Notes require regular gardening

I had a coffee the other day with a new friend about building communities. I wanted to link to her a project that the universities were running but couldn’t remember the name of it and a quick internet search or searching my notes didn’t immediately give me the results I was looking for.

When I got home and had more time to browse through my notes, I found the right note and sent it her way. I then adjusted the note and couple of other related ones to make it easier to find with the search queries I had used earlier to no avail.

I often hear people say they abandoned taking notes when the notes became too big and complex and they couldn’t find things from them or remember what was there.

Notes require regular gardening to stay useful.

While I don’t follow Zettelkasten method myself, one thing I do like about it is that it encourages you to go through your notes whenever you’re adding new ones. This helps you discover connections between ideas and refreshes your memory of what’s in your notes.

In Obsidian, I like that the system can show me unlinked mentions: words or phrases that I’ve used that exist as a note somewhere else. Using aliases for notes can also help make them more discoverable in cases where an organisation might have different ways to call it (for example, an abbreviation or a colloquial nickname). It’s easy to accidentally use different forms in different notes and then not find them later.

Regardless of the tools you use, if you want your notes to serve you well, you need to spend some time with them regularly. Not just for adding new stuff but improving old ones, adding helpful information and expanding their usefulness as your knowledge of the topic grows.

I don’t use any automated tools to capture notes. A usefulness of a notes system isn’t measured by how many notes it has or how long those notes are but how it helps you find the information and come up with new ideas as you go. For it to do that, you need to use the system regularly by reading what’s there, searching your notes and working on improving individual ones.