Supercharging Long Thinking: What Cal Newport's Notebook Method Leaves Out
Long thinking is a term coined by Giovanni Corazza and picked up by Cal Newport. According to Cal Newport, long thinking is the persistent and intentional application of thought toward a specific issue, problem, or idea with the goal of creating substantial and useful new insights.
He presents the Notebook Method as one way to engage in long thinking. The process follows four specific steps:
- Equipment: Purchase a sturdy, college-ruled notebook dedicated to a specific problem or project, along with a high-quality pen.
- Setting: Go to a relaxing, meditative, and non-distracting place. While a library is acceptable, the method is most effective in scenic environments like the woods or a beach, which can release different chemicals in the brain and unlock new areas of thought.
- Think (1–3 Hours): Spend one to three hours exclusively working out your thoughts on the task at hand within the notebook.
- Summarize: Spend the final 20 minutes carefully summarizing your results on a clean page, marking it with a title and the date to make the progress official.
The instructions are straightforward, yet there are gaps before this method can be used to its fullest potential: How do you externalize your thinking?
Writing good notes is not easy. Cal Newport is also assuming this task is trivial. It might have something to do with his thinking about note-taking in uncomplicated situations: You already know what you will write, or the notes are just containers for information that you have to learn for an exam. But if your notes are not simple capture devices, and note-taking involves thinking about something difficult to figure out, the task becomes difficult.
Let’s take this issue more seriously and ask ourselves what we need to think about one specific problem for a longer period of time.
How Do We Store an Ongoing Thought Process So We Can Continue Thinking?
This challenge is the reason why many people fail to build a thinking environment like the Zettelkasten and revert to writing environments. In writing, there are already established and familiar practices on how to organize a thought process. Especially if you are writing to publish anyway, you’ll get some of the write-to-think stimulus regardless. The added benefit of focusing on writing-to-think is hard to see. Write-to-think is a skill in its own right. Andy Matuschak put it like this: Note-writing can be a virtuosic skill.
The old saying that writing is thinking is true. However, writing is not just thinking. It is thinking and communicating. That means that if you are writing, you might be doing either one or both.
If you review the complete guide to atomic note-taking, you’ll find this pattern echoed:
Work on a note at least to the point that your future self will be sure how to continue working on it.
If you accept the idea of atomicity presented in the guide that knowledge is organized in specific building blocks, the problem is solved for the single idea. Additionally, it is crystal clear how to expand and work with the idea. Arguments lust for being tested by counter-arguments. The premises of arguments hunger for empirical evidence. Models thirst for a variety of inputs to produce outputs for evaluation. Empirical observations are eager to be replicated, confirmed, refuted, and contextualized to become solidified.
However, many issues depend on bringing together many ideas. In other words, atomic note-taking solves the problem at the atomic level of knowledge but leaves the problem at the molecular level open.
These molecules and larger structures are a hard challenge to tackle. They add the problem of complexity to the problem of time. The best tools would allow you to let the complexity develop without creating the need to manage it. This is one feature of the Zettelkasten Method: you focus on one note at a time, connect it sufficiently, and complexity will take care of itself. However, the Zettelkasten Method will solve the problem of note architecture but not the problem of the knowledge structure itself.
Adapting the Notebook Method
Adapting the Notebook Method of Cal Newport for the Zettelkasten Method is simple:
- Create a note for each hard thinking challenge to which you want to apply Cal Newport’s Notebook Method.
- Engage in long thinking.
- The last step, “summarize,” will be done on the note dedicated to the thinking challenge.
The last step can be done in two variations:
- For each summary, create a separate note to which you link from the note created in step 1.
- Modify the note.
I prefer the second option because I have never experienced the value of versioning, nor have I witnessed any value from it in writing or knowledge work.
If you have to long think anyway, it is pragmatic to exploit this activity to create a system of notes that can act as an integrated thinking environment.
In the next articles, I will present you with a few tools for developing molecules based on my own work. Each article will contain a ready-to-use technique to support long thinking challenges.