Importance of writing

• Mentions the importance of writing and its connection to the thought process
  • Nice Feynman quote to follow up: “Notes aren’t a record of my thinking process. They are my thinking process.” – Richard Feynman
• Notes the process of writing loosely looks like:
  1. Find topic/research question
  2. Research/find literature
  3. Read and take notes
  4. Draw conclusions / outline text
  5. Write
• This process is quite linear, but often the research is much less straightforward. There are lots of ideas bouncing around about many topics, and there’s not necessarily a linear approach to getting those concepts or questions organized before beginning the process. So what if writing came first, during the thinking process, like the Feynman quote? This of course is an idea I’ve already embraced entirely by the existence of this system, but this is more or less the rationale behind it
• Having a second brain that helps manage these thoughts is more or less what Zettelkasten is all about. However it also makes sense to have note only the “informal though files”, but some more formal reference wiki pages, and external source pages, and so on.

Taking Notes

The author takes two kinds of notes: fleeting notes, and project-related notes. - Fleeting notes: notes off the top of the head, and go straight into the daily notes page i.e. inside of a journal/diary page. Note: fleeting notes are later refined into their own page (or filtered into an existing one) and removed from the daily page. This is something I’ve been looking to get another opinion on, essentially how I should go about just jumping in and writing things down. Should I write those things in the diary and keep them there (since they are still searchable and I can link to whatever other pages I’d like)? Or should I distill them after getting them out of my head? Or if they are going to end up somewhere else anyway, should I decide where they belong first and then put them there? So far, I feel I’ve had a mix of later refinement and leaving things in the daily note. Some are anecdotal, and while they are associated with a particular topic, I don’t know how to put them into that topic’s main wiki page. It doesn’t feel like it fits anywhere other than a “thoughts” section, at which point it feels fine leaving it in the daily note. - The author then steps through an example where they take notes on an HN article (about which I share the sentiment as to its relative low value). He mentions the all important question of: “In what context do I want to see this note again?” when deciding what to link from within the document. See How To Take Smart Notes for more on this question, as well as the Roam research linking philosophy. - One thing to note here is the use of “tags” at the header of the document to explicitly link related pages. I think this makes sense; after all, I do it for zettels. So this might make a nice addition to the current file metadata header. This could help link in pages that aren’t easily linkable within the writing itself, despite being heavily related. - He also demonstrates following one of these tag links, and peaking at its backlinks to sort of exercise that exploration and build a potential connection between related content. The author is the creator of Introducing Org Roam, so he is using this system.