(2020-06-26) The Notetaking Cold War

Dan Shipper: The Notetaking Cold War. People in our little corner of the internet actually fight about how to organize notes. Tiago Forte thinks notes should be organized by actionability, and that each note should go in one and only one place in the following categories: Projects, Areas, Resources, Archives. Conor White-Sullivan thinks that notes should go everywhere, and that there’s no single top-down structure that can encapsulate all note-taking.

organizing information is just hard. But it turns out that it’s only really hard for certain types of information.

You’ll notice that there’s no great debate about the best way to organize the information inside of a CRM. It’s fairly obvious how to do that: a CRM should be a long list of customers.

So why are notes different?

Instead of being about how notes are organized, it’s about the way the world is organized.

On one side of the debate, roughly are people who believe that there is a world out there, that it is universal, objective, and accessible by the human intellect.

We’ll call these people essentialists.

One the other side of the debate are people who choose not to answer that question directly. They believe, roughly, that there is no objective place from which to decide what is true. They believe that there are many different ways to represent and organize reality. We’ll call these people pragmatists

Pragmatists have an instrumental theory of truth.

Essentialists have a hierarchical view of the world.

Pragmatists tend to have a networked, relational view of the world.

Pragmatists just think there are lots of different ways to describe reality and some ways are more or less useful in certain contexts.

a CRM feels different than a notes app. That’s because CRMs attempt to represent the world.

By contrast, notes apps don’t do that.

“Note” is just a catch-all term for a blank page. A “note” is a box you can stick anything into.

Pragmatism doesn’t preclude rigid, hierarchical organizational systems — it just tells us that there are infinitely many such systems, and some of them are useful in specific contexts. When the context becomes more clear, it is actually useful for the organizational system to become more rigid and hierarchical — it’s not a bad thing!

If we zoom out we can use this pragmatic insight to map every piece of software on a spectrum:

On the left hand side are notes apps — these are apps that record and process information as part of an undefined process. On the right hand side are things like CRMs.