Notes About Notes
Another year, and inevitably, more software for notes.
The Teardown
Wednesday :: February 1st, 2023
I'm always drawn to the internet cacophony about notes. Everyone takes notes. Everyone's notes are strewn all over the place. There isn't a system in existence that organizes, centralizes, and syncs all notes.
Except, there is. In fact, there are lots of software applications that help you with your notes. Some are focused on the writing notes. Some are focused on organizing notes, with features like tags, folders, and etc. Some are focused on cross-platform syncing. And finally, some capture flavors from everything I just mentioned and, in theory, secure your notes from prying eyes and fingers.
What’s fun to explore is the ecosystem around note-taking rather than notes. It’s the source of the cacophony I referenced in my first sentence. I like to analogize note-taking systems to a typical and perhaps cynical view of layers of management. It is sometimes the case that a new management team in any layer of a company demonstrates value not by doing work but instead by arranging organization around work. That might mean a few things:
Creating new functional, product, or people-oriented teams
Reorganizing existing teams
Adding or changing management layers
Announcing all of these things via lots of meetings, phone calls, Zooms, and other frequently wasteful activities
The note ecosystem is very similar in some ways, notably that there are posts about when, why, and how to take notes. You might see these sorts of posts:
Structuring your notes with Markdown syntax
The ten ways successful people take notes (I made that up, but I’m sure it’s out there)
All of these posts create noise around the core activity: people use notes for reference, to organize, to remember and more. And what’s often most important is just to take some notes. A post aptly titled Notes Against Note-Taking Systems beautifully characterized the discourse:
Getting lost in your knowledge management system is a fantastic way to avoid creating things. Or calling that friend you’re estranged from. Or doing anything else even mildly threatening. It’s also a fantastic way to convince yourself that unpreparedness is what’s between you and creative work. If you believe you’re unprepared, know that you will never transmute into the perfectly prepared person that you think exists in the future. Unfortunately, you have to start with the person currently in this chair. That’s all there ever is.
I sometimes ask this question: do people who write about taking notes actually employ the tactics they advertise? Are they significantly more organized? Or are we all stuck in some click-farm hell in which posts about notes just drive internet traffic and otherwise aren’t backed by substantial real-life use.
There’s likely no end to the cacophony either. There seem to be two constant truths in technology:
Note-taking software is never good enough - let’s unbundle it, and then bundle it again
Excel must die, let’s unbundle Excel, and then bundle it again
I don’t think we’ll ever reach a stasis on either topic. In both categories, someone releases a product and someone else finds a reason to dissect it such that there is a need for another product. That need suggests the presence of an unsolved problem. And perhaps that’s true in some cases. There are also moments when someone stumbles into a white-space and creates a truly unique product.
Recently, I’m using Notion professionally. Following VC and start-up Twitter made me envious of their productivity havens centered around the product. It’s a slick software application that is part note-taking and part Wiki. Notes aren’t just text but instead rich components covering pictures, tables, product boards, and more. See it in action:
The Board integration is particularly scintillating to the product management world. Not only can your notes now contain explanatory text and explication sectioning but also product roadmaps in the form of Kanban boards. And maybe the board system is the best way to resolve long-simmering disputes over who does what and when at home with detailed notes and roadmaps. However, it seems just as likely that thinking about how to organize and document information leads to, well, a lot of nothing.
The author Sasha Chapin echoes this point later in the post:
Consider how you may be limiting yourself by focusing on the presentation of factual insight as the core of your work.
and:
I am waiting for any evidence that our most provocative thinkers and writers are those who rely on elaborate, systematic note-taking systems. I am seeing evidence that people taught knowledge management for its own sake produce unexciting work. This is not a genetic condition. I think they could do better if they wrote what they knew, rather than what they recorded.
This post is, in fact, me writing about what I know. More broadly, I’ve tried to write The Teardown exclusively about what I know. When I look at my own systems, I see a graveyard of attempts to organize better over the years thinking I didn’t have the right system. Yet I’ve been, at least professionally, quite organized for many years through simple and mostly accidental systems.
Yes, I take notes on paper! I also take notes in Dropbox Paper. I also jot notes in Apple Notes. Across the three, I capture most everything I need to run my life. Not one of these systems overrides the others entirely. They all have simple reasons for continued existence:
Paper (yes, a notebook): I jot notes when I’m on phone calls that require me to either listen very closely or present, or both
Dropbox Paper: Typically used when I’m documenting notes during more informal conversations, or during larger phone calls when I’m listening and need to document items I hear but don’t need to be actively speaking during the entire conversation. Also, it works on all of my devices.
Apple Notes: Mostly the random other stuff that pops up in my personal life that I want to document for later retrieval and search.
And, I have two other note systems for specific situations
Microsoft Word and Sharepoint: Working at a start-up doesn’t mean that everyone knows about or cares to use Notion. Many people know how to write in Word. Office 365 and collaborative Word documents work pretty well for centralizing information, say, for group travel
Text files: I often document my product demos with simple text files organized into folders by client or prospect. This helps me centralize my demo-specific notes with other things I need for demos like images, files, and etc.
You probably read all of that and thought: you are not organized. But I think the real theme is simply that there cannot possibly be one system to rule them all. What I use works for me. Apple Notes is convenient and easy for Apple-ecosystem users, especially as you’re able to access notes on any iPhone, iPad, or Mac computer you own. Notion is great for a Wiki-style coalesce of information but seems like overkill for simple notes. My text files are great for informal and efficient documentation of key technical points for presentations.
I’m curious to hear what you’re using for notes. There are lots of products not referenced in this post. Comment on this post or reply by email and I’ll follow up in another post with the most interesting feedback I receive!