How to Write Useful Notes
How to Make myself Reread my Notes?
Over the last few years, I’ve been reading books and surfing the web for hours a day, and writing copious notes that I never reread. I know for sure that there are gems of insights buried in my notes. Clearly, the problem is that I am not rereading my notes. How can I make myself read my notes more often and uncover those gems?
Maybe I should change the format of my notes, so that they are easier to search for. Maybe I should use some high-tech note-taking technique such as “transclusion”, which allows you to cross-reference notes from other files, kind of like citations in scientific papers. Maybe I should publish more notes as essays, so that I would be forced to clean them up and would have a uniform web interface for accessing them.
If I just reread my notes more often, everything will turn out fine, right?
Asking the Wrong Question
My goal is to solve problems, not to read books or write essays. Reading is just a way to get solutions from others to problems I can’t solve. Writing is just a way to create solutions when others haven’t found any.
Lesson: Wait till you have a problem before you search for solutions (i.e., read or write).
I am an old man and have known a great many troubles, but most of them have never happened.
– Mark Twain
The 80/20 principle suggests that most notes will be useless. If you write things down “just in case” they are useful in the distant future, most will go unused. If, instead, you wait till you actually have a problem, what you read and write about will be more likely to be useful.
Develop the habit of asking yourself, “Will I definitely use this information for something immediate and important?”
… Information is useless if it is not applied to something important or if you will forget it before you have a chance to apply it. …
Focus on what digerati Kathy Sierra calls “just-in-time” information instead of “just-in-case” information.
– Timothy Ferriss, The 4-Hour Work Week
Exhaust Known Solutions before Reaching for New Ones
What if you do have a problem? Are you free to just drink from the firehose of information that we call the internet?
For example, I was feeling down last week. I wondered if the solution would be in some new technique, found in some shiny, new, best-selling book. I even looked online for a list of books that seemed relevant. But, before I went ahead, I decided to go over my existing techniques to see if I was missing something obvious. What had changed from the week before? Turns out that I hadn’t been to the gym in two weeks and hadn’t done any deep, focused work either. No wonder I was feeling miserable; I wasn’t making progress on any of my goals. This doesn’t guarantee, of course, that going to the gym and doing three hours of deep work would make my life rosy again. But I would at least have eliminated known causes before acquiring yet another shiny new technique I will probably never use.
Lesson: Exhaust known solutions before searching for something new.
Otherwise, you’re wasting time learning a new technique when you could be reusing a known technique.
Read with a Purpose
What if you have checked your notes and you don’t have a solution for your problem? If you’re going to read to find solutions by others, maybe set a time limit or a limit on the number of resources you check out. (Not sure about this.) To keep yourself honest, before you read something new, check that you have a problem and that you have exhausted known solutions.
Stick to a Word Limit
What if others’ solutions need some tweaking or if they haven’t solved your problem? Can you just go ahead and write things on your own?
First, how did I end up with hundreds of thousands of words in notes I never read?
(I can’t even say “notes I never re-read”, because most of my notes have never been read even once. It’s like my notes are write-only; I write but I never read. I might as well have sent them on a probe into outer space; either way, no human will ever set eyes on them again.)
My notes grew with my experiences. The more material I came across, the more data I saw, the more notes I accumulated. For example, even when staying on a topic I cared about, such as scientific thinking, I came across hundreds of examples on which I could test my methods. Naturally, over the years, having read and analyzed lots of books, articles, and movies, I ended up with tons of notes.
For those notes to help me, though, I need to read them. Given that my time is limited, the more notes I have, the less often I will read any given note. I can’t afford to spend an hour reading through thousands of words each time I want to make a decision. And if I’m in a hurry, I have little chance of finding what I’m looking for in all those scattered notes.
Not only does sheer size delay my search, it deters me from searching in the first place. After a while of dumping notes into a file, I give up on making sense of it and set it aside as “something I will clean up later”, i.e., it might as well have been shipped away on a space probe.
Lesson: Stick to a word limit.
Having fewer words to search through will make it easier for you to find known solutions or be sure that none exist. The same applies when you’re writing in order to figure out a new solution for yourself. Don’t just accumulate a mound of raw ideas. Refine them to find the gems within.
[T]here’s something very pleasing about small things. Small things can be perfect; big ones always have something wrong with them. But there’s a magic in small things that goes beyond such rational explanations. All kids know it. Small things have more personality.
– Paul Graham, The Power of the Marginal
Rewrite
The essence of writing is rewriting.
– William Zinsser, On Writing Well (second-hand source)
What to do when your notes exceed your word limit?
One method is to deduplicate notes that are very similar, such as N examples of the same phenomenon. It’s tempting to dump example after example into a computer file, since they can grow without limit. The rule of three suggests that three examples are usually enough to make a point, no matter how complex you think your point is.
Drawing a line through one point is generally held to be dangerous. Two points make a dichotomy; you imagine them opposed to one another. But when you’ve got three different points - that’s when you’re forced to wake up and generalize.
– Eliezer Yudkowsky, My Naturalistic Awakening
This applies to ideas as well as examples. If two or more ideas are very similar, generalize them. To do this, you usually have to organize - i.e., sort - your ideas, so that similar ideas end up close to each other and the similarities are easier to spot.
Cutting your words is hard. I cut more than two thousand words for this essay. A limitless computer file feels like a parent who doesn’t stop you even as you stuff yourself with candy. Without consequences such as a scolding or a queasy tummy, why would you stop stuffing your face with candy? After all, there is some non-zero, even if diminished, value from the next piece of candy. The problem is not that the new note I add has no benefit; after all, there was something that surprised me enough to write about. The problem is that the benefit is not worth the cost it brings in size and messiness. A word limit, like a good parent, helps bring home that cost.
Note: I haven’t applied this essay’s ideas too much yet. (I did, however, fit this essay within a word limit of 1500 words.) I’ll update it with my experiences over the months.
Appendix
Ideas I had while writing the essay:
Short notes consulted often > long notes never consulted. Count number of uses of a note. Focus on notes you have used often. Delete or archive notes you’ve never read. Avoid writing them in the first place.
Lesson: My actual problem statement was that my notes were unread. I should have focused on how to increase notes that were read and decrease notes that were not read. Instead of doing that, I meandered, talking about expected value of information and compression of raw data and word limit. The problem is the number of uses of my existing notes. Hug the problem statement.
Further lesson: My actual, actual problem statement was that I was reading and writing instead of solving problems.
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