Making sense of journals, notes, and an endless stream of content

Improving my system of note taking and ideating

Here is a typical day in my life processing information:

• Read and highlight passages on my Kindle. Or read from a book, earmarking pages to transcribe passages once done

• Save interesting online posts in my feed or email to Reader for highlighting

• Visual journal of the days’s feelings and events in my sketchbook

• Jot down or sketch ideas for future art and content, either in my sketchbook or Notion

• See something awe-inspiring on a walk and jot it down in my pocket notebook

• Scroll Instagram, browse Youtube, listen to podcasts—bookmark some posts but write nothing down

• Journal before bed in a dedicated notebook

Listing my patterns out like this I can see that perhaps I have many notebooks to juggle, and that my reading and listening aren’t in clear conversation with my ideas. Of course our brain has lots of synapses that subconsciously make connections—everything we create has an influence. But I’d like to get better at pulling from and attributing sources, and to stop forgetting entire books I’ve read!¹

I have been reading Tiago Forte’s Building a Second Brain to improve my current notetaking system, especially as I begin to mull over an idea for a memoir project. It’s been five long years of processing and healing since I last explored this idea. My notes and journal entries are scattered across a few online tools and many physical notebooks—I’m hoping a clearer system will steer me away from overwhelm and avoidance.

Some of my many notebooks accumulated over the years

I am still finishing Building a Second Brain, but here’s what I’m integrating so far:

Not everything is important

In college I would highlight nearly everything in my textbooks and notes while studying for finals. Without knowing what I needed to recall, I figured I would cram as much as possible through rote learning. It honestly worked pretty well for exams.

In our day to day lives we no longer have to be quizzed for our knowledge. Instead information is used for creation and exchange, and we can narrow our purview to what we care most about. More information is not necessarily better.

How do we know which information will be useful? We can use our intuition while considering the following capture criteria Forte presents:

• Is it inspiring? (a well-crafted sentence, a breathtaking image)

• Is it useful? (a statistic, reference, or diagram)

• Is it personal? (journals, texts, emails)

• Is it surprising? (a different perspective or thought, avoiding confirmation bias)

I often have a habit of highlighting pithy advice from self-help books, which inspires me while reading but isn’t necessarily useful or surprising. I’m challenging myself to let go of this habit of highlighting only what resonates in favor of usable or thought-provoking material.

Identify your deep questions

What kind of questions are you interested in exploring? What topics keep resurfacing in the books and articles you read?

Physicist Richard Feynman had a dozen or so problems he was working on during his lifetime. Any time he read or heard something new, he tested it against his problems to see if it could help. We can also similarly relate our intake of content to the problems and questions we deem important. These don’t have to be revolutionary theory generating questions, they can be gentle tune ups to your lifestyle or relationships!

One of my eternal questions that drives this newsletter is how can I maintain a sustainable art practice? Below is a screenshot of this question as its own Notion page, with links and backlinks to relate it with articles and books I’ve read over the years.²

Now when I’m brainstorming new posts to write for this newsletter, I can go to this question page and parse new ideas or draw from a variety of voices.

Think wherever, organize later

Every so often I envision myself as a person that can use just one notebook for drawing, journaling, ideating, and everything in between. How nice it would be to house everything in one place! But I’ve realized I am not that kind of person, and I enjoy having notebooks of different sizes for varying purposes.

Whether you are a notebook minimalist or maximalist or gravitate towards your phone, the most important thing is to have a tool close by where you can write your thoughts and ideas when you need.

Something I’d like to get better at is rereading past notes and journal entries. Art can often be directly inspired by one’s journals, as Camey Yeh mentioned in our interview. Though I haven’t looked back at my journals, I usually do a comprehensive flip through of my sketchbooks once finished and flag any sketches or ideas I want to return to. Perhaps this could be improved by capturing this in my Notion where more ideas live.

Note taking alone might be considered a waste of time, but I see it as a diligence that can lead to better creative processing and making. Many of your favorite works by artists and writers are born from notes—I recommend Jillian Hess’

Noted

to see their notes and discover their methods.

Being able to retrieve information on your inspirations and relating them to your core questions and ideas will lead to more interesting, expansive creations in conversation across space and time. Best of luck on your note taking journey, and I’d love to hear from you: Where do you usually store your notes and ideas? How often do you refer back to them?

1. I am mainly referring to nonfiction books here; fiction books have so much value outside of “practical use” or remembrance. Here’s a perfect quote from Sigrid Nunez’ latest novel The Vulnerables: “Only when I was young did I believe that it was important to remember what happened in every novel I read. Now I know the truth: what matters is what you experience while reading, the states of feeling that the story evokes, the questions that rise to your mind, rather than the fictional events described.”

2. Highlights from articles and books I read are synced to my Notion from Readwise.