Article Highlights

The following three principles were some of the most salient points to me when sifting through the article.

Principle #2: Do your work as if writing is the only thing that matters

• The purpose of research is to produce public knowledge that can be scrutinized and tested. For that to happen, it has to be written down. And once it is, what the author meant doesn’t matter – only the actual words written on the page matter.
• Almost every aspect of your life will change when you live as if you are working toward publication. You’ll read differently, becoming more focused on the parts most relevant to the argument you’re building. You’ll ask sharper questions, no longer satisfied with vague explanations or leaps in logic. You’ll naturally seek venues to present your work, since the feedback you receive will propel your thinking forward like nothing else. You’ll begin to act more deliberately, thinking several steps beyond what you’re reading to consider its implications and potential.

I very much agree with the last point. When I’m sifting through sources to take from and inspire writing directly, I become very intentional about what I pick up and what points I’m connecting with. Digesting becomes less of entertainment and more work, where in the former you care less about what pieces you don’t understand and just keep reading on. This resonates well with the point from How To Think, where an emphasis is placed on avoiding passive reading and be thinking along with/ahead of the writer.

Principle #5: Standardization enables creativity

• Notes are like shipping containers for ideas. Instead of inventing a new way to take notes for every source you read, use a completely standardized and predictable format every time. It doesn’t matter what the notes contain, which topic they relate to, or what medium they arrived through – you treat each and every note exactly the same way.
• So if each individual step is so easy, why do we find the overall experience of writing so grueling? Because we try to do all the steps at once. Each of the activities that make up “writing” – reading, reflecting, having ideas, making connections, distinguishing terms, finding the right words, structuring, organizing, editing, correcting, and rewriting – require a very different kind of attention.
• The slip-box is the host of the process outlined above. It provides a place where distinct batches of work can be created, worked on, and saved permanently until the next time we are ready to deploy that particular kind of attention. It deliberately puts distance between ourselves and what we’ve written, which is essential for evaluating it objectively. It is far easier to switch between the role of creator and critic when there is a clear separation between them, and you don’t have to do both at the same time.
• By standardizing and streamlining both the format of our notes and the steps by which we process them, the real work can come to the forefront: thinking, reflecting, writing, discussing, testing, and sharing. This is the work that adds value, and now we have the time to do it more effectively.

Principle #8: Organize your notes by context, not by topic

• Now that you’ve been collecting notes on you’re reading, how should you organize them?
• The classic mistake is to organize them into ever more specific topics and subtopics. This makes it look less complex, but quickly becomes overwhelming. The more notes pile up, the smaller and narrower the subtopics become, limiting your ability to see meaningful connections between them. With this approach, the greater one’s collection of notes, the less accessible and useful they become.
• Instead of organizing by topic and subtopic, it is much more effective to organize by context. Specifically, the context in which it will be used. The primary question when deciding where to put something becomes “In which context will I want to stumble upon this again?”
• In other words, instead of filing things away according to where they came from, you file them according to where they’re going. This is the essential difference between organizing like a librarian and organizing like a writer.
• A librarian asks “Where should I store this note?” Their goal is to maintain a taxonomy of knowledge that is accessible to everyone, which means they have to use only the most obvious categories. They might file notes on a psychology paper under “misjudgments,” “experimental psychology,” or “experiments.”
• That works fine for a library, but not for a writer. No pile of notes filed uniformly under “psychology” will be easy to turn into a paper. There is no variation or disagreement from which an interesting argument could arise.
• A writer asks “In which circumstances will I want to stumble upon this note?” They will file it under a paper they are writing, a conference they are speaking at, or an ongoing collaboration with a colleague. These are concrete, near-term deliverables and not abstract categories.
• Organizing by context does take a little bit of thought. The answer isn’t always immediately obvious. A book about personal finance might interest me for completely different reasons if I am a politician working on a campaign speech, a financial advisor trying to help a client, or an economist developing monetary policy. If I encounter a novel engineering method, it may be useful for completely different reasons depending on whether I am working on an engineering textbook, a skyscraper, or a rocket booster.
• Writers don’t think about a single, “correct” location for a piece of information. They deal in “scraps” which can often be repurposed and reused elsewhere. The discarded byproducts from one piece of writing may become the essential pillars of the next one. The slip-box is a thinking tool, not an encyclopedia, so completeness is not important. The only gaps we do need to be concerned about are the gaps in the final manuscript we are working toward.
• By saving all the byproducts of our writing, we collect all the future material we might need in one place. This approach sets up your future self with everything they need to work as decisively and efficiently as possible. They won’t need to trawl through folder after folder looking for all the sources they need. You’ll already have done that work for them.

I feel like this point is sort of the focus of systems like Roam i.e. a highly connected, backlinked wiki. We want to spend less time filing content away in its “perfect place” only to never be found, and spend more time simply writing the content and connecting it to/from the appropriate neighbors to piece together the proper context. That way, content appears organically within the system as we sift through related content, and less time is spent digging through a hierarchy to find the proper location. As is often mentioned (within neuroscience, NLP, etc), “a word is characterized by the company it keeps.” That is, a word or concept get its meaning from the other words or concepts it’ss highly related to. It’s not difficult to imagine this is roughly how ideas and concepts are built up in the brain, and having a note taking system that resembles this is important for making often surprising connections between notes that would otherwise be lost. From the article, Tiago mentions that writers (of notes) should be thinking about what context in which they will want to come across a particular note again. This process is taken care of entirely by a heavily interconnected wiki system, where simple linking across notes and the ability to access backlinks builds the context for you. All you have to do is find yourself in that context, and the system has done its job.