A Framework for taking notes

I used to write daily notes. All the ideas, experiences and thoughts that I had that day in a single note. That was such an inefficient way of taking notes. All my thoughts and insights were scattered in chronological order.

One of my favorite Radiohead songs: Everything In Its Right Place

In this article I’m going to share with you the framework I use for writing better notes. A way of getting the most out of the information and ideas that you write down.

The digital garden concept

The most important change in perspective that helped me the most was thinking about your notes as evergreen plants that you keep watering over the time.

You do this by revisiting, editing and improving notes. They can evolve the same way as you do.

I learned about this magnificent concept from one of my favorite blogs. I highly recommend you to check it out for a deeper explanation on the subject.

Create your own categories

This is how my mind garden looks like, I personally love Notion for keeping all my notes and basically organizing my entire life

You don’t have to follow traditional categories. Feel free to invent your owns!

As you develop your writing habit, your mind starts to recognize different patterns that resonate with you. That’s how you build your own mindset and start to see the world with a different perspective.

Learning how to categorize and abstract information according to your preferences will improve the way you build your personal knowledge Library

Letting go improves the quality of your notes

As time passes, there will be some ideas that are not so relevant to you anymore. Let them go. They occupy important space in your collection that could be filled with better ideas that are more relevant to you now.

You should write as many ideas as your mind can come up with. Feel free to explore different things. However, we all write poor ideas, and that’s totally fine.

You develop the mindset of trying out some things and seeing if they take you somewhere. If they don’t, you just let them go.

The key is feeling comfortable with adding and deleting as much as possible and keeping only the good stuff.

Connect the dots

We have many tools at our disposal for creating our mind garden. As I said already Notion. There are other options as well.

One important feature that you should look for is Backlinks

Backlinks are links inside your notes to other notes. It’s a way of connecting ideas directly and it follows the way your brain thinks.

This is such a powerful thing.

Combine notes, ideas, and categories. Recognize those patterns that spark your imagination and you’re going to come up with unique findings.

Round up

Writing in general is a beautiful thing to do. For me It has changed the way I think and I’m very glad to share the way I approach this activity.

Those are the main concepts I’ve have adopted over the time for writing my notes. Thank you for reading and I really hope you find article useful for you somehow.