đź“ť Section 2: Thoughts on Note-Taking and Understanding
How?
Socrates (470–399 B.C.) was a significant figure of his time who led a movement, claiming that writing decreased memory and advising the young people who followed him not to write. However, if Plato hadn’t written The Apology of Socrates, how much would we actually know about the Socratic dialogue?
Words fly away, written ones remain (Verba volant, scripta manent)
— Latin proverb
In contrast to Socrates, there are many historical figures famous for their note-taking.
From Leonardo da Vinci’s (1452–1519) to Charles Darwin (1809–1882), Marie Curie (1867–1934), Thomas Edison (1847–1931), Nikola Tesla’s notebooks (1856–1943), and Albert Einstein’s (1879–1955) notes on happiness and his notebook filled with relativity theory formulas. We can list many digitally scanned handwritten manuscripts. The primary purpose of note-taking is personal knowledge management (PKM).
Knowledge management isn’t limited to note-taking or scientific research; it’s also one of the primary challenges facing companies today. How many companies can you name where everyone knows what others will do in advance, like in an orchestra? Are you storing what you consider important in your email inboxes? How easily can you compile data for a report that’s been requested? How successful are you at performing a company routine that you weren’t initially part of? A company cannot be valued solely by its physical presence or brand. Human capital includes the knowledge base of the employees and is often measured by the quality of the product. It also refers to the network of the employee base and the general level of influence they have on the industry.
Another historical figure famous for his knowledge management and notes is the German sociologist Niklas Luhmann (1927–1998). While we can’t measure productivity solely by the number of publications, Luhmann wrote around 70 books and nearly 400 articles throughout his life. The method he developed is called 🇩🇪 Zettelkasten in German, 🇬🇧 slip-box in English, and 🇹🇷 not kutusu in Turkish. Zettelkasten is a methodology aimed at structured, written thinking. Luhmann’s Zettelkasten, which contains approximately 90,000 cards, is currently exhibited at Bielefeld University. You can access Luhmann’s archive online here.
Zettelkasten is a note-taking system where notes follow one another in a connected sequence and can be related independently of hierarchy through the use of #tags.
Zettelkasten remains a popular method in digital note-taking today. I wanted to share it because of its inspiring nature. For more detailed information, you can follow the links below.
đź“š Links on Zettelkasten method and application
- Getting Started
- Implementing Zettelkasten in Roam: A practical guide — RoamBrain.com
- Zettelkasten — How One German Scholar Was So Freakishly Productive
According to Turkish author Yalın Alpay, he typically begins by taking notes in books and notebooks. In a 2014 interview, he shared details about his note-taking process:
My short-term memory has weakened because I deal with so many things. That’s why I have 30–40 small notebooks. I write down the topics I’m working on and thinking about in them. Every 2–3 days, I review the notebooks and continue from there. I’m very disciplined, but I allow some freedom within that discipline. I enjoy about 90% of the work I do. Some days I work on my PhD, and on other days, I focus on the articles I’m writing.
https://www.haberturk.com/yasam/haber/1006228-harika-cocuk-buyudu
The important thing to focus on here is not which method you use, but finding the method that keeps you the most dynamic.
You can make any quote you want using a camera in Yalın Alpay’s book. You can record the page number, access your notes from any device, and search through them. You can transfer these notes to other platforms, seamlessly integrating your analog world with your digital identity.
Digital books naturally offer this advantage. Their main benefit is making it easier to find what you’re looking for. From an environmental perspective, they reduce paper dependency, lower logistical costs, and decrease the carbon footprint.
Whether printed or digital, digitizing what we read makes it more accessible and offers benefits like highlighting, undoing changes, taking unlimited notes, easy referencing, and archiving.
Being able to access our book excerpts when we’re away from our library, adding or recalling new notes as soon as they come to mind, is important. But there’s something just as crucial: sharing. If we don’t share what we’ve learned, processed, or know, it may disappear, unlike in the Socratic dialogue. In the image below, you can see how the excerpt above has been digitized and made shareable in two simple steps.
Today, note-taking and personal knowledge management have undergone a major transformation with the development of the internet. The applications introduced with the concept of WEB 2.0 have also changed the culture of note-taking. Some of the notable apps for note and knowledge management include OmniFocus, Monday, JIRA, Readwise, Instapaper, Pocket, Evernote, Notion, Roam Reasearch, Obsidian, Spotify, Discord, Slack, YouTube, Wikipedia, Medium, Ekşi Sözlük, Vedat Milör Rehberi, Turkish Language Society Dictionary. Built-in phone tools like notes, calendars, and reminders also complement these applications.
When we bring all of this together, we can say that the bridges between our memory and the internet — what was described as Transactive memory in Section 1 — were strengthened by WEB 2.0. M. Serdar Kuzuloğlu’s article on note-taking culture and Evernote (in Turkish) beautifully summarizes the transition from analog to digital. According to his article, Kuzuloğlu first takes notes on books and paper, and then uses the Evernote app. As seen in his Zihnimin Kıvrımları (The Curves of My Mind) podcast series, he also uses paper and pen to guide his conversations.
Another Evernote user is Tiago Forte. In his methodology, formulated under the name Second Brain, he argues that if we use everyday applications effectively, they can function like a second brain. He developed two key concepts: CODE and PARA.
Forte emphasizes that the tools we use (whether it’s Paper-Pen, Evernote, Notion, or Roam Research) are not what matters most; rather, it’s the behaviors and habits we need to develop. He breaks down the creative process into four universal steps, which he defines under the acronym CODE.
C.O.D.E.
C: Collect
Your to-do list, things you’ve read online, book excerpts, shopping lists, or class notes — bringing all of these together forms the first step.
O: Organize
Since our notes are derived from daily life, they are prone to easily becoming disorganized. To address this, Forte developed a system called PARA to organize content into four distinct categories:
- P — Projects: Targeted, connected tasks with a specific deadline. Examples include: launching a new version of a product, attending a conference, or preparing this article for publication.
- A — Areas: We can store anything here that we can sustain without a specific time constraint. Areas of responsibility are essentially clusters that encompass projects. For example, buying Bitcoin for the first time is a project, but it falls under the financial responsibility area and can wait there if you’re not planning to act on it right away. Renovating your home is a project that falls under the home responsibility area and can stay there until you’re confident in all your ideas. Planning a summer vacation is also a project, but it fits under the vacation responsibility area and doesn’t require immediate action.
- R — Resources: Topics of interest, content, and resources to be used later. Forte’s examples include: habit tracking, project management, transhumanism, coffee, music, gardening, online marketing, SEO, interior design, architecture, and note-taking.
- A — Archives: This is the area where outdated projects, areas, and resources are archived. Using Forte’s examples, it includes completed projects or things that no longer interest you.
D: Distill
The next step in the P.A.R.A. method involves organizing our content using a technique called progressive summarization, where summaries are created in a way that is immediately clear and distraction-free. This is where the distinction between knowledge and experience, as discussed in Section 1, as well as the difference between knowing and understanding, comes into play. While capturing information is easy, unless we make sense of it, it will remain nothing more than a tiring routine.
E: Express
According to Forte, after collecting and organizing what we learn from the world, we must make it ready to share. Otherwise, accumulating knowledge without sharing it is purposeless.
đź“š Further Readings on Second Brain
- Using Notion as Your Second Brain — Forte Labs
- The PARA Method: A Universal System for Organizing Digital Information — Forte Labs
- Progressive Summarization: A Practical Technique for Designing Discoverable Notes — Forte Labs
đź“ť To summarize the examples covered so far, here are my conclusions on data processing, knowledge management, or more simply, note-taking:
- What matters more than acquiring knowledge is what we do with it.
- The key to creativity and productivity isn’t the tool we use for note-taking, but our note-taking culture, knowledge management, practice, and habits.
- Our projects, tasks, interests, daily routines, shopping lists, and calendar should all be noted and organized individually.
- Organizing our notes properly makes searching easier and helps with recalling information over time. Not forgetting makes understanding and learning easier. Like Socrates said, repetition strengthens memory, because that knowledge is right where we’ll first look for it.
(Example from Section 1: The 2015 study conducted at the University of Toronto, “Answers at your fingertips: Access to the Internet influences willingness to answer questions”) - When everything is properly noted, the notes on topics we care about most will appear more frequently, while those on less important matters will show up less often. This prevents distractions, saving us from wasting time and motivation.
- When we revisit a topic after a long time, all relevant notes should be ready to work with. To achieve this, they need to be well-organized and summarized.
- When we return to a topic after a long time, if our notes are well summarized, we can pick up right where we left off without wasting any time.
- If we can accurately define what something is, we can place it correctly and know exactly where to find it when we need it.
- Knowing where to find what we need greatly simplifies our preparation for achieving our goals.
Whether you take notes with pen and paper like Niklas Luhmann or Yalın Alpay, or use tools like Evernote, Notion, or Roam Research, it’s not the tool that matters, but the human element — your behaviors and habits — that will drive progress.
