Category: Productivity

Note-taking Apps

Neera

Back in September 2021, my writing life turned a corner.

I was writing online for almost three years. I had published a book, written over 300 articles, and experienced burnout.

What was killing me, ironically, was not the writing, or the vast amount of reading but keeping notes.

I was saving everything that I found even remotely interesting thinking I will use it in my next article or book. But as soon as I saved it, I forget about it.

I had become a digital hoarder.

The crunch came when I moved from Windows to Mac. Took me days to transfer my files, and the process left me bewildered.

That got me thinking why am I keeping all these notes if I can’t find them when I need them?

I tried to organize them for easy findability first in Microsoft files then in One Note Finally in Evernote.

But none of the methods worked.

Then something happened.

In September 2021, I found a tool called Roam Research. I was immediately hooked.

It could store notes as atomic units complete on their own and yet be able to interact with each other, forming unexpected connections.

I started using it straight away. A year later, I had a massive knowledge bank which has become the backbone of my writing.

Six months ago, I moved to another tool even better It’s called Obsidian. My writing has more depth and substance now. I couldn’t have done it without my knowledge bank.

A right notetaking tool has the power to lift your writing much beyond your imagination.

Yesterday, I wrote about notetaking archetypes. Today I am going to share which apps are suitable for which archetypes.

Check out which one is for you:

Architect Archetype

The app for the Architect archetype is Notion.

Notion allows you to create personal dashboards, just-in-time indexes of notes and information that can be tagged, categorized, sorted, and updated dynamically updated as it changes.

Gardener Archetype

The apps for the Gardener archetype are Roam Research and Obsidian.

These apps are very different in how they organize knowledge. Both of them are fundamentally about creating new connections between disparate pieces of knowledge.

A visual map of content that organically grows as your knowledge bank grows and surprises you even with new insights you didn’t plan for yourself.

Librarian Archetype

Librarian archetypes love Evernote.

Evernote kicked off the modern note-taking phenomenon and has specialized over the years to be the best in class.

With Evernote, you can collect information from any number of different sources. It’s quick, it’s accessible across all your devices, and it’s a highly dependable platform for modern knowledge workers.

Student Archetype

The Student archetype’s needs are different. Their notes are likely a mix of documentation, practical notes, to-dos, and even word-for-word transcripts.

The apps suitable for them are:

  • Apple Notes,
  • Google Keep,
  • Notability
  • Simple Notes

These apps are simpler. They’re pared down in their features than the apps mentioned earlier. They’re practical, quick, flexible notetaking.

4 Types Of note-taker archetypes

Neera

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.

———-

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.

—–

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.

The beauty of compression

Neera

In December 2008, Juergen Schmidhuber, a German computer scientist, published a paper titled Driven by Compression Progress. This very influential paper, in the study of cross-disciplinary creativity, argued that the simple principle of compression is at the heart of everything.

Schmidhuber and his team point out that a simple algorithmic principle based on the notions of data compression and data compression progress informally explains fundamental aspects of attention, novelty, surprise, interestingness, curiosity, creativity, subjective beauty, jokes, and science & art in general.

In simple words, what does compression mean?

Compression says that ideas need to be boiled down to their most pure, dense, rich essence.

“The world can be explained to a degree by compressing it,” says Schmidhuber. Basically, our brain prizes efficiency. If it can remember one thing instead of ten, it’s happy.

Good communication is often compression, packaging up tangled thoughts into neat little words with agreed-upon meanings.

Love is compression, fusing a series of experiences, memories, feelings, and thoughts into an exhilarating state of mind.

Einstein changed physics with an incredibly succinct equation E equals MC squared.

Jokes boil down just to the punch line.

Compressed ideas can travel farther and faster. Not only through the communication channels like the internet but also through human minds.

One of the most famous and clear examples of compression is Picasso’s Bull. Picasso was a master of compression. He painted a series of 11 lithographs, his goal – to find the “essence” of the beast in a series of progressively simpler images.

He starts with a lively and realistic drawing of the bull. Next, he adds expression and power, making the beast even more evocative.

And then he stops building and starts dissecting. He keeps the lines that follow the contours of its muscles and skeleton and takes away everything else. In the subsequent images, he is simplifying and outlines just the major parts of its anatomy.

The compression continues in the final 5 images, as Picasso starts to understand the balance of form in the animal, and how weight is distributed between the front and the back. He removes structural lines of support that are no longer needed. He finishes the drawing with a final image, encasing what he has discovered are the most essential elements in a taut, nearly continuous outline. Along the way, he drops the bull’s head to emphasize the horns.

The result is a stunningly simple line drawing that somehow still captures the fundamental spirit of a bull.

“A picture used to be a sum of additions. In my case, a picture is a sum of destructions.” Pablo Picasso.

Picasso did line sketches of several animals. I tried to copy his sketches, but it was hard to get the line control. Picasso, too probably wouldn’t have achieved this in one step –  the learning curve would have been too steep. He once described this process as “charging up” his arm with the essence of the animal. He often wouldn’t keep the whole sequence, turning the canvas upside down and painting over it at each stage.

Nike compressed its entire marketing philosophy down into just three words, Just do it. And then they compress that slogan into a symbol that is so recognizable all around the world, but it doesn’t even need the Nike’s name.

All of these examples show that compression is at the heart of creative excellence in every field.

When you compress your ideas, they automatically get better.

When you remove the parts that are merely good they no longer dilute the parts that are truly great.

We, writers, are compressors by profession. Our role is to explain complex ideas. To distill them down to the basics so that readers can get the gist of them without getting tangled in the fluff.

Building in blocks

Neera

Since building my “second brain,” my whole approach to writing has changed.

I no longer do the “heavy lifting,” where I would pick a task and stay on it until it’s finished.

I used to write articles on a single stretch, spending hours on it, not starting another one till it was done and published.

I used the same method for writing books. Working on one book at a time.

Now I am working on several.

This approach is called “slow-burn.”

I am working on several projects in parallel, where I am slowly gathering ideas in the background.

Over time, I will have a rich collection of interesting anecdotes, insights, examples, facts, and illustrations to compile my books.

Besides, all those building blocks can be reused in articles, blog posts, LinkedIn posts and even building courses.

Each day I spend one to two hours inside my “second brain,” my Personal Knowledge Management System, and create or refine “notes.”

These “notes” are self-sufficient, reusable, knowledge articles. I like to think of them as atomic essays.

It has been a transformative shift in how I think about my work.

This new way of working is more adaptable, more innovative, more effective, and stress-free.

There have been 5 benefits of this way of working.

1. I am interruption-proof since I am working in one small building block at a time.

2. There are natural breakpoints where I can get feedback rather than waiting till the end of the project.

3. I can create value in any span of time I am working.

4. Big projects and goals have become much less intimidating.

5. Over time, I’ll eventually create so many building blocks that I’d be able to complete entire projects just by assembling previously created blocks.

This is a magical moment.

Once you experience it, you’d never want to start anything from scratch ever again.

This was the place I wanted to be with my writing.

Building my second brain

Neera

I am building my second brain.

Not because my primary brain is not functioning well, or it is not smart enough to handle all the tasks I undertake. But because I want to free it from doing things it was not designed to do.

Our brain is not designed to remember dates, facts, or pieces of information we have read somewhere. And it was never meant to memorize the books I read or the tens of articles I consume every day.

What it is good at is creating, connecting, visualizing, imagining, and coming up with good ideas.

My second brain is going to hold all the knowledge I gain from reading, listening, watching, and contemplating.

Rather than sitting in my digital folders, this information is now in a central repository where it is interacting with other ideas,
my insights and stories, my perspective and forming unique connections.

Building a second brain is the best productivity exercise I undertook in my writing career. And I want to teach it to others.

I will be holding five workshops from Monday 8 May to 5 June. The details are here.