Note-Taking IV: My Personal Workflow & Insights
Note-taking is a deeply personal process. Everyone operates under different criteria regarding what deserves to be recorded, whether to write Atomic notes or Molecular notes, and how to connect ideas.
Rather than debating those methodologies, this article outlines my personal workflow for handling generic notes. While I have previously covered specialized contexts in Taking class notes and Taking notes about books, generic notes stem from daily observations, sudden insights, and ongoing reflection.
For me, the note-taking process begins long before typing. Most of the effort lies in structuring the mental model of a topic. Even intermediate or rough thoughts require a minimal framework to become actionable; organizing these ideas upfront aids comprehension and makes future retrieval within my vault far more intuitive. When dealing with complex themes that span multiple interconnected notes, I often map out the concepts visually using Excalidraw (via the standalone app, the website or the Obsidian plugin).
Recently, I have experimented with dumping unstructured thoughts directly into notes and using AI to generate organized summaries. While this saves time on proofreading and fixing typos, it requires caution. Maintaining a strict boundary between human-written content and AI-generated text is essential. Furthermore, reviewing automated summaries introduces the risk of confirmation bias, where subtle misinterpretations or errors in the output can easily go unnoticed.