When It Comes To Taking Notes, Here's What Really Matters (Organize Your Life) | Cal Newport
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0:0 Connect with Cal Newport:00:00:00.000 | "What is note-taking for?
00:00:02.280 | I found note-taking most useful in the short term, grounding me in my current task or noting
00:00:06.800 | a few to-dos throughout the day.
00:00:10.640 | Almost all of them are immediately disposable.
00:00:12.560 | It seems like note-taking can become fairly navel-gazing and doing it excessively takes
00:00:17.120 | away from execution."
00:00:19.040 | It's a good question because we see this a lot in our discussions of organization.
00:00:24.080 | Notes and note-taking is an excessively broad term.
00:00:28.960 | It covers lots of different things and for a lot of people, like Mark, these things get
00:00:34.320 | all mixed up and they're thinking, "Well, I don't know.
00:00:37.000 | I'm sitting here journaling all day.
00:00:38.720 | Is this note-taking?
00:00:39.720 | What should I be doing?
00:00:40.720 | What should I not be doing?"
00:00:41.720 | So what I want to do here is step back.
00:00:44.800 | Let's give a general definition for note-taking and then I want to highlight what I think
00:00:49.440 | the three critical types of note-taking systems you need in your life if you work any sort
00:00:55.560 | of knowledge job.
00:00:58.000 | From there, move on to talk about more advanced options.
00:01:01.160 | So let's define note-taking more generally to mean recording information on a durable
00:01:07.520 | written medium.
00:01:10.360 | So anywhere you're collecting information in a written medium that's durable, you have
00:01:14.360 | it outside of your head so you can reference it later.
00:01:17.680 | Here are the three types of this note-taking that I think are critical, especially for
00:01:21.320 | most knowledge workers.
00:01:22.720 | One, some sort of working memory extender.
00:01:28.240 | This is where I use my text file on my desktop of my computer's workingmemory.txt.
00:01:33.760 | This is for strictly expanding the amount of information you can temporarily hold on
00:01:39.160 | to as you engage with the inflow of information throughout your workday.
00:01:44.000 | So as things come in, you're in a meeting and people are suggesting next steps, you
00:01:48.320 | can just write this information down in whatever medium you use for your working memory extender
00:01:54.440 | because it's probably more information you can keep in your head.
00:01:57.160 | So there it is.
00:01:58.160 | I write it down right there.
00:01:59.160 | Or I'm going through my email inbox and I need to remember different notes I need to
00:02:03.960 | act on, schedule this, get back to them.
00:02:05.880 | I can write it into my workingmemory.extender.
00:02:08.120 | These are notes that exist outside of your own brain, allows you to hold on and organize
00:02:12.420 | more information than you could do just strictly within the confines of your own neurons.
00:02:18.920 | Now this is something that resets all the time.
00:02:20.960 | It's a durable form, but you reset it all the time.
00:02:24.540 | So as I'm going through a meeting, I'm taking quick notes on here's the five things I need
00:02:28.080 | to do.
00:02:29.480 | After that meeting, those notes will then get processed out of my working memory file
00:02:34.620 | into calendar reminders, into my obligation system.
00:02:38.600 | So it's a temporary storage, but it allows me in the moment to keep track of more things
00:02:43.700 | that my brain can do on its own.
00:02:45.140 | That's note taking, but of a very temporary type.
00:02:49.460 | Next comes what I just cited, which is your obligation tracker.
00:02:52.760 | Some system to maintain all of the relevant information for every obligation on your plate.
00:02:57.340 | This is also note taking, written durable information that you don't have to keep track
00:03:01.380 | of in your head.
00:03:03.700 | So somewhere here, all the things I have to do probably categorized.
00:03:06.960 | Here is all of the information related to each of these things, all in this one place.
00:03:13.180 | You want that information accessible and captured somewhere, that's note taking.
00:03:18.920 | Then finally we get to what most people think of when they think about note taking, and
00:03:22.940 | this is more where you're capturing key ideas about your work and your life.
00:03:26.700 | It could be interesting ideas, interesting articles, brainstorms, concerns that you have.
00:03:33.780 | This is the broad category that captures what people normally think about in note taking.
00:03:38.300 | I might be journaling my thoughts about things.
00:03:40.140 | I might be writing down my plans for how I want to improve my life.
00:03:43.020 | I might be capturing articles that are relevant to the newsletter that I run and things I
00:03:48.100 | want to remember.
00:03:50.780 | This is where you're going to use whatever type of system you like to capture things
00:03:54.780 | in.
00:03:55.780 | You have a lot of different choices here.
00:03:57.380 | All three of these things are note taking.
00:03:59.120 | You need some sort of system for each.
00:04:02.900 | In my own life, I use a plain text file for working memory.
00:04:08.420 | I use Trello for obligation tracking notes, one board per role, one column per type of
00:04:14.820 | obligation, one card per obligation, all of the relevant information for that obligation
00:04:21.720 | on the card.
00:04:23.540 | I use my Remarkable 2 digital notebook for everything else.
00:04:27.860 | Inside my Remarkable 2, I have dozens of different individual virtual notebooks for keeping track
00:04:32.500 | of ideas, reflections, concerns, etc.
00:04:35.700 | So those are the three categories, Mark.
00:04:37.100 | Do those three categories, different tools for each, different rates of refresh and reset
00:04:43.340 | for each working memory.
00:04:44.660 | You're resetting this every 10 minutes or so.
00:04:46.980 | Your obligation list, you're working with every day.
00:04:49.620 | Your bigger idea capture is something you maybe go over in detail much less often.
00:04:54.420 | "Hey, I'm going to have a summit now to rethink this part of my business.
00:04:57.380 | Let me go back and look through my notes."
00:04:58.740 | Maybe that's just once every few months or so.
00:05:01.460 | That's really it.
00:05:03.980 | There are more complicated systems and methodologies.
00:05:08.100 | We have a lot of fans here of Zettelkasten type systems.
00:05:12.060 | We also have a lot of fans here of interesting note-taking software that really gets into
00:05:18.460 | the details of how you store notes, how you connect notes, the format in which the notes
00:05:24.060 | are stored.
00:05:25.820 | That is optional.
00:05:28.260 | It's more about your interest.
00:05:29.740 | If you like information management as a hobby, you can build more complicated systems around
00:05:35.460 | it, but you don't need complicated systems to successfully take notes.
00:05:39.320 | Those are the three areas you have to take notes.
00:05:41.020 | Just make sure those are all three covered with some sort of reasonable techno system,
00:05:46.020 | and then you're doing a fine job.
00:05:48.020 | I think that separation is key.
00:05:49.860 | Don't mix all this stuff together.
00:05:51.440 | Don't have a moleskin somewhere in which you're trying to keep your tasks next to your vision
00:05:57.420 | for living on a cabin in 20 years next to a grocery list you want to remember when you
00:06:02.380 | go to the store.
00:06:03.380 | We need some separation for note-taking to keep up with the complexity of modern life.
00:06:07.660 | All right.
00:06:08.660 | What do we got next, Jesse?
00:06:11.700 | Next question is from Reeshab.
00:06:13.900 | As a 26-year-old software developer who has recently landed a well-paying job, I'm looking
00:06:19.060 | to pursue my interest in learning to play the guitar, drawing, and some days gardening.
00:06:24.140 | However, I'm concerned about whether it's feasible to schedule all these activities
00:06:27.540 | into a single week while maintaining a focus on deep life core fundamentals.
00:06:32.340 | Your expert opinion, would it be possible to balance all these pursuits effectively
00:06:36.740 | within a given week without compromising on essential life habits?
00:06:40.540 | Well, I think this is a objective question for which you can get an objective answer
00:06:46.260 | by becoming quantitative.
00:06:50.060 | Let's just work with your calendar.
00:06:52.100 | I'm assuming you're professionally speaking, you're organized, you time block your days,
00:06:56.700 | you have a clear shutdown.
00:06:57.700 | So there's some clarity about your time outside of work.
00:07:02.260 | Play with that time.
00:07:04.640 | So start autopilot scheduling some of these hobbies.
00:07:08.700 | Maybe you garden on weekday mornings.
00:07:11.140 | Maybe you alternate a guitar practice session and what was the other thing, drawing practice
00:07:17.100 | session on different days.
00:07:18.420 | You do it an hour before dinner.
00:07:21.720 | Work with this out.
00:07:23.900 | See if it fits.
00:07:24.900 | And if the stuff does fit, execute this autopilot schedule for a while and say, does this feel
00:07:30.380 | sustainable or do I feel like I'm constantly running from one thing to another or it's
00:07:35.020 | overfilling my time?
00:07:37.820 | I used to run this exercise with undergraduates who are trying to figure out their academic
00:07:42.420 | programs, their extracurricular programs, and I would say, we got to sit down and just
00:07:45.860 | build a plan for your proposal here.
00:07:48.380 | You want to do these five extracurriculars and double major?
00:07:51.060 | Show me the time.
00:07:52.060 | Then they would go through and block off the time for studying and how long is this going
00:07:55.780 | to take and put on their meetings and the time to work on their activities.
00:07:59.060 | And it either fit or it didn't.
00:08:00.880 | And sometimes if it just barely fit, they would come back a week later and say, this
00:08:03.980 | is crazy.
00:08:06.100 | Every minute of my life is scheduled.
00:08:08.400 | So if it doesn't fit or it fits and your life feels too crowded, then you just pull back.
00:08:11.820 | You're getting an objective feedback here.
00:08:14.660 | You pull back.
00:08:15.660 | And it doesn't matter if you're pulling back.
00:08:17.300 | These are hobbies.
00:08:18.700 | The thing is, you want to be spending quality time outside of work on things that matter.
00:08:22.660 | The quantity isn't important.
00:08:25.060 | So if it doesn't fit or it barely fits, maybe you do seasonal pursuits.
00:08:31.220 | In the spring, I'm working a lot on my garden and in the winter, I'm spending a lot more
00:08:35.340 | time on guitar because that's sort of inside.
00:08:38.620 | And I do drawing in the fall.
00:08:40.060 | You could have seasonal pursuits, you could stack these one over another, or maybe what
00:08:44.460 | you need to do is just slow down your ambition for these pursuits.
00:08:49.740 | And instead of saying, look, I'm going to do four hours of guitar a day and I want to
00:08:52.900 | be shredding in like six months, you say, I'm going to spend less time.
00:08:57.500 | Good hard practice, like we talked about the deep dive, trying to move up the stair steps
00:09:00.660 | towards expert knowledge, but I'm just willing for this to take longer.
00:09:04.340 | A few years from now, I'll be a pretty good guitar player, but I'm playing just an hour
00:09:08.980 | every other day.
00:09:09.980 | That doesn't take up as much time.
00:09:11.180 | I'm doing so I have a drawing class I take once a week and on Fridays I get out of work
00:09:15.580 | early and go to a park to work on the drawing.
00:09:17.420 | This is maybe I'm going to learn these skills slower, but that makes their footprint on
00:09:20.260 | my schedule smaller and I have more give and more flexibility and don't feel like I'm over
00:09:24.940 | scheduled.
00:09:25.940 | So treat this like a quantitative question.
00:09:28.540 | Get clear feedback.
00:09:30.140 | If it's too much, reduce or slow down.
00:09:33.380 | It doesn't really matter for your goal here, which is just to make sure that you're engaged
00:09:37.940 | in deeper pursuits.
00:09:39.860 | That's what matters, not the speed at which you're getting better at things, not the quantity
00:09:44.180 | of things that you're actually going after.
00:09:46.300 | All right, what do we got next?
00:09:50.260 | Next question is from Craig.
00:09:51.780 | I'm a college student trying to be more smart about how I study and organize my learning.
00:09:56.340 | I'm relatively new to this stuff.
00:09:58.340 | Strangely, most productivity tips on YouTube are about the top 10 to do lists and note
00:10:02.980 | taking apps.
00:10:03.980 | Will I be less effective if I don't use one of those apps?
00:10:07.220 | It seems like a lot of work and setup to learn all those apps to be efficient and I dread
00:10:10.900 | thinking about the heavy lifting prep those apps require.
00:10:14.340 | What should I do?
00:10:15.340 | Well, I think my answer here at first is going to be ironic because you may be listening
00:10:20.900 | to this answer on YouTube, but I'm going to tell you in a second why what I'm about to
00:10:25.900 | say here is not oxymoronic.
00:10:29.380 | Don't use YouTube to get advice on studying.
00:10:32.780 | So when you're getting information, especially information on improving your life, you have
00:10:38.380 | to understand the incentive structures in place.
00:10:42.620 | And for people who are purely doing YouTube, so if you're a pure study habits YouTuber,
00:10:50.100 | the incentive structure is for views.
00:10:53.300 | That's what you look about.
00:10:54.300 | That's what you care about.
00:10:55.300 | I want more views on my videos.
00:10:56.780 | To get more views on your videos on YouTube, you have to work with the idiosyncratic properties
00:11:04.260 | of the recommendation algorithm and you get into this feedback loop where you, your, your
00:11:09.580 | content, it morphs more and more towards what's giving you this better feedback from the algorithm.
00:11:17.060 | And after a while is the algorithm specifying your contents.
00:11:19.940 | You may be started out as a YouTuber saying, I want to help students study better because
00:11:24.420 | this is an audience out there that cares about this.
00:11:28.500 | And after six months of interacting with the algorithm, it's, you know, the top 10 to-do
00:11:33.820 | list apps or whatever, because this is what's getting them the best view numbers.
00:11:38.640 | The advice might have very little to do, however, with the nuts and bolts of becoming a better
00:11:43.180 | student.
00:11:44.180 | So the incentive structure matters.
00:11:46.300 | So if you want to become a better student, and this is going to sound very self-serving,
00:11:48.540 | but I'm going to say, read my book, how to become a straight A student.
00:11:53.820 | So why is that better?
00:11:54.900 | Because what is the incentive structure of books?
00:11:57.780 | When you write a book, like how to become a straight A student, let me tell you this
00:12:00.820 | from experience.
00:12:02.540 | This is not a, we're going to go hard out of the gate.
00:12:05.660 | There's going to be a number one New York times bestseller.
00:12:07.980 | I'm going to be on the today show talking about this book and every major podcaster
00:12:12.480 | wants to have me on.
00:12:13.760 | That is not the play.
00:12:14.760 | When you write a book on student advice, the play is this better work.
00:12:20.460 | So some people will buy this because they heard about it from me or saw it on a table.
00:12:26.140 | I'm embarrassed to admit this Jesse, but when that book came out, it was for my first, my
00:12:29.140 | first year of grad school at MIT, I would sometimes go to the Harvard co-op as they
00:12:34.660 | call it the coop.
00:12:36.140 | And I would, uh, it was on tables, kind of hang around.
00:12:40.620 | People would pick up the book and look at it, but that's like how people discovered
00:12:43.740 | it at first.
00:12:44.740 | I didn't have a social, there was no social media back then, wasn't on a big podcast.
00:12:49.860 | People would find it on tables and then it's all word of mouth.
00:12:53.660 | And what is going to make someone recommend a book to someone else?
00:12:56.900 | This worked, this made me get better grades.
00:13:00.780 | You should read it.
00:13:01.780 | My kid's grades got better after they read this.
00:13:03.980 | So what you want to look for, if you want to align incentive structures with advice
00:13:06.940 | here is where you want to find a book on student study habit advice that just had a quiet entry
00:13:13.860 | into the marketplace and over time sell, sell, sell, sells.
00:13:17.540 | And I just looked it up before the show.
00:13:19.460 | I think the sales, um, on how to concentrate a student is approaching 250,000 copies.
00:13:25.880 | A book that has never had any major promotion has never been talked about on a single major
00:13:30.180 | podcast show or had any footprint on social media.
00:13:33.940 | That's all word of mouth.
00:13:35.420 | So there you verify the incentive there for me to make that book, sell that many copies.
00:13:40.580 | I was obsessed about this better work.
00:13:43.500 | What really works.
00:13:45.220 | So books have a better incentive structure surrounding their information than YouTube
00:13:49.740 | does.
00:13:50.740 | So you buy my book or any other book that has sold a lot of copies that focus on this
00:13:54.860 | topic.
00:13:55.860 | You're much more likely to get advice that works and you're not going to hear anything
00:13:59.220 | about note taking apps or to do list in that book.
00:14:02.340 | My book gets right down to the brass tacks of what are the different academic tasks you
00:14:05.980 | have to do?
00:14:07.540 | What is the right way to do these?
00:14:08.780 | How do you take information from a textbook and learn it efficiently to the point that
00:14:12.620 | you can do well on a test?
00:14:14.020 | How do you write a paper?
00:14:15.180 | How do you break that down into multiple steps so that it's a good paper that you're going
00:14:18.700 | to get good grades on?
00:14:19.900 | How do you learn mathematics to the level that you can sit down for a mathematics exam
00:14:23.820 | and get a really good score on it?
00:14:25.260 | Well, here's exactly how you want to organize your notes.
00:14:27.660 | Here's how you should study it.
00:14:29.600 | These would make excessively boring YouTube videos from the perspective of the algorithm,
00:14:35.260 | but they also lead to notably high GPAs.
00:14:38.060 | All right, so now let's come back to the oxymoronic fallacy early on.
00:14:43.860 | Aren't you hearing advice now on YouTube?
00:14:46.100 | Well, here's how I exempt what we're doing here is that if you're watching this on YouTube,
00:14:52.020 | what you are seeing is the video of a podcast, right?
00:14:55.220 | The podcast is the game here.
00:14:57.500 | We put the video of the podcast on YouTube.
00:15:00.740 | Podcasting has a good incentive structure.
00:15:03.420 | It's similar to books.
00:15:05.260 | There is not an algorithm to please.
00:15:08.060 | In other words, there's not a hard, inscrutable, complex feedback mechanism that drives your
00:15:14.780 | content in podcasting.
00:15:16.220 | It is just like books.
00:15:18.020 | If someone likes your show, they will tell someone else about it and your audience grows
00:15:23.260 | a little bit.
00:15:24.780 | And that's how podcasts grow is people find what you're talking about to be effective
00:15:30.220 | enough that they will then go on to tell someone else about it.
00:15:34.360 | So that's what I think saves us here if you're watching this on YouTube, is that what we're
00:15:38.080 | trying to do is get more podcast listeners.
00:15:40.280 | And I see that the exact same way as trying to get more book readers.
00:15:43.300 | The stuff's got to work.
00:15:45.840 | We play some tricks with the thumbnails and the titles to try to get some algorithmic
00:15:51.640 | juice.
00:15:53.080 | Our YouTube guy does that.
00:15:55.540 | But the content comes out of the podcast.
00:15:58.300 | So I think incentive structures matter, so keep that in mind.
00:16:02.140 | So peer YouTubers are not necessarily a great source of advice on a lot of topics.
00:16:08.420 | You want to find sources of advice where the incentive structure is for the advice to work.
00:16:12.440 | That's what's going to make it actually do better.