Quick start to taking notes

Taking notes is a lot like many other tasks you do: it isn't always fun and requires some motivation from you to move forward with it.

The first thing is finding out why you want to take notes and get deep into that to find out how it aligns with your goals and what benefits it will bring to you. I've already written about Why taking notes is important (Reddit) before, but I want to move on with some extra ideas here in this article.

Before I focused on psychological facts, and now I'm willing to focus on organizing and structuring ideas. There are other things I could write about, but I like to keep it one step at a time.

So, once you start working, there are the inevitable questions about “how”, “what” and “when” (no, I won't get into the full 5W2H thing, don't worry about it) to write about something.

One significant observation. I use mostly Obsidian for note-taking. But I also use other tools (such as Microsoft OneNote and Visual Studio Code — or vscode / Visual Studio — with extensions such as Foam | A personal knowledge management and sharing system for VSCode): these guidelines and the way I do things is tool agnostic. There might be some changes you'll need to make, but the process works in many tools (including GNU Emacs that I've used for so many years and that I still return to sometimes…). It is also platform-agnostic, as I've used this with Linux in the past, and now I use it with Windows and Android.

What and When

There are a few different moments when you might be willing to take notes. And there are a few other moments when you should take notes. The thing is that what you're writing about will be a decisive factor to the time it will take you. So let's go through a quick set of examples (not an exhaustive list, because I can't foresee what are your needs).

• Quick notes — more like reminders — can be taken at any time. They serve as a prompt for something bigger. There's this thought you wanted to capture so that you don't forget it during the current activity you are performing. Write it down quickly. These notes, don't have any structure, and they are more like Post Its (I see you coming up with categories, paper colors, pen colors, etc. but don't go that route for this type of note: you'll send them to the trash soon).
• Quotations of something you read or listened to. These might have some structure, but without extra context or some comment from you, the original idea might be lost, and the quote might be used in weird contexts. These require a bit more of time to structure them and to add your comments and context where you read / listened to the quote. Here you might start with a quick note and develop it later, or you might add all the information at once. Just know that it will take you more than a few seconds if you want to do it properly and be able to use the information correctly later.
• Meeting notes. These are to be taken during the meeting. They aren't the meeting minutes, but they should cover what matters to you. If you're in charge of the minutes, then you have the difficult role to decide if you'll document everything, specific items or just what was in the original agenda. If you're not that person, take your notes for yourself, and later you can add the “official” meeting minutes to your notes, as reference to other things. Being selective is important because you shouldn't be acting on everything all the time (I've thought about the 1-2-1 meetings here…).
• Complex notes and ideas development. Here it is where the magic happens. But where time investment is required. Start these when you'll have enough time to either complete it or deliver a good chunk of work. This is where you'll have many doubts about the best approach, methods for organizing your notes, etc. but it is also where you'll see more benefits in your note-taking journey. Once you feel ready, “this is the way”.

How

The thing with notes is that tools should allow you to be free on what structure you have and what you think you need. Below are some general guidelines (and some more specific comments and thoughts about how I approach some things) that helped me through the years.

These note-taking tools should allow you to modify your note structure and change past things if and when you change your mind (Vault evolution and changes / Reddit).

The way I recommend doing things is by designing your process from the outcome you expect to achieve and then check what you need to do to achieve it. What information you'll need? How you query your notes? How do you see your work organized?

All data — including metadata about the note itself — should be a part of the note. It should be anywhere in your note: some footer section, properties, etc. What matters is that the information you want to reference to be preserved and doesn't change if you change tools, sync your files, restore some backup, etc. In theory — and for any reliable tool — your note contents are preserved in many events, so it is where the information you require should go. The file name is preserved in most cases (some clouds, internally, use a different representation of the file, but it should be transparent to you) and you can add metadata — such as date and time — here as well. Your note metadata is like a book reference card in a library, classifying it, organizing it, providing essential information that allows you to refer to the book as well as locate it in the library shelves. (See Connecting information and notes.)

Once you have some ideas on how to organize things and what you expect from your notes, start writing. And I really mean writing, not clipping, not copying and pasting, not typing what other people did. Really writing it all by yourself.

Use your own words, structure the note the way you think about things. I've written about that at Obsidian - getting started / Reddit.

And forget what YouTubers do: they, most of the time, do very complicated things to monetize from people like you, it isn't necessarily the best approach, and it won't necessarily work for you. Once you're writing regularly, you can use their videos for some inspiration or learning new things, but start from the start first.

If you'll write about yourself, write in the second person as if you were observing and writing about what you do, with privileged access to your thoughts. This makes it easier to assess facts and will help you write without feeling judged.

Once you see some patterns emerging (maybe after 10 or 20 notes), you can start designing your note templates. They are like Microsoft Word templates, where parts of your document comes pre-filled, or you have some guiding questions to help you start and standardize your notes. Test them. Use them to make your life easier and to have standard information always available (for example information about note date and time creation or update — Managing time in notes / Reddit). Work hard, but work smart. Templates can also be used with existing notes to speed up things. Be creative.

Move on with your note-taking and once you achieve some mass of notes, already using templates, you can work on aggregating and visualizing information. Some tools provide an automation for that, some other tools graphs, and all the tools from the last 30+ years work with folders (or a similar concept of groups of notes, notebooks, etc.). Use what works for you in the tool you use.

Separate the idea of contents and presentation (appearance). Once you have the contents, you can work on making it pretty. Each tool has different capabilities here, so the simpler you have your layout, the more portable between different tools your notes will be. Remember that the information matters more than how pretty it is in most of the cases.

Dive into tools for adding visual cues and visual details to your notes. Usually a text editor isn't a good image editor or diagram creator. Think about a tool set, not a do it all tool: specialized tools will perform better.

You have to think about integrations and making things work. Again, Microsoft Word is not a good calendar tool, neither Obsidian nor Visual Studio, so use the right tool for the right job: calendaring apps, note-taking apps, drawing and diagramming apps, etc. Pick a powerful tool set and integrate their outputs, making your notes and your work flow better. A good work flow is not doing enduring in a single tool, it is doing things in the best way you can with the time you have to do it.

Align everything with your objectives and the reasons why you take notes and be happy.

As time passes by, you'll improve things, change your templates, change tools, change how you query your notes… but you will own the information, it will be tailored to you, and it will bring you many benefits when it is just like what you need, not like someone designed it to be to sell it.

Other references

I've described how I approach some things before. These get into some extra details and thoughts on how to approach note-taking in digital tools (most of these focus on Obsidian, but they can be used with other tools) and might provide you some valuable information, so I'm linking them here. Many of them were born to reply to Reddit questions or as Reddit posts and as such I'm linking to their version over there.

• Taking notes about books (Reddit)
• Taking class notes (Reddit)
• Connecting information and notes (Reddit)
• Note linking process (Reddit)
• Patterns to make linking easier (Reddit)
• How I handle attachments to my notes in Obsidian (Reddit)
• Splitting Notes (Reddit)
• How to start note-taking — a view on what to write about.

Have fun and welcome aboard the note-taking community.