#productivity

While exploring the various alternatives to roamresearch during the [[path-to-zettelkasten]], I ended up reading the book that explains the philosophy. I don’t remember the specifics (felt very much like one of those self-help books, except written by someone a little more competent). I am intrigued by the methodology of note taking that it espouses, so here’s a short summary:

There are essentially three types of notes.11 As you’ll find, this comes from a very academically focused mind.

1. Fleeting Notes

The purpose of this category is to be the inbox of all your scattered thoughts. The simple idea here is that there should be almost zero latency to input random thoughts and ideas, and so you just write, but if you do nothing to them, then they’ll simply disappear into the ether22 And this is exactly what happened to me when using Dynalist as a repository of random research thoughts.. In principle, there should be some expiry date with all your fleeting notes, so that you are forced to migrate them to the next category, which is:

2. Permanent Notes

One of the key things about this method (and it has similar undertones to the whole GTD movement), is this second deliberate step of converting fleeting notes to permanent ones. This type of deliberate practice (?) is what separates this type of note-taking method from others. The idea here is that you should try to write bite-sized notes, that capture one idea, and the value-add here comes in being able to connect permanent notes together. The word they like to use here is chunking, which I think is related to the idea of packets (fixed-sized).

3. Project Notes

Keep in mind that this was all in the pursuit of creating works of academia (publishing papers). Thus, the final kind of note are those that are project-specific. But in order to explain these notes, I need to talk a little about the philosophy of the first two. The key idea here is that of bottom-up formation of knowledge. That is, the goal here is not to start with some project/idea in mind, and then start panning out. Instead, it is to be goal-less, and just start making connections. Slowly, you’ll create your very own personal knowledge graph (PKG). And, from an algorithmic perspective, you might start to notice interesting motifs/subgraphs that form – in other words, some cluster of ideas that comprise of a project.

It is at this point that project notes come in – having pinpointed/discovered some clustering of interesting ideas, then we start to synthesize everything, at this point focusing on a single project, the final goal of course being that of a paper! If only it were that simple.