I am a gardener cum librarian.
Confused?
These are two of the four archetypes of note-takers.
Before deciding which note-taking app you should choose, you need to know what is your note-taking style.
Anne-Laure Le coffee, the founder of Ness Lab, gave a very useful model to find out your note-taking style.
According to her, note-takers fall into three archetypes.
1. Architects
Are you looking for structure in your note-taking?
Do you need a simple system to organize every facet of your life?
Do you need customization in the note-taking app that blends practicality, function, and aesthetics?
Then, you are an architect.
An architect note-taker approaches everything about their note-taking with a systems mindset of architecting their knowledge.
2. Gardeners
Is your primary feeling about note-taking one of wandering, dreaming, imagining, and making spontaneous creative leaps?
Do you want to cultivate new ideas, cross-pollinate concepts, and sprout lots of creative possibilities?
Are you looking to blend your existing concepts, maybe create something new? You’re probably not necessarily trying to create a system that knows where it’s headed.
Then, you’re probably a gardener.
The gardener approaches everything about note-taking with a nurturing exploratory approach of reimagining the relationship to information and making novel connections.
3. Librarians
Do you have a deep desire to find the most useful or interesting things that exist in the world, capture them, keep them, and then study them?
Are you always collecting new bits of information, categorizing your learnings, retrieving your insights, combining old and new information into a new understanding, and especially sharing your favorite learnings with others?
You are likely a librarian.
Librarians often have a project orientation, like architects, but instead of architecting their entire life, their research supports specific projects and learning obsessions.
The librarian approaches everything about note-taking with a fundamentally practical relationship to information.
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Don’t fit in any of the three archetypes so far?
Or do you resonate with several of them and find the whole decision really confusing and kind of unnecessary?
If that’s you, then you are a student.
Tiago Forte, of Building A Second Brain, added the fourth archetype to these.
4. Students
Students use note-taking to manage many aspects of their lives but do not necessarily go too deep into any one of them.
As a student, you desire ease of use in your notetaking. Something quick, something easy, something accessible.
The student archetype is actually the most common type of note-taking archetype. It is something we default to when we don’t have extra time.
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Take a look at these archetype definitions in the carousel and find out which one you are.
Usually, not that hard to figure out which one you are.
Note-taking is a highly personal process, and for that reason, it’s based on intuition and feeling.
You will immediately resonate with one archetype or the other.
Or, like me, a blend of two.
Tomorrow, I will tell you which app is suitable for which archetype.