This is what I mean when I say Roam “increases the expected value of my notes.” Now that I’m using Roam, I’m confident my notes will remain useful long into the future, so I’ve increased the quality and quantity of the notes I take.

In most note-taking apps, you jot something down quickly and only use it a few times before losing track of it.

Remember that notes are only an intermediate step towards understanding. Having a beautiful set of perfectly written notes is useless if you don’t understand the subject you are trying to learn.

Consider that no single step in the process of turning raw ideas into finished pieces of writing is particularly difficult. It isn’t very hard to write down notes in the first place. Nor is turning a group of notes into an outline very demanding. It also isn’t much of a challenge to turn a working outline full of relevant arguments into a rough draft. And polishing a well-conceived rough draft into a final draft is trivial. 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.

Writing then is best seen not only as a tool for thinking but as a tool for personal growth.

No one ever really starts from scratch. Anything they come up with has to come from prior experience, research, or other understanding. But because they haven’t acted on this fact, they can’t track ideas back to their origins. They have neither supporting material nor accurate sources. Since they haven’t been taking notes from the start, they either have to start with something completely new (which is risky) or retrace their steps (which is boring). It’s no wonder that nearly every guide to writing begins with “brainstorming.” If you don’t have notes, you have no other option. But this is a bit like a financial advisor telling a 65-year-old to start saving for retirement – too little, too late.

Principle #10: Save contradictory ideas

Here are a few questions to ask yourself as you turn fleeting and literature notes into permanent notes: How does the new information contradict, correct, support, or add to what I already know? How can I combine ideas to generate something new? What questions are triggered by these new ideas?

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

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.

Luhmann actually had two slip-boxes: the first was the “bibliographical” slip-box, which contained brief notes on the content of the literature he read along with a citation of the source; the second “main” slip-box contained the ideas and theories he developed based on those sources. Both were wooden boxes containing paper index cards. 

The 8 Steps of Taking Smart Notes Ahrens recommends the following 8 steps for taking notes: Make fleeting notes Make literature notes Make permanent notes Now add your new permanent notes to the slip-box Develop your topics, questions and research projects bottom up from within the slip-box Decide on a topic to write about from within the slip-box Turn your notes into a rough draft Edit and proofread your manuscript

Luhmann’s slip-box grew to become an equal thinking partner in his work. He described his system as his secondary memory (zweitgedächtnis), alter ego, or reading memory (lesegedächtnis).

The Instapaper highlights go to my Evernote inbox, then I copy them from Evernote into Roam (annoying, I know, hopefully the Roam API will be set up soon!) 

I kept losing content that I edited out and then wanted to put it back in.

But thirdly, and most valuably, the template gives you a big space at the bottom to write sentences that summarise the page.  That is, you start writing your critical response on the notes themselves.

If you’d like to differentiate between the various functions a paragraph in a text can have, look out for signal words. For example, the following literal devices may indicate that the function is to build a mental model: schema, allegory, analogy, hypothesis, metaphor, representation, simile, theory. Put a corresponding “model” mark next to these.

The students in Raphael Folsom’s Spanish Borderlands course read primary sources on a weekly basis. Rather than taking notes on 3×5 index cards as we did when I was a kid, the students take the same type of note in the Drupal system. They fill out some basic bibliographic information about the source, write a short summary of the source, and then take a note about an interesting facet of the text.

Obsidian is a powerful knowledge base that works on top of a local folder of plain text Markdown files.