@readwithai - X - blog - machine-aided-reading
One of the things I like about my Obsidian setup is that it makes it easy to do “drive-by note taking”. While doing something else, if I think of a couple of things I want to note down then I can quickly find or create a note on the topic and jot something down. Over time I start to add some structure. Various people talk about the ability to gradually accrue value from taking in Obsidian, but I get the impression the drive-by note taking I do is more at the micro-level.
The features in Obsidian that make this easy for me are:
The title search feature in Obsidian
Creating a lot of small notes so that the title search works well (I suspect I would get too many matches if I did a full text search)
Maintaining a global Map of Content with each note having parents so that I can quickly add a bit of structure
What’s interesting here is that the notes I am taking may not be directly related to what I am doing - often sort of related to a specific task as part of a process or a little abstracted. I mean… you are never really just doing one thing rather you taking an action within a tree of goals so it makes sense to take little notes about the more general things that you are doing while doing a specific thing.
Process as you go
This style of note taking is explicitly at odds with the way that many people seem to want to do note with with a capture mode for fleeting notes that then get processed into real notes. For me that list will never get processed because the things that I am working on are always urgent. I guess this one of those plan vs habits thing. I to smear out the capturing and processing by doing a little tidying and abstracting each time I add notes. At least things works for notes related to my work - I imagine for certain types of work I imagine I would use a different approach.
One observation is this sort of note taking can kind of be free. You are going to think about this stuff anyway, the difference is that you write some reusable n
How to do good drive-by note taking?
There are probably good ways of doing drive-by note taking and bad note taking. The main challenge is to do sufficiently little note taking that it does not distract from the task that you are doing, but also doing enough that your notes improve over time. My feeling is that note taking, like reading and thinking is an expert skill that improves over time, so there isn’t necessarily any cut-and-dry advice.
My main rule is that I try to always link a note to a parent note, and sometimes also update the parent node a least. This means that there is always a little “interaction” with your notes over time. I’ve written before how the maintenace of this sort of Map of Content can act as a form of spaced repetition.
What I would say is to take fewer notes initially until you get some value. Once you see some value there you can start adding more structure.
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