Developing Notes
From taking to making notes
Taking notes captures information from external sources of interest or sparks for ideas to remember, reference, or explore further.
Making notes shifts the focus to creative content that reflects our own understanding and insights, rather than ideas and thoughts of other people. Nick Milo calls this process sensemaking because we're making sense of what we encounter in life as we write and link notes.
Idea emergence
My notes develop and grow over time as ideas emerge into a powerful web of knowledge (what I "know"). Nick Milo describes this process as having five [[Notes - Levels|levels]] of idea emergence, from sparks to notes to maps with complex knowledge structures.
It's helpful to think about notes as an evolving process that blends aspects of divergence, emergence, and convergence.
- Divergence creates "unique" notes with refactoring
- Emergence develops and links related notes
- Convergence "unifies" related notes and maps.
Creative and critical thinking
Writing notes requires both creative and critical thinking. PKM systems like Obsidian enable creative thinking by encouraging you to make unique connections and approach problems from fresh perspectives. It helps you think as you write, link related notes, and develop ideas and thoughts for your future self and sharing with others.
The process of writing and linking notes also supports critical thinking. It forces you to analyze information from sources, evaluate its relevance, identify connections between ideas, and synthesize new insights. This process forces you to dig deeper into topics for efforts and interests that you write about. Writing helps you think and understand what you know!
Balancing architect and gardener skills
Making notes and maps involves both top-down (architect) and bottom-up (gardener) thinking styles. This is complemented by middle-out thinking when collecting, clustering, and unifying maps.
This balance allows for structured organization and organic growth of ideas. You can go from notes to maps, maps to notes, or maps to maps, while developing your thoughts and ideas, and it's natural and joyful.
PKM architecture
A PKM system and idea emergence share similarity with software architecture and development concepts that integrate components and frameworks into applications across connected systems comprised of objects, functions, services, and interfaces.
There are notions of divergence from inputs with learning and understanding, and convergence into shared outputs. This reminds me of typical architecture layers for user or application interfaces, processing services, and data persistence.
Reusable components
Applications and PKM systems both provide solutions from complex systems using reusable components:
- Objects (entities): Individual notes represent distinct concepts or things
- Relationships: Links between notes define connections
- Schema: The overall structure and organization as a model for types of notes in a personal knowledge graph
- Queries: Selection, filtering, and sorting notes based on specific criteria.
- Views: Different ways of visualizing and accessing your notes.
Gall's law and system design
When designing your PKM system, keep Gall's Law in mind: start simple and allow complexity to evolve naturally. This approach leads to more robust and effective systems by integrating functions from simpler components where "the whole is more than its parts".
As I revisit, refine, and connect my notes, they become more valuable. This enables harvesting and reuse of atomic notes as intellectual assets for sharing as published notes, posts, pages, and newsletters.