LionKimbro
It'd take another book to write a re-treatment of notes and notekeeping, but three major emphasis would be:
1. Time, or rather, "epoch" or "period," are more important than subject. Subject is secondary to epoch, but still important.
2. Proper placement is more important than the capacity to link distances via page numbers. Page numbers are valuable, but the page numbering scheme I used was overboard. Valuable for mapping out every thought, but not valuable for living a life and getting benefit from notekeeping. Page numbers and links are exciting at first, but a poor substitute for things being where they belong in the first place. So I keep much more white space now, and I structure things as I develop, such that there are places for information to be integrated in.
3. "Don't write letters to dead people." This is about a principle of action. It is important to think about: "Who is going to read this note?" Yes, you, of course. But you -- when? I now take a much more mission-centric approach to my projects and my research. YES, sometimes you really are working on a twenty year mega project. I have projects like that. Other times, it's: "This is valid for 6 months." Or even just 1 month. This relates to pre-deleting, but it's important to have a sense of -- like in Death Stranding, you are preparing for a trip. What are you bringing? What are you not bringing? What is disposable? What will you need? My notes are far tidier than they were back 20 years ago.
Zettelkasten I think is a good path -- as far as I understand it, it is: "networked islands of structure." I'm all for it.
Today, I do a lot of research into networked data, and mediums for expressing code and data.
For example, I wrote a system called "Minicubes," which I intend to redo in Python+Tcl/Tk -- you can see a demonstration at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GvPyLDXZlb4
I think a lot of the promise of computer notes and programming and such, would do well to focus on the medium that we use. I would like to see text files replaced with an easily parsable "schematic" medium, for example: https://communitywiki.org/wiki/SchematicMedium
If anybody would like to talk, I encourage you to find "Lion's Internet Office" on the Internet, and come and stop by. I'm happy to answer questions, learn about people's projects, and I love collaborating with people on things. We have a somewhat monthly group discussion chat in real-time, too, where you can introduce yourself, or ask questions, etc.,.
Thank you for your attention, I deeply appreciate the comments from people -- the positive ones are profoundly appreciated, and the "negative" ones are -- I kind of grin, because I think that they are also correct! Thank you.
The way I keep notes has changed a lot since I wrote the book, and my experience of notes has changed a lot.
The comments here that are most in line with my deeper experience:
* [sliverstorm:] "If time is precious and every moment is worth preserving, who is going to spend time reading these records?"
This is a very good question, and one that my notebook systems have pivoted around in their evolution.
This is about the purpose of notes, and how that turns into their organization.
I estimate that by my present notekeeping system, 1 in 15 pages of my notes are revisited even after 1-2 years time. I arrive at this figure by opening a notebook from 2 years ago, and asking myself, "How many of these pages do I still regularly revisit?"
I think this is actually an unusually high value -- I'd put most notekeeping systems somewhere in the 1 in 1,000 to 1 in 100,000 range, if they have any pages at all that are regularly revisited after 2 years.
The question is, "What are you keeping notes for?" And this is where the ethic of developing thought comes in.
Which segues straight into these two comments:
* [timtadh:] "Two things fascinated me about the article: 1) the inability of computers to model his thought process and 2) the experience of thinking deeply." * [kiba:] "I am more interested in how his thought process change and help him solve problem than his notebook system."
I've taught several classes on keeping notes now, and I've found that the main distance between what I'm talking about, and where people are at, is in terms of the ethic of incubating thought.
Our thoughts appear chaotic and unruly, going in all directions at first, but with time, themes and patterns emerge. A programming idea that fascinated you 7 years ago still continues to fascinate you, 3 years later, and then 4 years later again.
Can you develop a thought across time? Everything works by accumulation.
The answer to these questions is to prioritize the development of thought, to make space for additional thought, and to focus on editing and annotation, rather than the focus we see today on the ability to find what has already been written.
That is, today we focus on the question, "Can I find a prior thought?" An important question, but I have solutions to that problem.
The deeper question is, "How do I extend the prior thought?"
And here is where user interface makes or breaks the experience. If you cannot layout the scene, if you cannot apply visual techniques transparently, if you cannot position your thoughts, -- you're dead in the water.
Editing ASCII text files definitely does not function here. There is no annotation capacity. You cannot write "in the margins." You cannot diagram. You cannot vary your font with ease. There are so many ways in which our user interface fails us.
Yes, yes, -- we can make up stopgap "fixes" to these problems, but the problem remains: it's nowhere good as what we have with a pen and paper, even given the capacity to erase, copy, transfer, etc. If a stellar page is revisited only 100 times in its life, (whether computer paper or real paper,) then you really aren't getting much of an advantage from all these sophisticated computer capacities. But the difference in "user interface" is extremely relevant.
* [naner:] "Taking a stylus to a screen feels a little like trying to take a sports car on a frozen lake to me."
I love my computers and my iPhone, but touch, mouse, keyboard, and (today's) pen computer are still no match for a pen and paper.
More recent thoughts on notebooks that I've written online are at: http://lion.posterous.com/tag/notekeeping