On Note Taking

Published See discussion on Twitter

This blog post might seem fairly different from most of my other posts, mostly because my other posts are usually pretty concrete about specific things (e.g. web development methodologies, or about a trip to central Oregon). This post will instead be a bit more broad and open ended, I hope that it is still valuable for at least a few of the people that may stumble upon it in the future.


I’m pretty bullish on the possibilities of enhancing our methods of note taking as a way to improve the way that we think as humans. I’ve definitely come around to this train of thought thanks to the note taking renaissance that we find ourselves in at the moment. It seems like every month there is a new app that tries to solve the note taking problem space in a unique way.

I think there are a lot of unique areas of exploration that we (or at least I) have fully dived into yet, and so I wanted to catalog them here and hopefully return to some of these ideas and publish more content on them!

  • Collective note taking
    • Collaborating with others on note databases in the hopes to create both intentional and coincidental linkages between concepts
  • Iterative note taking
  • Computer aided notes

This list is not exhaustive, I expect that I’ll want to add more concepts here over time!