(2021-06-27) Lee Incremental Notetaking

Linus Lee: Incremental note-taking. Though I’m hesitant to say I’m there yet, I’ve found myself repeatedly coming back to a group of related ideas I’m going to call incremental note-taking about how to best gather knowledge into notes, and how we should design tools built around this workflow

Good notes should behave like memory

We think tens of thousands of thoughts every single day, and the job of a good note-taking system is to help us make the most of them, even when our squishy, biological brains can’t.

Most productivity solutions focus on the 10% of our thoughts that are easy to categorize and structure, like lecture notes, meeting minutes, people’s contacts, and highlights of readings. But the vast majority of thoughts we think – the other 90% – still hold underrated, underestimated latent value

In an ideal world, we won’t have to forget things from our minds and workspaces. We could live in an infinite room for thought

An age-old note-taking method that preserves these characteristics of memory is to carry a small notebook with you wherever you go

Though I don’t personally have a pencil-and-paper workflow, I can see the appeal of this kind of a note-taking system. It records your thoughts over time

when we moved our workflows into the digital realm, we began to lose respect for this way of taking notes, of simply adding new information to an ever-growing log of our thoughts. Instead, we built tools that encourage us to keep only the most current version of reality. Popular tools like Notion and Roam Research are about maintaining a timeless web of ideas, but life is anything but timeless!

Principles of incremental notes

Captured ideas are better than missed ones

Adding new ideas is better than updating old ones

in that rewrite, we lose all of the original context we could have remembered about the history of our idea. Updating notes in-place is inherently lossy, and I think it’s unnecessary.

Ideas that can’t be recalled are worse than useless – effective search and recall form the soul of great notes.

Time is essential to how we remember (blogbit)

like an extra layer of memory you grow around yourself

Tools for incremental note-taking

Notion

Notion is probably the worst offender of them all – calling Notion an effective “note taking” app that extends your memory would be charitable. Notion is great at what it does, which is helping everyone easily create a shared web of documents that look and feel great. But it is not a note-taking app. It’s too slow to capture every thought I have

Roam (and others)

Roam and its clones fare much better. Roam is designed to help you incrementally build up a connected, sophisticated knowledge graph of ideas

But Roam’s notion of time is weak at best – each day is treated as just another “thing” in a Roam graph of notes, rather than a first-class concept around which the tool is designed

Mira

The first tool I personally built that embodied the incremental note-taking principles is probably Mira, which I still use a year later as my primarily “people notes” (CRM) app.

Ideaflow

Ideaflow, the note-taking software I help build at work, also embodies many of these principles. In fact, Ideaflow is my current “main” notes app

in Ideaflow, time is a first-class citizen. Rather than a haphazard web of connections and words, notes go neatly into a timeline, grouped by days and weeks

Inc(remental)

Most recently, this week I began hacking on a tool called inc (short for “incremental”), a minimal notes app

Inc is an experimental, append-only notes app.

Truth be told, Inc is a new project (as are Ideaflow and many other projects in this space), so my hypotheses about incremental note-taking and the way these tools work are only so strong