How I take notes

Taking notes is something that is very particular to each person. There are multiple criteria into what might become or not a note, how to write said notes, write Atomic notes or Molecular notes, how you connect things, etc.

I'm not going to write about that here. But I'm going to write about the process I use for generic notes. I've written about Taking class notes and Taking notes about books before.

Generic notes come from daily situations, ideas, etc. These are usually born after some time thinking and structuring the idea in my mind.

It is not that I don't write intermediate things, I do, but even them need some structure to become useful.

It helps with organizing things and maturing the idea. Not only that, but it is part of what will make me remember of what is inside my vault.

Most of the process is, then, creating the mental structure of what I'll write about. If it is a complex subject or a theme that I'll need to expand in multiple notes then I might also think in graphical format with the help of Excalidraw (either the website or the plugin in Obsidian).

Lately, I've been exploring dumping more unstructured contents into notes, and using AI to create organized summaries from them. It isn't always a productive thing — specially as I want to let it clear what is human and what is AI generated in my notes — but it frees me from a lot of time reviewing my notes, fixing typos, etc. But it is also a dangerous thing in the sense that reviewing that kind of text adds up the possibility of misinterpretation and of me reading it with a biased view, ignoring possible mistakes.

Also see The speed of things, To inform versus to communicate, A escrita como processo mental, Interacao Humanos IA, Thinking about AI.