My note-taking process

First, I need to get a general idea of what is happening in the book. Linear reading is inconvenient for the task, so we need to approach the text structurally.

To begin, I am looking at the table of contents, skimming through pages, reading the section headers, sometimes section introductions. It is enjoyable doing this with a physical book!

Often, the book is either not entirely new for me, or only some chapters are useful — it is necessary to identify them before reading. This is most important if the book is not an easy reading: sometimes, getting through every single page may require an extensive research and an exhausting thinking.

My goals at this stage are:

1. Familiarize myself with the book structure.
2. Ask Google/ChatGPT about the meaning of unknown technical terms.
3. Identify my goals in reading this specific book.
4. Think for a moment about the questions that appear in my head after skimming through the book.

Some books are going an extra mile to guide the reader, for example, "The Network State" starts with sections "The book in one sentence", "The book in one image", "The book in one thousand words", and "The book in one essay". This is a didactic approach that I am also using with my students: guide to ideas through a series of increasingly detailed approximations.

Once I have a general idea of what to expect from the book, I start reading and annotating it. As a kid, I was reading fast but memorized little, so now if I am serious about working through the text, I am annotating it. I use a set of four pencils and four highlighters of colors: violet, blue, red, and green. When something picks my interest, I highlight a fragment of text with one of these colors and write text on margins in the same color. This way a commentary is matched to a fragment.

There is a logic to my color selection:

• Violet is for summarizing. It is well visible on paper and also distinguishable from black, so it does not fuse with the text.

  It is not useful to highlight without commenting. Writing summary is mandatory, highlighting is optional ¹.

• Blue is for connections. It reminds me of hyperlinks on Web pages. With blue I mark reasonable connections to other topics, writers, or books. Connections greatly enhance retention.
• Red is for questions and critique. It attracts the most attention and is associated with danger. I use it if I do not agree with the author, or if I do not understand a fragment.
• Green is for everything else. It is a safe, a bit disconnected color. If my curiosity suggests me a possible connection to my previous readings, if I get an idea on how to solve some problem, an analogy, a metaphor, then it is worth noting it. Basically, this is the color for everything else.

I am never waiting to finish one book before starting another, so my working set of sources is usually large. Reading many books on the same topic helps establishing more connections. Sometimes, it also enhances understanding, since I am exposed to several explanations of the same concepts, often from different points of view.

Every now and then I revise the notes to add information to my permanent note storage.

The core of my system is Zettelkasten. It is a personal Wiki with small subjective articles and annotated subjective connections between them. Each "wiki article" is a note on something: a concept, an idea, a book, an article etc. After some reading, it is time to revise my notes, skim through the book again, and put the bits of notes into the appropriate notes in Zettelkasten.

I like taking notes in two stages:

• It forces me to come back to notes in a systemic way. I re-read, re-discover things that I missed, and memorize information better.
• It combines the advantages of hand-writing and digital note-taking.
  • Handwriting is good for retention; sheets are more "personal", it stimulates thinking.
  • Digital note-taking is fast, notes are easier to systematize, much easier to edit and illustrate, they can benefit from the version control systems etc.

I use emacs with org-roam to keep my Zettelkasten organized, easily search through them and explore them with org-roam-ui.

Here is an example of a note:

… and its source code:

:PROPERTIES:
:ID:       22AF419C-C79F-42A6-B7E9-CF7A27DAD5E0
:END:
#+title: System
#+filetags: #system-engineering

* Definition
A system is something that consists of parts, functions and has emergent properties.

*  Other definitions

#+begin_quote
\dots any organized *assembly* of resources and procedures united and regulated by
*interaction of interdependence* to accomplish a set of specific functions
-- DoDAS (Department of Defense Architecture Framework)
#+end_quote


#+begin_quote
\dots a construct or collection of different entities that together produce results
not obtainable by the entities alone.
-- INCOSE
#+end_quote



Human-crafted systems have goals.

* Related

- In order to create systems it is necessary to engage in
  "[[id:4C0E5272-CC97-40B5-BA56-FD15F83B23B8][Systems thinking]]"

#+setupfile: org-header.org
#+created: [2022-11-18 Fri]
#+last_modified: [2022-11-18 Fri 12:16]

The note contains:

1. An identifier for org-roam (generated automatically)

   :PROPERTIES:
   :ID:       22AF419C-C79F-42A6-B7E9-CF7A27DAD5E0
   :END:
   

2. Title
3. Tags (we can then search by them)
4. Sections with content. Text supports markup: underline/bold/italic, monospace, strike-through and alike; it may contain pictures (there is a convenient way of including shot of a part of the screen through org-download-screenshot).
5. A special section for connections to other notes Personally, I am also putting links to other notes directly into the body of the note. The special section is precious to provide subjective annotations for the links: why do I think there is a connection between this note and another one.

I used to have two sections: for links to the sources, and for related notes, but now I tend to just merge both into "Related".

I keep most metadata out of the way by putting it in the end of the note.

Additionally, emacs lets us explore the connected graph of notes in 3D, filter them by tags, preview them nicely etc. thanks to org-roam-ui. It looks like this: