All the coolest kids are building “second brains” and “digital gardens” and public note-taking libraries and I’m sitting here like a rube with no robust note-taking system. I am one of the most knowledge worky of all knowledge workers — a management consultant. I mostly spend my days having conversations with executives about how their organizations can be better, with teams who are trying to constantly evolve the way they work, and occasionally writing things that support both of those endeavors. And in my “off time” I try to write semi-insightful things on this website and in my newsletter. If there’s anybody who could benefit from having a note-taking system that generates insights that can be turned into smart words (spoken or written), it’s me.
And yet, I don’t. And I don’t think I’m going to any time soon.
The cynic and small mean person inside me sees these folks expounding the value of their digital gardens and wonders if they’re missing the point. I don’t actually follow any of them closely enough to know if this is true (it’s probably not) but if all the work being put into the note-taking system isn’t resulting in actual outputs then it seems like misplaced effort. It’s like a chef collecting a huge library of impressive and rare ingredients but never actually making anything with them.
My process is a lot more like coming home from the grocery store with the ingredients in hand and basically immediately turning on the stove and getting to work. I know that if I don’t capitalize on the motivation and the available ingredients when they are easily at hand I’m unlikely to do much of anything with them. The optimist in me says it makes me very efficient and somewhat, if sporadically, prolific. I suppose a critic would say that this process encourages a level of superficiality enforced by immediacy. How nuanced and expansive can I be if I don’t have a place for ideas (ingredients, maybe? I’m letting this metaphor get away from me) to go ferment for awhile. Other than my brain, that is. My first brain, not a second one.
Perhaps I’m not giving myself enough credit for what I do. I may not have a digital garden, but I do have a digital windowsill with a couple herbs sitting on it (I will wring every bit of utility out of this metaphor; just watch me). I have what I call my “Spark List” which is a simple text file with every scrap of an idea that I’ve ever had that I think I might want to write about at some point. When I want to write but don’t have something sitting at the front of my awareness I’ll sometimes go shopping in my Spark List for something to write about.
I’ll also do stream of consciousness writing about a variety of topics and they almost always get saved in Day One which is ostensibly a journal but has really become a catch-all place to store writing that doesn’t have much of a home anywhere else. It doesn’t get any meta-data attached to it other than the date at which I put it into the program. Once every few months I’ll go through Day One and read those entries and see if it sparks anything to be added to the Spark List. Otherwise, Day One gives me an “On This Day” notification every morning that shows me everything I’ve saved in the program on the given date since 2011 (which is when I started keeping a journal). Mostly what I’ve learned from this is that I’ve been thinking about and struggling with the same things for the better part of a decade. Something to be said for consistency, I guess?
I look at what people have built with Roam and I think, I should do that. I look at what people are doing with Notion and I think, I should do that. I look at what people have made with DEVONthink and I think, I should do that.
For now, though, I’m going to keep the shortest distance between inspiration and output as possible. That’s the best way I know how to work and diving deep into the world of note-taking sounds exactly like the kind of productive distraction that would keep me fat, happy, and distracted for months while I never actually make the things that the notes are supposed to support. Maybe all those years of writing the same things into Day One have taught me something about myself after all?