In response to my recent post on slow note taking Robert asked about the note card method supported by Robert Greene, Ryan Holiday and a number of other writers. If I think that friction is good in taking my notes on books, why isn’t greater friction in my notes better? Won’t touching the note cards regularly to file new ones bring about ever more connections?

There is an undeniable forcing factor when it comes to note cards in the physical world. To add a new note you have to wade through your old notes and decide where it fits in the context of your existing cards. This is forced upon you by the medium.

A digital system doesn’t require this of you. I can simply add a new note and it goes off into my vault without thought. I don’t have to weigh it’s value in the context of my existing notes to know where exactly it should be placed.

Magical Thinking

Many people think that a Zettelkasten or PKM system will magically transform their scattered thoughts of the moment into something worthwhile with little effort on their part. Dump notes in to Obsidian without thought, on a whim, and out the other end comes writing worthy of the New York Times bestseller list.

Then a few months or years later they look at their few thousand notes only to realize that nothing of value has come of all their effort. The first stop is to blame the system and go looking for a new tool that will fix all the problems.

We see this regularly when people are overwhelmed with their task list. They decide that the tool is at fault and move to whatever the new hot tool is. Then a few months later they have an overwhelming task list again and blame the tool.

The tool is almost never the problem. The problem is your system for using the tool. If you add tasks you were never going to get to hoping that you’d suddenly become an ideal version of yourself, you’ll be disappointed by any task manager.

The same principle works with your note system. If you just add a bunch of random shit in one end, without spending time thinking and connecting it, you’re not going to get rainbows out the other end. Your notes aren’t a squatty potty.

Strategies to Investigate Your Notes

This is not the first time I’ve talked about interrogating your notes. But today we’ll collect all my current strategies in one spot.

The first and easiest strategy I use to interrogate my notes in Obsidian was to remap the Create New Note command to open the Quick Switcher instead. This means I have to search through my note titles at the same time as I’m titling a new note. While doing this I’ve regularly found matching ideas that I go back to after I create the initial note. Then I’ll end up linking them together, or expanding on them. This often turns into a session where I think about my notes and relate the current idea to recent reading. This simple change helps take the idea of looking back at your notes with notecards and turn it into something that works in Obisidian, or any digital tool that will let you remap keys.

The second strategy, that I admit I don’t use enough, is to randomly look through your notes. I use the Smart Random Notes plugin and then can click the dice icon on the side to have a random note brought up that matches my search parameters. No the first note isn’t always one that gets me thinking, or the second, but if I decide to dedicate 25 minutes, a pomodoro, to this practice there is always something that comes up that sparks ideas and connections. I end up most using this when I’m searching for something to write about for my Saturday newsletter. It often is triggered by new things I read, but I know I already have notes for years of content if I go looking through my vault.

One of the final guiding ideas is that I focus on the output of my vault, not the input. This is one reason I take exception to the focus on read later tools, it’s a focus on input. Simply adding more stuff to your vault doesn’t produce good thinking, digging through your notes regularly as you work is what turns them into gold.

Stop When You’re Writing

One of the pitfalls of focusing on output is focusing on lots of fast output. Just because someone you admire churns out good writing regularly doesn’t mean that it’s something you can do. My kids are really little anymore, but they’re in the thick of sports and still want to hang out with me. That means I don’t have as much time as I’d like to write or read. I get up every morning during the week at 0600 to work on my writing before I walk the dog and take the two youngest kids to school.

But in the midst of these relatively short writing sessions of around 90 minutes I try to give the writing the time it needs. The outline for this post took 35 minutes which is one of the ways I found all the links above to previous content that related to the current writing.

During the writing process I also open up tools like Graph Analysis to see what other ideas relate to my current work. That as another way I found all the different links above.

A new tool I’ve just started to use this week is Smart Connections. While it claims to find find your relevant notes “so you don’t have to” don’t fall into that magical thinking trap. Yes it does show me a bunch of my own notes that relate to my current writing, but it didn’t find everything I’ve linked to and referenced, it found a few new things that added to my writing.

All these different tools take time though, just like good output takes time. Once I’ve written something I take more time with it. I let the draft sit for a bit and then come back to it and ask myself the writing accomplishes anything. Will it be useful to readers? Does it show new thinking. Are the arguments solid? What would someone who thinks I’m an idiot say about my writing because they want to pick it apart?

Then I’ll go back to my notes and see if there is any other supporting stuff I need to bring in to support my writing. I’ll stop and turn around in my chair and look at my bookshelf to see if anything I’ve read had some ideas I should bring into my writing. Since I often use Pomodoro during my writing I’ll often use a 5 minute break to scan my shelf and see if other ideas present themselves.

It’s not about speed

Ultimately, your writing and note connections isn’t about speed and efficiency. I promise you that all those authors with a note card system spend time just sifting through their notes to find connections. They spend time thinking about their writing and remember ideas that didn’t present themselves just by flipping through note cards when they added a new one.

The best tool you have to make better note connections is time. Time to dig through your notes. Time to let your writing sit so you can think about it and figure out where you’re wrong and haven’t supported your writing.

This post alone took 40 minutes to outline. Then I wrote it for 90 minutes, where I thought of and found more connections. As I come to the end of the first draft I expect I’ll spend at least 30 more minutes editing the piece to ensure that my arguments are solid. Then I’ll spend 40 minutes talking about it and editing a video, which often gets me to think about more ideas and support that gets linked into the original writing.

If your time is limited, produce less content of better value. Anyone can churn out slop, whether it be via AI or just shit writing. Taking the time to think and revise is what can turn your ideas into something worth interacting with.