How to transform your notes from dead storage to thinking partner
People take notes to remember and learn from what they read. They highlight the sections that interest them and comment on those notes. However, even when we take notes about our opinions about these highlights, we find ourselves with a big box of notes that don’t add to our lives. The notes exist as dead storage and gather dust.
How to prevent your notes from gathering dust and becoming dead storage?
By listening (in your mind) for the implied questions that a note suggests, you gain the opportunity to answer these questions. When you answer these questions, you gain understanding and collect new ideas and generate arguments to support other ideas. This process transforms your notes from dead storage to an active thinking partner.
Listen to the implied questions that the note suggests
To listen to the implied questions, it helps to think of questions that analyze your note and questions that find related or similar notes that answer the same questions.
Analytical questions suggest themselves more easily and often follow a general pattern. Examples are:
- Why is that true?
- What does it mean?
- How does it work?
- What are the steps?
Synthetic questions suggest themselves by asking what question does this note answer? Examples are:
- “Writer’s block is a label” suggests “What is writer’s block?”
- “Procrastination often masks perfectionism” suggests “What causes writing delays?”
Now that we have a list of questions, we can answer them.
Answer the question to gain more understanding and pull in more ideas
Both types of questions ask you to bring together multiple notes under that common question. The analytical questions pull in deeper understanding of the same idea. When you ask the analytical question, you find answers about parts of the idea. When you ask “what are the steps?” the steps you need to take will suggest themselves immediately. Perhaps not completely, but enough to get you started.
The synthetic questions pull in more ideas from anywhere. When you ask the synthetic question, you move up from the idea and see the note in a broader perspective. Perhaps you find a note that suggests a different way to approach the same idea. Or you find an idea that contradicts your idea. As these notes talk about the same idea, you gain more understanding and perhaps find nuances that you didn’t know about.
For example, as you can see with procrastination, it leads to delays in writing. What causes these delays? Other ideas could be:
- Structured writing practice increases writing output
- A first shitty draft lowers effects of perfectionism
As you answer questions, you’ll notice you’re pulling together notes that weren’t obviously related before - this clustering around shared questions is where new patterns emerge.
Summarize the answers into an inductive argument
If you can summarize the cluster of ideas, then you have an inductive argument. This means that you place a new note above the cluster that uses the ideas in the note to claim something new.
For example, if you have notes that say:
- “Procrastination often masks perfectionism”
- “Procrastination stems from internal resistance created by our beliefs”
- “A first shitty draft lowers effects of perfectionism”
- “Structured writing practice increases writing output”
Then we can summarize these notes into an inductive argument. Perhaps we can say “Writing blocks dissolve when you attack the perfectionism, rather than force more discipline.”
Repeat the process
This process continues with each new argument becoming a note that suggests its own questions, creating an expanding web of connected ideas. Following it through, you’ll find that you’re able to transform your notes from dead storage to an active thinking partner.