The Importance Of Ephemeral Notes
I first talked about this in AAC Software & Taxonomy of Note Types.
Revisiting it today, I decided to follow up on it a bit.
Writing things down quickly and revisiting them later to refine my thoughts has fundamentally changed the way I approach my work, especially my more ambitious and experimental projects.
I always thought I was bad at taking notes. But I'm not.
The people telling me notation (e.g. bullet journaling) would help have fundamentally misunderstood the problem.
There's two types of notes:
- Documentation of something being witnessed.
- Documentation of what you're doing/thinking.
The problem I've had for literal decades is: I'm trying to solve the latter. People keep giving me solutions to the former.
Every single person who I have ever talked to about taking notes treats the initial thing written as the final product.
It's supposed to be perfect from the start.
You write it down, and then you reference that copy directly later.
But there's a fundamentally different approach to notetaking:
Write thoughts and observations down as you have them. Revisit them later, if you feel it is necessary, to refine and expand upon them.
Rather than trying to get it perfect the first time around, this lets you easily keep track of what you've been doing, what progress has been made, what observations and thoughts you've had, and things of that sort.
For me, a digital version works well. But you can do the same thing with paper notebooks, if you'd like.
I highly recommend experimenting with some variant of this approach.