Comment by harles
4 years ago
I feel the author’s pain of not reviewing back links on Roam. But I think there’s a larger point to be made here: do folks review their notes at all? I suspect back links aren’t the actual problem.
During undergrad, I found I rarely reviewed my class notes, and when I did they weren’t very helpful. I simply stopped taking them, was happier, and giving my full focus to lectures improved my comprehension. Notes that don’t get read again are a distraction in my opinion.
I think it's actually a big leap from "I never read notes again" to "I shouldn't write notes at all". Writing things down causes you to think more clearly about something, and aids in memory by itself.
We're all different in various ways but I had the same experience as GP. I used to believe in notetaking from lectures and discovered comprehension and memory was much better when I actively listened instead of trying to either copy or process the lecture onto paper.
And, really, there's no substitute for coming to class prepared (by reading ahead or whatever). It makes the lecture process much more useful. In that sense, a list of notes of things you don't think you understand from preparation is probably helpful.
I went with a hybrid approach in university: I didn't take any notes in class so I could actually focus on the lecture and actively think along. Later, in preparation for the exam, I would go through all slides again and turn them into notes, compressing a whole lecture down to 20 pages or so.
I think this is true when clarifying one’s own thoughts. If they’re notes from a book - a big chunk of what I use Roam for - they don’t act as memory aids, not for me at least.
>do folks review their notes at all? I suspect back links aren’t the actual problem. During undergrad, I found I rarely reviewed my class notes,
Discussing the word "notes" is not easy because it encompasses a bunch of different uses.
- (1) notes as transcription of an external source or memorization aid: e.g. a professor might say something and a student writes that down. Or one comes across a fact and makes a note of it.
- (2) notes to organize internal thought: a canvas for generating/synthesizing/connecting/etc ideas. Things like personal commentary on topics, weighing pros/cons of different future actions, drafts of song lyrics, research ideas, etc.
I think your comment is mostly based on thinking of notes as (1). A lot of people that constantly review notes are talking about category (2).
Sometimes when I spend an hour trying to figure out the right ffmpeg command line options or Linux "find" syntax that works correctly, I'll copy paste those as "notes" in my "tipsandtricks.txt" file. Those feel like a combination of (1) and (2).
Also, if the mental model of "notes" is dominated by (1), it would seem like having a hypothetical universal recording tool combined with a more complete search engine would make note-taking obsolete. I mentioned in a previous comment that such a search engine still wouldn't handle type (2) notes: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30153479
> do folks review their notes at all?
Review as in look at every single one of them from time to time? No.
But I do review them as in it's my first stop in finding something. It's my personal DDG for repetitive queries (vaguely remembering a quote, needing a reminder of some code syntax, or what happened in a book I've read 3 years ago and kinda liked). All my notes are oriented towards what my future self might actually want to find: most important things at the top, going in more details if I scroll down, sometimes adding unnecessary words just because future self might search for them in hopes of reaching that note, etc.
I'm firmly of an opinion that if the search bar in your notes app isn't the most crucial part of your workflow, you're doing something wrong and wasting your time.
I don't take notes, I create documents that I refine over time. A bit of research into a topic gets continually added to as I read related books and articles, with linked pages for the specific sources tied into the core topic with generic content in it. I find taking notes to be pretty pointless, but organising information to be helpful - if that makes sense.
The limit of my notetaking is daily journaling because if I link out to the pages I created or updated with some contextual information (e.g. "read chapter 2 of book X, went off and read a blog post at https://X that was mentioned") then I can retrace the backlinks to find out when/how I learned something. I wish I could do that with things that I haven't put into Roam (or Notion, which to be honest I use more often).
> During undergrad, I found I rarely reviewed my class notes, and when I did they weren’t very helpful.
That's interesting, because I almost wanted to make the exact opposite point. I'm actually right now in the process of revisiting my notes, and I think it helps me a lot. Not because they are super useful in and of itself (After 1-3 months have passed now, I understand the stuff deeper now, obviously) but because they help me piece the stuff together.
Anyways, the reason why they then get useful is because I have an extrinsic motivation to read them! (Exams are coming up)
That does in no way make it easier to read them, but it helps in actually reading them.
Then, reading notes and really understanding something will always be hard. I think there is also quite some research ouf there that finds just this: If you really want to understand stuff, you need to put in the effort. It kinda needs to hurt...
This is why I don't think these personal wikis / note -taking tools help too much, especially if one is, like me (and probably most people), more a person who in their downtime maybe likes to read something new and interesting, but better keep that on the light side - it's supposed to be downtime anyways, no?
That leads me then back to the extrinsic motivation: If for example you're a researcher and use Roam (or whatever) exclusively for that (that means restraining also from putting notes in there that have little to do with your actual research), I think the benefits would be much more clear. To be honest, though, that is just a guess. I'm not a researcher myself and I have n't been using note-taking systems for a while now, because of the points explained above.
The fascinating thing about using TiddlyWiki for me has been the way it turns my notes from a bunch of monolithic and siloed documents into something more akin to a personal search engine, letting me see how my past self has explained concepts in my own words. The chunking aspect helps with this. The approach has its own problems, no doubt, but for that alone it was a massive step up.
I also use Tiddly Wiki for my office notes, and I love it. I actually organized it as a proper Wiki, and every note has a home. Tags allows me to find them faster if I need to search (I rarely search because everything has a proper place).
The older way of organization may seem outdated and clunky, but it indeed works.
> do folks review their notes at all?
Yes. I have a bunch of notes which embodies larger subjects or procedures in a more compact and fit-for-purpose format.
These notes are regularly visited, updated and read. Both my personal and professional note troves are actively expanded, reviewed and pruned. However, this is not a deliberate effort, but a part of my normal routine.
Interesting. I had the opposite experience and could use my notes (taken in workflowy while reading papers) towards my thesis rather well. Tried Roam for a while but realized pretty early on it wasn't going to work for me. Main reason being speed! Workflowy works at "speed of thought" for me. For a long while I was lamenting the lack of basics like date stamping and linking, but all that and more is now available and I couldn't be happier. "must be in my workflowy" is a thought that is fairly frequent. WF's tagging with auto completion is better for me than auto linking.
With auto linking, I think the main issue for me is that I want the connection made in my head rather than in a tool. So searching and finding related notes works rather well and the deliberate act helps gradually internalize the links for me.
Spaced repetition is one of the “mind hacks” that has been proven to work:
http://augmentingcognition.com/ltm.html