Sublime

note taking is essentially single-player collaboration where you communicate with your future self

Writing notes is really pretty easy, once you get the hang of it. And it’s a way of proving to yourself (and eventually, to others) that you’ve understood the text. Our notes can also provide us some clues into what in a text actually interested us. Where a source’s ideas really excite us, notes will cluster. Even so, we should try to write a

Write exactly one note for each idea and write as if you were writing for someone else: Use full sentences, disclose your sources, make references and try to be as precise, clear and brief as possible.

Write exactly one note for each idea and write as if you were writing for someone else: Use full sentences, disclose your sources, make references and try to be as precise, clear and brief as possible.

The most important factor in whether your notes can survive that journey into the future is their discoverability—how easy it is to discover what they contain and access the specific points that are most immediately useful.

A simple approach that has you split a notebook page into four parts: 1/ title, 2/ notes, 3/ keywords/questions, and 4/ summary. And no, it’s not because I worked at Cornell for the better part of a decade, but because this method encourages you to document your thought processes (i.e., ask questions), synthesise what you’re learning in real-time