"What is note-taking for? I found note-taking most useful in the short term, grounding me in my current task or noting a few to-dos throughout the day. Almost all of them are immediately disposable. It seems like note-taking can become fairly navel-gazing and doing it excessively takes away from execution." It's a good question because we see this a lot in our discussions of organization.

Notes and note-taking is an excessively broad term. It covers lots of different things and for a lot of people, like Mark, these things get all mixed up and they're thinking, "Well, I don't know. I'm sitting here journaling all day. Is this note-taking? What should I be doing? What should I not be doing?" So what I want to do here is step back.

Let's give a general definition for note-taking and then I want to highlight what I think the three critical types of note-taking systems you need in your life if you work any sort of knowledge job. From there, move on to talk about more advanced options. So let's define note-taking more generally to mean recording information on a durable written medium.

So anywhere you're collecting information in a written medium that's durable, you have it outside of your head so you can reference it later. Here are the three types of this note-taking that I think are critical, especially for most knowledge workers. One, some sort of working memory extender. This is where I use my text file on my desktop of my computer's workingmemory.txt.

This is for strictly expanding the amount of information you can temporarily hold on to as you engage with the inflow of information throughout your workday. So as things come in, you're in a meeting and people are suggesting next steps, you can just write this information down in whatever medium you use for your working memory extender because it's probably more information you can keep in your head.

So there it is. I write it down right there. Or I'm going through my email inbox and I need to remember different notes I need to act on, schedule this, get back to them. I can write it into my workingmemory.extender. These are notes that exist outside of your own brain, allows you to hold on and organize more information than you could do just strictly within the confines of your own neurons.

Now this is something that resets all the time. It's a durable form, but you reset it all the time. So as I'm going through a meeting, I'm taking quick notes on here's the five things I need to do. After that meeting, those notes will then get processed out of my working memory file into calendar reminders, into my obligation system.

So it's a temporary storage, but it allows me in the moment to keep track of more things that my brain can do on its own. That's note taking, but of a very temporary type. Next comes what I just cited, which is your obligation tracker. Some system to maintain all of the relevant information for every obligation on your plate.

This is also note taking, written durable information that you don't have to keep track of in your head. So somewhere here, all the things I have to do probably categorized. Here is all of the information related to each of these things, all in this one place. You want that information accessible and captured somewhere, that's note taking.

Then finally we get to what most people think of when they think about note taking, and this is more where you're capturing key ideas about your work and your life. It could be interesting ideas, interesting articles, brainstorms, concerns that you have. This is the broad category that captures what people normally think about in note taking.

I might be journaling my thoughts about things. I might be writing down my plans for how I want to improve my life. I might be capturing articles that are relevant to the newsletter that I run and things I want to remember. This is where you're going to use whatever type of system you like to capture things in.

You have a lot of different choices here. All three of these things are note taking. You need some sort of system for each. In my own life, I use a plain text file for working memory. I use Trello for obligation tracking notes, one board per role, one column per type of obligation, one card per obligation, all of the relevant information for that obligation on the card.

I use my Remarkable 2 digital notebook for everything else. Inside my Remarkable 2, I have dozens of different individual virtual notebooks for keeping track of ideas, reflections, concerns, etc. So those are the three categories, Mark. Do those three categories, different tools for each, different rates of refresh and reset for each working memory.

You're resetting this every 10 minutes or so. Your obligation list, you're working with every day. Your bigger idea capture is something you maybe go over in detail much less often. "Hey, I'm going to have a summit now to rethink this part of my business. Let me go back and look through my notes." Maybe that's just once every few months or so.

That's really it. There are more complicated systems and methodologies. We have a lot of fans here of Zettelkasten type systems. We also have a lot of fans here of interesting note-taking software that really gets into the details of how you store notes, how you connect notes, the format in which the notes are stored.

That is optional. It's more about your interest. If you like information management as a hobby, you can build more complicated systems around it, but you don't need complicated systems to successfully take notes. Those are the three areas you have to take notes. Just make sure those are all three covered with some sort of reasonable techno system, and then you're doing a fine job.

I think that separation is key. Don't mix all this stuff together. Don't have a moleskin somewhere in which you're trying to keep your tasks next to your vision for living on a cabin in 20 years next to a grocery list you want to remember when you go to the store.

We need some separation for note-taking to keep up with the complexity of modern life. All right. What do we got next, Jesse? Next question is from Reeshab. As a 26-year-old software developer who has recently landed a well-paying job, I'm looking to pursue my interest in learning to play the guitar, drawing, and some days gardening.

However, I'm concerned about whether it's feasible to schedule all these activities into a single week while maintaining a focus on deep life core fundamentals. Your expert opinion, would it be possible to balance all these pursuits effectively within a given week without compromising on essential life habits? Well, I think this is a objective question for which you can get an objective answer by becoming quantitative.

Let's just work with your calendar. I'm assuming you're professionally speaking, you're organized, you time block your days, you have a clear shutdown. So there's some clarity about your time outside of work. Play with that time. So start autopilot scheduling some of these hobbies. Maybe you garden on weekday mornings.

Maybe you alternate a guitar practice session and what was the other thing, drawing practice session on different days. You do it an hour before dinner. Work with this out. See if it fits. And if the stuff does fit, execute this autopilot schedule for a while and say, does this feel sustainable or do I feel like I'm constantly running from one thing to another or it's overfilling my time?

I used to run this exercise with undergraduates who are trying to figure out their academic programs, their extracurricular programs, and I would say, we got to sit down and just build a plan for your proposal here. You want to do these five extracurriculars and double major? Show me the time.

Then they would go through and block off the time for studying and how long is this going to take and put on their meetings and the time to work on their activities. And it either fit or it didn't. And sometimes if it just barely fit, they would come back a week later and say, this is crazy.

Every minute of my life is scheduled. So if it doesn't fit or it fits and your life feels too crowded, then you just pull back. You're getting an objective feedback here. You pull back. And it doesn't matter if you're pulling back. These are hobbies. The thing is, you want to be spending quality time outside of work on things that matter.

The quantity isn't important. So if it doesn't fit or it barely fits, maybe you do seasonal pursuits. In the spring, I'm working a lot on my garden and in the winter, I'm spending a lot more time on guitar because that's sort of inside. And I do drawing in the fall.

You could have seasonal pursuits, you could stack these one over another, or maybe what you need to do is just slow down your ambition for these pursuits. And instead of saying, look, I'm going to do four hours of guitar a day and I want to be shredding in like six months, you say, I'm going to spend less time.

Good hard practice, like we talked about the deep dive, trying to move up the stair steps towards expert knowledge, but I'm just willing for this to take longer. A few years from now, I'll be a pretty good guitar player, but I'm playing just an hour every other day. That doesn't take up as much time.

I'm doing so I have a drawing class I take once a week and on Fridays I get out of work early and go to a park to work on the drawing. This is maybe I'm going to learn these skills slower, but that makes their footprint on my schedule smaller and I have more give and more flexibility and don't feel like I'm over scheduled.

So treat this like a quantitative question. Get clear feedback. If it's too much, reduce or slow down. It doesn't really matter for your goal here, which is just to make sure that you're engaged in deeper pursuits. That's what matters, not the speed at which you're getting better at things, not the quantity of things that you're actually going after.

All right, what do we got next? Next question is from Craig. I'm a college student trying to be more smart about how I study and organize my learning. I'm relatively new to this stuff. Strangely, most productivity tips on YouTube are about the top 10 to do lists and note taking apps.

Will I be less effective if I don't use one of those apps? It seems like a lot of work and setup to learn all those apps to be efficient and I dread thinking about the heavy lifting prep those apps require. What should I do? Well, I think my answer here at first is going to be ironic because you may be listening to this answer on YouTube, but I'm going to tell you in a second why what I'm about to say here is not oxymoronic.

Don't use YouTube to get advice on studying. So when you're getting information, especially information on improving your life, you have to understand the incentive structures in place. And for people who are purely doing YouTube, so if you're a pure study habits YouTuber, the incentive structure is for views. That's what you look about.

That's what you care about. I want more views on my videos. To get more views on your videos on YouTube, you have to work with the idiosyncratic properties of the recommendation algorithm and you get into this feedback loop where you, your, your content, it morphs more and more towards what's giving you this better feedback from the algorithm.

And after a while is the algorithm specifying your contents. You may be started out as a YouTuber saying, I want to help students study better because this is an audience out there that cares about this. And after six months of interacting with the algorithm, it's, you know, the top 10 to-do list apps or whatever, because this is what's getting them the best view numbers.

The advice might have very little to do, however, with the nuts and bolts of becoming a better student. So the incentive structure matters. So if you want to become a better student, and this is going to sound very self-serving, but I'm going to say, read my book, how to become a straight A student.

So why is that better? Because what is the incentive structure of books? When you write a book, like how to become a straight A student, let me tell you this from experience. This is not a, we're going to go hard out of the gate. There's going to be a number one New York times bestseller.

I'm going to be on the today show talking about this book and every major podcaster wants to have me on. That is not the play. When you write a book on student advice, the play is this better work. So some people will buy this because they heard about it from me or saw it on a table.

I'm embarrassed to admit this Jesse, but when that book came out, it was for my first, my first year of grad school at MIT, I would sometimes go to the Harvard co-op as they call it the coop. And I would, uh, it was on tables, kind of hang around.

People would pick up the book and look at it, but that's like how people discovered it at first. I didn't have a social, there was no social media back then, wasn't on a big podcast. People would find it on tables and then it's all word of mouth. And what is going to make someone recommend a book to someone else?

This worked, this made me get better grades. You should read it. My kid's grades got better after they read this. So what you want to look for, if you want to align incentive structures with advice here is where you want to find a book on student study habit advice that just had a quiet entry into the marketplace and over time sell, sell, sell, sells.

And I just looked it up before the show. I think the sales, um, on how to concentrate a student is approaching 250,000 copies. A book that has never had any major promotion has never been talked about on a single major podcast show or had any footprint on social media.

That's all word of mouth. So there you verify the incentive there for me to make that book, sell that many copies. I was obsessed about this better work. What really works. So books have a better incentive structure surrounding their information than YouTube does. So you buy my book or any other book that has sold a lot of copies that focus on this topic.

You're much more likely to get advice that works and you're not going to hear anything about note taking apps or to do list in that book. My book gets right down to the brass tacks of what are the different academic tasks you have to do? What is the right way to do these?

How do you take information from a textbook and learn it efficiently to the point that you can do well on a test? How do you write a paper? How do you break that down into multiple steps so that it's a good paper that you're going to get good grades on?

How do you learn mathematics to the level that you can sit down for a mathematics exam and get a really good score on it? Well, here's exactly how you want to organize your notes. Here's how you should study it. These would make excessively boring YouTube videos from the perspective of the algorithm, but they also lead to notably high GPAs.

All right, so now let's come back to the oxymoronic fallacy early on. Aren't you hearing advice now on YouTube? Well, here's how I exempt what we're doing here is that if you're watching this on YouTube, what you are seeing is the video of a podcast, right? The podcast is the game here.

We put the video of the podcast on YouTube. Podcasting has a good incentive structure. It's similar to books. There is not an algorithm to please. In other words, there's not a hard, inscrutable, complex feedback mechanism that drives your content in podcasting. It is just like books. If someone likes your show, they will tell someone else about it and your audience grows a little bit.

And that's how podcasts grow is people find what you're talking about to be effective enough that they will then go on to tell someone else about it. So that's what I think saves us here if you're watching this on YouTube, is that what we're trying to do is get more podcast listeners.

And I see that the exact same way as trying to get more book readers. The stuff's got to work. We play some tricks with the thumbnails and the titles to try to get some algorithmic juice. Our YouTube guy does that. But the content comes out of the podcast. So I think incentive structures matter, so keep that in mind.

So peer YouTubers are not necessarily a great source of advice on a lot of topics. You want to find sources of advice where the incentive structure is for the advice to work. That's what's going to make it actually do better.