So I make every note card with the assumption that I will later have forgotten just about everything about the book/article/paper/interview from which the note card comes from.

If I am capturing an interesting idea, for instance, I surround it with context—the way it might appear in a paragraph in an article. (much more on this and many examples... See more

I've spent the last three months bouncing between Apple Notes, Notion, and Craft—and I convinced myself it was productive work.

It wasn't.

This is sophisticated procrastination. We feel busy researching features and designing elaborate systems, but we're not actually creating anything with our notes.

The research on context switching is brutal.... See more