chrisaldrich
chrisaldrich
Different types of notes and use cases boffosocko.com
|
Embed
JohnPhilpin
JohnPhilpin

@chrisaldrich I need to check properly - but have you seen the note types described by Nick Milo when he describes using Obsidian?

|
Embed
chrisaldrich
chrisaldrich

@JohnPhilpin That's like saying, "Did you see that reference that Augustine made to Jesus." 😜 Seriously though, if you find the reference, I'd love to see it.

|
Embed
JohnPhilpin
JohnPhilpin

@chrisaldrich I think this was originally Nick - I can’t find the post - it might be in his ‘LYT’ world — but found this on another blog:

And to indicate each note’s maturation stage, I use hashtags ( now removed to make flow easier to read … JP )

📤: Seedbox | items that I am / will be working actively on

🌱: Seedling | items grown from literature notes that still need incubation

🪴: Sapling | items in need of planting among other trees

🌲: Evergreen | fundamental unit of knowledge work, stable for dense linking to & from

|
Embed
JohnPhilpin
JohnPhilpin

@chrisaldrich but I did find these two posts from Nick Ang

1

And

2

|
Embed
chrisaldrich
chrisaldrich

@JohnPhilpin Thanks for digging these up. I'd seen Nick Ang's articles when he first published them. Most of this list is rife in the digital gardens space with a gardening metaphor that goes back to Mark Bernstein's Hypertext Gardens (1998) and to Mike Caulfield's The Garden and the Stream: A Technopastoral piece. Maggie Appleton used a version of it fairly early on as did Andy Matuschak. See also links at https://indieweb.org/commonplace_book. Most of these levels are evolutionary after the initial work of starting the note has begun. Anecdotally, I've also noticed that many people using that system look at "evergreen" more from the journalistic perspective (an evergreen article) and consider those notes to be longer articles rather than reusable notes in multiple contexts.

But being completely honest the general collecting and tending metaphor goes back to antiquity (and possibly earlier). In writing about classic rhetoric Seneca the Younger wrote in Epistulae morales

"We should follow, men say, the example of the bees, who flit about and cull the flowers that are suitable for producing honey, and then arrange and assort in their cells all that they have brought in; these bees, as our Vergil says, 'pack close the flowering honey | And swell their cells with nectar sweet.' "

He's essentially saying, 'read the best, take their thoughts and ideas, consume them, make them your own.' As a result of this quote and others similar to it, it's not uncommon to see bees or the equivlaent Latin word apes written or drawn into the margins of Renaisance humanist texts as a sort of "bookmark" annotation by readers of the time. 🐝

Another gradation of note names similar to this is that of Sönke Ahrens with descriptors like fleeting notes, reading notes, literature notes, etc.

The thing I'm looking at in my particular list is the form of the intial note at the level of an annotation made at first reading. These descriptions may be more indicative of what the note may or may not become later on. I've also ranked them a bit from (for me at least) the more important and valuable to the least. Differentiating them at this lower level can be more important as a means of where to focus one's time and energy.

I also tend to take the approach of doing more upfront work than less. Using the gardening metaphor list, I usually intend to get my notes to the seedling/sapling level at the first pass while reading. Usually once they're in my system for a week or so, they should all be at sapling level and then it's a question of linking and crosslinking them and then actually using them in new contexts thereafter.

|
Embed
jeroensangers
jeroensangers

@JohnPhilpin I have tried a similar approach in the past, but in the end decided that it didn’t matter and only complicated my workflow. What criteria does a note need to pass to go to the next level? Instead, I now simply consider all my notes a work in progress. I have one simple rule: whenever I open a note, I have to improve it. This way, my most used notes are also the most developed notes.

|
Embed
JohnPhilpin
JohnPhilpin

@chrisaldrich yikes - why am I reading all these other people when I have you right here on MicroBlog?

Thankyou!

|
Embed
In reply to
JohnPhilpin
JohnPhilpin

@jeroensangers I’m with you - still exploring all of this - but the ‘improve every time you open’ rule is a good one … in conjunction with ‘open a random note’ … I’m slowly getting there.

|
Embed
chrisaldrich
chrisaldrich

@JohnPhilpin Thanks. Most of what I've seen in the Twittersphere and some of the note taking and tools for though space is incredibly thin, so I've been trying to dig into the background and history for some more considered approaches by studying people who've spent years using similar systems rather than people who've (re-)discovered them in the last year or two and are reinventing the wheel. Better to look at Mortimer J. Adler's writing and examples. Manfred Keuhn is a more recent writer with both experience and some appreciation for the history of the space.

Mortimer J. Adler holding a pipe in his left hand and mouth posing in front of dozens of boxes of index cards with topic headwords including "law", "love", "life", "sin", "art", "democracy", "citizen", "fate", etc.

For others on mb, it might be worth reading (and listening) to @AndySylvester.

@jeroensangers idea is similar to some of my process as well. @JohnPhilpin I use the random note occasionally to review over old tidbits, but I'd recommend against using random note for progressive improvement. You'll probably find that you're more productive and have more fun by reading and impoving the notes on the areas you care about and enjoy the most. Not coincidentally those are also the places you're more likely to re-visit and re-poen as well.

|
Embed
AndySylvester
AndySylvester

@chrisaldrich thanks for this summary and for the link to "Thinking About Tools for Thought"! I am planning to restart the podcast soon....

|
Embed