About Thinking Notes
Dear Zettlers,
This might help you relate McPherson’s book, Effective Note-Taking, to the Zettelkasten Method:
The term “note” has multiple meanings that can cause confusion.
Engagement notes: Those are notes that you take because they help you to engage with the current input (writing down questions, so you don’t forget to ask them; concept mapping to aid your working memory etc.)
Many of those notes can be thrown away. The best practice is to review them quickly after input (like a meeting or a call), decide what to keep, and then transform them into proper atomic notes.
Thinking notes: These, in my experience, create quite some confusion. The best domain to understand these notes is math/physics. To understand a line of math, you HAVE to use paper. What you are doing is extending your mind with pen & paper. The notes are needed to make sense of what you are reading. When you understand the material, you no longer need those notes. You might check these notes, similar to the engagement notes, to be safe, but in most cases, you are primarily interested in the results.
You might compare these notes to drafts in drawing. You can keep the drafts for sentimental reasons. But they are a by-product of the medium. The common thread is that you move from low to high resolution.
Making notes for math or doing versioning for a drawing project is part of the understanding process itself, enabling you to get to the idea in the first place. Then you keep the idea that you got and perhaps learn from your mistakes (learnings which could be processed into your Zettelkasten).
Most of the other texts don’t need thinking notes. The most obvious example is self-help literature. If you read a chapter from a book by Cal Newport, you can perfectly understand what he wrote if you understand basic English. This is by design. Thinking notes would be, for example, scribblings if you don’t understand a particular translation or are unfamiliar with the essential historical context of a term (which is almost non-existent in self-help literature).
The notes created after reading such sources don’t deal with understanding the idea itself, but rather with its implications, applications, relevance, and so on.
Atomic Notes: Atomic notes are captured, understood (putting them in your own words is a controlling measure), and integrated ideas.
They are the building blocks that you use. Thinking notes might be the external manifestation of building blocks.
Fiona McPhersons book should be seen as “How to work with thinking notes”.
Suppose you start processing ideas in your Zettelkasten. In that case, you may realise that you didn’t understand an idea correctly and therefore render some of your atomic notes as drafts to your conclusion. They “turn” into thinking notes. Then, you either update your existing notes to reflect your current understanding and check the links, so you can also update any possible implications to your changed knowledge. Or if the particular use cases ask for it, you create a new note, update the network of links to bring this part of your note network up to novel understanding, and then use your old notes as pointers to possible errors.
Example: You followed Inigo San Millan’s advice on the “clean Zone 2”. However, coming from an improved understanding of what the actual leading indicator of a good aerobic workout is, you deviate from his advice. You change the section of the notes “How to design a Zone 2 workout” and “How to improve your aerobic base”. Your old understanding will be moved to a separate note (“Fallacy of the clean Zone 2 training”), which you will then refute and link to your justification laid out in the notes mentioned above.
I’d be diligent and thorough because, as a trainer who writes and publishes about these topics, it is essential to have a comprehensive understanding of all the reasoning. For you, it might not be necessary, and you’d update the notes “How to design a Zone 2 workout” and “How to improve your aerobic base”. (Or you don’t trust your future self to remember your learning process. Then you can be diligent.)
This is the context of my advice to treat Fiona McPherson’s book as “How to work with thinking notes” or “How to pre-process ideas, before they can be integrated into your Zettelkasten”
Live long and prosper
Sascha