very bad at doing things randomly. There's always an order, a sequence, a method to the way we do things. Who's to say your method is better than mine? |
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People will surely, as you say, adopt certain habits, e.g. ordering notes chronologically for lack of a better idea.
That doesn't mean that there isn't a "best" system, which anyone who wants to be productive should adopt. But what I regret is dogmatism unsupported by empirical evidence of superiority (=unscientific claims), and the world of productivity systems (including note-taking) is full of that.
Notes may contain ideas that need to be captured so that they aren't forgotten. Notes may contain event logs that need to be capture to verify later what actually happened (or not). Notes may contain task lists, potentially with commitments and/or assignees and associated promised completion dates. (Many notes can be repurposed later: an informal list of things may become a list of chapter titles in a book one day - I guess that view makes me a pragmatist [pragmaticist, more precisely, c.f. Pierce], maybe not surprising for a student[yours truly] of a student[Spärck-Jones] of a student[Masterman] of Wittgenstein).
The good thing about computers as tools that support our personal knowledge management is that we do not need to worry that much about the organization compared to e.g. a paper-based system, because we can always fulltext-index everything, so at least there is a high chance of re-finding things (known item search) at least as long as we give things specific names or we can recall sets of keywords we likely used in describing something.
EDIT: PS: My personal note on note-taking is that indexed plain text beats any particular software anytime - because notes (any data, really) live longer than the note taking software of the day, so you don't want lock in.