The first principle I have for my note-taking system is to capture your fleeting thoughts as much as you can. This is not because you have lots of great ideas — in fact, 90% of your ideas are useless or garbage. At least, that’s the case for me. But they do take up some space in your mind. By writing them down, you can capture them into a note, thereby you can free up your mental space which helps you concentrate and think better.
This is a little related to the first principle, but you want to make the process of capturing your thoughts into your note as smooth as possible. That means you want to remove all the potential friction in the process. Otherwise, you might forget your ideas, or it just feels too cumbersome to write them down.
The primary obstacle in this process is the speed of the tool you use.
And the second biggest obstacle is having to make decisions when writing your thoughts.
And this is exactly why the idea of Daily Notes is genius because that’s where you can write your thoughts without these frictions. Since your daily note is where all of your thoughts can live, regardless of their category, you don’t have to make any decision when making a new note. All you have to do is just write it down.
So, my second principle is to pick a tool that’s fast and use Daily Note for every idea to make it frictionless.
The third principle is maximise the number of portals in each note. The problem I had with many note apps I used before was that they all turn into an idea black hole. It means you make notes but never actually use them or even see them again because they get buried under a pile of other notes.
Another principle that I think is critical is to resurface your old notes regularly.
To prevent this, we can use the spaced repetition system to resurface the buried notes to the top. This way, you can create a circulation inside your knowledge base where you can review the existing notes so you can develop them further or archive them if they’re not important anymore.
Finally, something that I like to do is to include mental anchors in my notes. Mental anchors are things that make it easier for you to remember what you wrote and find the notes you’re looking for.
The primary mental anchor for me is time. I find it helpful to include it when I write things down because we use time to remember almost everything. This is why I love interstitial journaling because it lets you see your thoughts in the context of time, which makes it easier to remember what you wrote.