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Goals of a Note Taking System

A goal of a note taking system should be to store information, so that your brain can do more useful stuff.

Another goal is to help you connect ideas, even from different domains. As you read things in books, blogs, or come up with ideas on your own, eventually some of them will be related and can be combined to make something even better. The note taking system should facilitate creating these connections.

It should also help you process your notes. A note is not a static thing. It’s not something you just write down and then never touch again. Almost all ideas will eventually need refining. When you read a book and find something noteworthy, you write some notes, but in time you find that you can reword it better, as you understand things better. For your own ideas, in time you add something; you cut some things, hopefully making them better and then you create something with them.

Lastly, the note organizing system should help you organize and browse your notes. It should encourage serendipitous rediscovery of forgotten notes. It should help visualize them. It should make it easy to see all notes that are related to a certain note or to a certain topic.

Backlinks:

list from [[Goals of a Note Taking System]] AND -"Changelog"