🗃️How to Take Smart Notes

Writing is not what happens after the thinking; it is where the thinking is done. Notes are useful only if they are written in your own words, one idea each, and connected to other notes so that they can be found by what they are about. A pile of highlights is a record of having read. A set of linked claims is something you can write from.

The tool hardly matters, which was the sentence I did not want to hear, and the reason for 📜 Use this system for ninety days without changing it.

• Read from 20 October to 16 November 2024, at the end of 📂 Rebuild my notes system, attempt four. I filed this record in January from the notes I made then.
• I bought it to improve system four. It ended system four.
• The first half is the argument. The second half repeats it with studies attached, some of which I would now want to check.
• What it changed is not a technique. It is the order: writing first, notes in its service.
• Nothing quoted from the book itself. The line I keep beside it is four centuries older: 💬 Reading maketh a full man, where 🏛️ Francis Bacon gets to the same conclusion about writing in the last clause of one sentence.