Notes against note-taking by Sasha Chapin

Highlights

Your natural salience filter is a great determinant of what's most alive to you. If you begin to rely on any other filter, you will increasingly record what _seems like it should be interesting according to some preexisting criteria _rather than what organically sticks to your mind. This is a tradeoff. It is often not a worthy tradeoff.

Getting lost in your knowledge management system is a fantastic way to avoid creating things.

• but you can see your note-taking as the work itself

Most heart-stopping writing comes from _synthesizing the previously unarticulated in the moment. _Rather than reaching for your database, try channeling what's in the air at this very second. If it's some stunted, fragmentary version of an idea you were exposed to previously, that is good. These read/write errors are what we call originality.

Consider how you may be limiting yourself by focusing on the _presentation of factual insight _as the core of your work.

There are serious reasons for systematic note-taking: perhaps you need to summarize the literature

If your note-taking system is adapted to a specific context of use such as this, then you're working. If it's not, then you're LARPing.

I am seeing evidence that people taught knowledge management for its own sake produce unexciting work.

I think they could do better if they wrote what they knew, rather than what they recorded.

It's not that I advocate for no note-taking. I just strongly believe in keeping it as elementary as possible, such that the note-taking itself doesn't become the thrust of the endeavor.

When something can be like work or like play, never make it work.

References

Chapin, Sasha. “Notes Against Note-Taking Systems.” Sasha’s “Newsletter,” 31 Jan. 2022, https://sashachapin.substack.com/p/notes-against-note-taking-systems.