How Should We Take Notes?

“The trail of the human serpent is thus over everything.” - William James

How should we organize our notes? 

It’s the bugbear of almost every productivity nerd, and answers abound: notebooks, tags, stacks, kanbans, links, bi-directional links.

In fact, there are so many answers to this question that people in our little corner of the internet actually fight about how to organize notes. 

(Tiago is, of course, the creator of the organizational system PARA and fellow Everything bundle member. Conor is the creator of Roam.)

The lines of battle have been drawn this way:

Tiago 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 thinks that notes should go everywhere, and that there’s no single top-down structure that can encapsulate all note-taking. 

They’re both extremely intelligent and thoughtful about this topic — so why do they disagree so thoroughly? And how should we decide between them?

I think if we take the time to actually examine the disagreement we’ll be surprised. I don’t think they actually disagree about as much as it may seem. Second, I think gaining a better understanding of the philosophical source of their dispute will help to make us better note takers, and importantly, better thinkers. 

Ready to dive in? Let’s go.

1 

Let’s start at the beginning. Why are we fighting in the first place? Why is organizing notes so hard?

That’s a good question to ask.

One obvious answer is that 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. 

If you want to get slightly more complicated with it you’d include a hierarchy. Each customer contains a list of attributes like name and address and phone number. Each customer is then contained inside of a company. Companies are contained inside of a geography. 

You can see here, we just built a very basic organizational system for a CRM in a few sentences. It’s not so hard. There’s room for disagreement over details. But no one is disagreeing over the fundamentals in the same way that note-taking nerds are. 

So why are notes different?

2

One way to think about knowledge management is as philosophy in action:

As we think about the best folder structures and tag hierarchies, we’re really doing philosophy.  And it turns out that there’s a two-thousand-year-old debate in philosophy that’s pretty similar to the debate between Tiago and Conor. 

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

The questions that this battle attempts to ask are things like:

What is the world? 

What is it made up of? 

How do its constituent parts relate to each other?