Every now and then, I’m pulled back into the orbit of the second brain/zettelkasten/notetaking community conversation. I’ve written a little bit about my note-taking process before.
I don’t really use it too much these days. And even when I do, I’m often irritated by the thought of “where should this go?” and the general dissonance of “mess-making”. Dan Shipper talks about this same challenge in this post, The Fall of Roam.
While reading this post, I was reminded of another of my favorites. One with a particularly memorable name and liberating idea: The Good Shit Sticks, by Oskar, about an idea from Tim Ferriss.
Note-taking and thinking about ideas and things you have learned, reviewing notes, and being reminded of your past self is a great way to revisit where you have been and where you thought you were going. However, for me, my notes have never really been my roadmap even when I thought they were or should be.
Notes are necessary and useful for keeping track of things and structuring thoughts. If I get feedback from a friend about a project, I’ll summarize it in a note, but this note and its value are likely short-lived. Ideally, I will re-read and incorporate the feedback into my project soon. If I don’t, I’ll likely have moved on from the idea entirely. The note and its continued existence won’t be all that important.
Most notes aren’t that important. Not that many can be. You can only focus on so many things.
However, the good stuff sticks around – the concepts, how they connect, and where I can go with these ideas. For my most interesting work, I’m often not relying on my notes to figure out where I’m going with regard to building and experimenting. I’m largely relying on my intuition, interest, and ways in which I see the pieces connect.
I read and write extensively, but I’m writing notes to think. In fact, many of my most interesting notes happen in these logs, which eventually turn into blog posts or more exploratory work.
The act of building the body of work is the process that matters. The curation and organization of the notes themselves matter a lot less.
These days I try to focus on building things, reading things, and trying to understand them deeply through my own experimentation and application of the ideas whenever possible.
Practically, this means reading about vibe coding (constructing a software system without looking at the code and only verifying the results) then actually trying it to understand the tradeoffs or experimenting with frameworks like langchain and comparing them to rolling my own implementations.
I’ve been far more satisfied with the outcomes of this approach than I ever was trying to make my notes the center of my universe.