I am constantly trying to improve my note taking abilities; and I have been for something like 25 years. I don’t just believe, I know, that this has helped me tremendously in every job I’ve worked at over those years, and in my life away from work as well. There is a whole lot of thinking and a variety of prescribed ways to do note taking well, and just over a year ago I learned that there is this magical term PKM. It stands for personal knowledge management and some of the thinking around it puts forward the idea that our personal knowledge is one of our biggest assets.
All of that - PKM, greatest asset - instantly made sense to me and I wrote a little about it here:
All of the PKM note taking methods I’ve tried out over recent years have at least one thing in common; they emphasize that the heart of it, the critical parts of it, are to:
Capture thoughts, ideas, facts etc quickly
Whenever possible, link notes that are around the same theme or category, or that make sense to you to link for some other reason
Ultimately, try to end up with atomic/evergreen/permanent notes (I’ve seen all those names used). These are generally shorter notes and they are the result of reviewing a captured note (or maybe a small group of notes) and then transforming it into your own words. This is said to deepen your understanding of the note topic and these are the most valuable type of note
In aiming to follow this method, there has been a lot of experimenting. I’ve tried out Tiago Forte’s Building a Second Brain, Nick Milo’s Linking Your Thinking, and methods and guidance from other experts in this field mentioned in my linked post above. I’ve tried these out in my two note taking apps:
Zettelkasten has worked best for me for some time now. You might be wondering what the heck Zettelkasten is - I know I did at first brush with it - and why does it have such a crazy name. I don’t speak the right language to answer the second question, but I can piece together an answer for the more important “What is it?” part. For a good overview I’ll start by quoting Professor Elizabeth Butler:
Zettelkasten is a tool for thinking that’s used to organize ideas. You can use it as a writer, as an academic, as a lawyer, as a student, or as a content creator. The roots of Zettelkasten go back to the early modern period, but the practice of Zettelkasten, but it was popularised by the twentieth-century prolific academic Niklas Luhmann.
And add my quick outline of the core components of it - these are three types of notes:
Fleeting Notes: These do the quick capture piece of note taking
Literature Notes: These are for capturing notes when you’re reading a book, an article, a web post, a whitepaper or report; listening to a podcast, watching a webinar, or a similar resource
Permanent Notes: These are the Big Value, Deepening Understanding notes in your own words
Getting this far was a big Huzzah moment for me - seeing that after many months of using this method it felt good, worked well - as the note taking approach. Then the lat piece of my little PKM puzzle/quest was figuring out which of my two note taking apps - Notion and Obsidian - worked best for Zettelkasten.
I tried out suggested ways to use Zettelkasten in both apps for quite a while, went back and forth quite a bit, and even tried using them both to do different parts of it - mostly capture vs the rest. Notion emerged as my preferred option, and I tried out several free and paid Zettelkasten templates for Notion. In the end what has worked for me is a very simple template which takes just a few steps to create, from Professor Elizabeth Butler - see her great post on Zettelkasten and her template here. All I added to it was a favorite New Note template from another template I had tried out earlier.
The result is what you see in the images in this post. The one at the top of the post is in the Notion web/desktop app; the rest are from the Notion Android app - which is where most of my notes get taken. Here’s an individual literature note on the Notion Android app:
Are any of you fans of PKM? Or just avid note takers? If so, it would be great to hear how you take notes and work with them.