Option 2. Choose a tool you like and use it while exploring your intended mindsets. You will learn by trial-and-error and by finding points of friction where your mind doesn’t work as you want it. It won’t make the exploratory process any faster, but at least you will get started.
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Have you ever seen a (non-egoistic) person who ever believed their thoughts are the absolute truth? The consequences of having this mindset are:
- We avoid writing our own thoughts down. As every note needs to be their final version with only correct information, it instantly triggers perfectionism. When that happens, we may avoid writing notes about our thoughts altogether.
- Personal notes are seen as disposable. When we finally come to write down our thoughts, we just treat these as fleeting notes – notes that are disposable and have a deadline to go to the rubbish bin (or trash can). By treating them as disposable, we tend to not work well on our own thoughts. Why would you put effort in growing a note that will go into the bin anyway?
All our long term notes are the words of other people. You want to write content with your own knowledge contributions. Yet, all your good notes are about other people’s thoughts. You just try to capture the author’s thoughts exactly as published. You do have quotations, facts and citations, but where is your own argument? Where is your knowledge?
Instead, I suggest creating Notes as Pieces of Understanding**.** This mindset recognises that ideas are born vague, incomplete, and chaotic. Only by spending time with those ideas will they grow into what we could consider truth or at least good reasoning.
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Most people take what I call document notes**.** And this is our 3rd trap. Document notes contain either multiple snippets of ideas or a full argument chain within a single note. Also, to make things worse they have cryptic titles that say nothing about which ideas are inside that note. It is inefficient to use document notes when it is time to find your ideas again, for three reasons:
- You need to remember in which document you wrote your idea (You most likely won’t).
- You need to read most of the note to find the paragraph mentioning the idea (Time consuming).
Pieces of the same idea may appear spread over multiple notes (Good luck searching for it all). These pieces may even contradict each other. Now let us stop to reflect.. If you are looking for ideas, why are you writing notes as documents? Instead, I suggest writing what I call idea notes.
The trap of document notes is their lack of atomic retrievability, but the trap of idea notes is their lack of referential context. The importance of an idea is often unclear at the time of capture — it only becomes apparent over time. A pkm tool that synthesizes incrementally, surfacing which ideas recur and accrue connections, would address this gap.
