Andy Matuschak

I've been investing in taking notes to enable better understanding of the material. I tend to follow Andy Matuchak's philosophy on note taking (https://notes.andymatuschak.org). But, I've only really started taking notes, so grain of salt about this.

Some thoughts and responses to what you've said:

1. I try to make sure anything I enter into my notes are intended to last, filtering/processing is a key step to that. This often means I won't enter notes unless they can contribute to my understanding of some lasting higher level concept. For example, I don't have any notes on tech library X, Y, Z. But I do have notes on concepts, like "Required accidental complexity should be avoided or separated" and if a library Z has a unique way of doing so, I may incorporate my understanding of the strategy to further my understanding of the concept.

2. My goal is less to simply collect links/articles, it's to process and assimilate. I write everything in my own words to clarify my understanding. I link it to other topics in my notes to help build stronger associations, which helps me ground and recall the knowledge. I'm also exploring whether I want to put some spaced repetition in with my notes to help keep pieces of information fresh.

3. I treat my notes as separate from my todo lists. The extra bit that these tools give you is the linking and clustering of information. I find the associations useful for encouraging identification/contextualization of where that knowledge sits in my…

> you have to create things worth writing about

Sure, but how about you intertwine the process of creating things and writing about them?

I don't remember the exact reference but I remember reading an article by someone who uses something like a Zettelkasten to write down his thoughts and insights in small digestable pieces and then creates an outline for an article / a book once a pattern of thought emerges and he feels ready.

I really liked this approach as you don't need to filter yourself in your daily writing practice – no one will read your notes, so it's okay if they're not perfect or relevant to millions of people or whatever.

EDIT: Found the reference! It wasn't Zettelkasten but Evergreen note-taking (though the author does reference Zettelkasten):

https://notes.andymatuschak.org/z3PBVkZ2SvsAgFXkjHsycBeyS6Cw1QXf7kcD8

Not parent but here's some, downloadable from the built-in plugin store:

- Advanced Tables: for automatic formatting and table operations of markdown tables

- Dynamic Table of Contents: allows you to include a codeblock that automatically renders a table of contents from headers of some level

- Natural language dates: insert dates in your preferred format using language like 'next Friday' or 'first Monday of June'

- Quick latex for Obsidian: autoformat and autocomplete common latex commands (e.g. 'a/b' becomes '\frac
{b}
{a}'

- Tag Wrangler: rename, merge, toggle and search tags easily

- Sliding Panes: changes notes to panes that can be stacked similar to the ui of Andy Matushchak's notes [0] (check it out, it's rather neat)

[0] https://notes.andymatuschak.org

I've integrated spaced repetition quite effectively into my daily life and I've found that it's incredibly important to learn how to write good prompts.

The naive approach definitely leads to rote learning of factual trivia, but proper prompts can definitely foster curiosity and understanding. In fact it's often times the process of creating new prompts that reveal a gap in my understanding.

This Article from Andy Matuschak is a very thorough introduction to the art of prompt writing: https://andymatuschak.org/prompts/

Of course it doesn't mean that practical experience is obsolete, quite the opposite. But spaced repetition works great in conjunction with practice. I'd go so far that it's more effective to do both, than just practical experience.

There's basically just two things you need to know:

1. Keep your notes short. I do 10 sentences max.

2. Link them as much as possible. Find a program that does that (Obsidian, Roam, Foam, etc).

It truly is a wonderful feeling when you do those two things many, many times. Instead of a YouTube rabbit hole, I can fall down a rabbit hole of my own thoughts just by clicking on a random note, following the links, and re-discovering some of my thoughts from months or years ago.

Unique IDs are easy. For example, Unix timestamp or just YYYYMMDDHHMMSS. Here's a commonly shared public database to get you hooked: https://notes.andymatuschak.org/About_these_notes

Definitely a biased opinion, but I don't mind my collection of notes. As a sample: https://simple.industries/notes/counting.html

I've been slowly hacking at a system that lets me jot things down with markdown and latex in Obsidian, then render in a mostly clean and lightweight form. The build pipeline is just a bash script and pandoc to keep tooling as thin as possible too.

I hope to have time to expose the underlying graph in yet to be defined way, but have neither the time or amount of content to warrant that yet. A source of inspiration and admiration for that is definitely https://notes.andymatuschak.org/.