Some urgent notemaking questions find answers
From time to time I attempt to answer questions about note-making on Reddit.
It’s a tough job with few perks, but someone has to do it and for no obvious reason that person is me1. So here’s a fresh bunch of my recent comments, with a disclaimer that, field-tested as they are, they’re not guaranteed to make you rich, famous or even mildly handsome, even if that’s how it’s worked out for me. I guess life is unfair like that.
Anyway, here goes.
Question: Where does AI fit into your note taking?
“I considered using AI to scan and auto link related ideas, but even this seems like robbing me of the chance to “think” as I examine possibly related ideas, so for now I am trying to be totally manual in the slip box. Anyone else tackling these questions? What successful strategies do you have for getting the thinking benefits while still getting the busy work benefits of AI?”
My Answer: The temptation to skip the thinking process is far from new.
In 1924 Sergey Povarnin, yes that Сергей Поварнин, Soviet author of How to Read Books for Self Education was warning of it:
“There are readers who think that with such ‘card indexes’ they can replace their mind… In short, a new ‘improvement’ in our culture. No need to work with the mind. Ready-to-wear boots, ready-to-wear pants, ‘ready-to-wear’ thoughts.”
He was OK with the card index itself; the problem was imagining you could use it to stop thinking.
And for the last 17 years I could have outsourced my note-making to a service like Freelancer. But I didn’t even consider it back then, so why consider it now? It would be like hiring someone to go to the gym for me (which I admit I have contemplated).
Question: Should I keep my Zettelkasten?
“I have now essentially two systems of notes, and I’m not sure how to reconcile them. Should I rework these new notes back into my Zettelkasten and just focus on publishing that? Should I keep two systems of notes? Has anyone run into this issue before?”
NB: A Zettelkasten is a box with paper slips in, a once-popular way for scholars and writers to make and keep their notes, and by extension it’s the name of a contemporary method for making digital notes too; but is there a Zettelkasten method?
My Answer: Just give everything a unique ID so you can link to it from anywhere.
I’ve had this issue to some extent, but it was the Zettelkasten that freed up my writing. Before that I’d write sprawling stuff that was all over the place. This kind of writing felt like it was too digressive, so I’d try to focus — but this made me just clam up. Or I’d write a long piece but get bored part way through and drop it before finishing.
The Zettelkasten approach helped me focus without making me feel like I was writing the wrong things. Then I started stitching my various notes together to create longer pieces of work. Eventually the practice started freeing me up to write digressive pieces again, without feeling irrationally guilty about it. So now I have my structured Zettelkasten and a whole pile of longer pieces in various states of completion.
My ‘solution’ to this (though is it even a problem?) is to give each and every piece, however short or long, a unique ID.
That way I can always refer to any piece of writing, and always find it again.
I’m inspired by Niklas Luhmann, who didn’t just write sociology notes, he also wrote many manuscripts in several drafts. Towards the end of his life he mainly worked on the manuscripts since he had a backlog of publishing to get through. Like him I’m ultimately more interested in publishing than in perfecting my notes system.
Question: Highlighting for literature notes
How do you highlight content? I’ve always tried progressive summarization, but I feel like I don’t have that much time.
My Answer: For me, highlighting is a shortcut to nowhere.
I’ve found my highlights don’t get used for anything. My conclusion is that highlighting may look like useful work, but in practice it just isn’t.
Resulting rule of thumb: if it’s worth highlighting it’s worth writing a short note about it; and if it’s not worth writing a note, it’s not worth highlighting.
What I do instead: write a note. If I read something and think “that’s interesting”, I make a note and force myself to record why I find it interesting. This seemingly slows me down, but then I don’t waste time creating unused highlights that looked interesting for reasons I didn’t record and have now forgotten.
Caveat: while reading, I write literature notes that include bibliographic details, followed by a list of interesting points I notice, together with a page reference. I might write: “Opinionated summary of ‘My Neighbour Totoro’ - p.127.” I’d follow that with a reference to the note that expands on this. In practice, I don’t actually get round to writing a new note for every reference. Some never get followed up. The Zettelkasten approach is a way of triaging my thoughts, creating useful friction so I only follow up what really matters to me.
Question: Should Mini Essays Be Kept Outside of the Main Notes Folder?
I like writing mini essays to help me understand things better, but I’ve read that main/atomic notes should be short and focused on one idea. Should mini essays go in a separate folder, or can they live with my main notes?
My Answer: Your ‘mini-essay’ concept has been tried and tested for many decades and it works. Keep them with your notes so you can easily reference them and expand them.
Maybe tag them ‘mini-essay’ so you can review them collectively in future.
I’ve found - once my Zettelkasten got big enough - I tended to work by assembling clusters of atomic notes, rather than jumping straight to mini-essays. The Zettelkasten approach facilitates this ‘bottom-up’ method of writing.
Andy Matuschak shows how he wrote a modular mini-essay made out of about 60 atomic notes. He redrafted it and turned it into a polished essay which he then published. The original mini-essay is called Enabling environments, games and the Primer. It’s clearly a work-in-progress, but it’s a lot more comprehensive than just a single atomic note. It’s an example of what he calls ‘evergreen notes’ in the sense that it grew from a seed into a larger plant (though I’m not actually sold on that metaphor, but still).
I described the process in full, in an article which is itself assembled from modular components:
How to write an article from your notes.
I certainly keep my ‘mini-essays, or ‘sub-assemblies’ or ‘intermediate packets’ or ‘alpha drafts’ or whatever, in my main collection of notes. This enables me to link to them and add future links to them. But one very important step is to ensure that where the writing is made up of smaller parts, the backlinks are clearly noted, so I’m not inadvertently self-plagiarising.
To me a mini-essay is just a structure note, but with the contents of the linked notes transcluded and then lightly edited together. You can certainly see this with Andy’s note, referenced above. Parts of that note are little more than hyperlinks connected together with connecting phrases. But the hard work is precisely in connecting disparate ideas by means of writing. This kind of stitching work doesn’t usually produce a publishable article straight off, but it does help with an early draft.
That’s all for now, but if you’re strangely hooked on this stuff (not your fault, and no one here is judging) you might now like to go even further with:
I’m the author of Shu Ha Ri. The Japanese Way of Learning, for Artists and Fighters, available now..
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It’s exactly like a bunch of radishes, but made out of email.
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Well, me and lots of other people. ↩︎
The Digital Humanities Now website has come out of hibernation and kicked back into gear. OK, so it took me a whole year to notice this, but better late than never to spot a very interesting resource.
#DigitalHumanities #AcademicWriting #AcademicResources #ResearchTools
AI isn’t making us obsolete: we already were, and that’s nothing to be ashamed of. Promethean shame in an age of technological change.
#Philosophy #PrometheanShame #AI #FutureOfWork #ethics #GüntherAnders
Fear of AI is nothing new: Promethean shame in a time of technological change
Günther Anders (1902-1992) is a 20th century philosopher for our time, which is fitting since he saw himself as uncomfortably ‘too early’ for his own.
Almost unheard of in the English-speaking world, he was at the centre of German philosophy before the rise of Hitler and the catastrophe of the Second World War. Student of Husserl, Heidegger, and later Tillich, he was a second cousin of Walter Benjamin, a friend of Berthold Brecht and was Hannah Arendt’s first husband. Given this pedigree I found it surprising he was (to me) so obscure. In post-war Germany he was a big deal. Now he’s back in fashion, thanks to the eery prescience of his masterwork, The Obsolescence of Man (vol. 1, 1956, vol.2, 1980) and its clear relevance to the current AI revolution.
Anders coined the phrase ‘Promethean shame’, which is…
Guy Kawasaki says ‘move fast and break things’ is a myth. True! But since he can’t quite escape its toxic allure, I’ll say it for him, loudly and proudly:
Move slow and fix things. [guykawasaki.substack.com]
Shu Ha Ri: The Japanese Way of Learning, for Artists and Fighters is available now.
What's the true path of excellence?
Brad Stuhlberg’s book The Path of Excellence is a great read and it offers what the subtitle promises:
💬 A guide to true greatness and deep satisfaction in a chaotic world.
By now I’ve read many similar works and I’ve found there’s often something strangely missing. There’s usually heaps of good advice about acquiring expertise and wisdom, about learning and improving, and about following through; plenty too about commitment, discernment, patience and resilience. And these are all important factors if you want to attain excellence and some sort of mastery.
Well, OK. But there’s almost no mention of the need to find a teacher, coach or mentor — and to work constructively with them. And in this particular case I find it slightly weird. After all, the author is himself a performance coach, so why not at least mention the great benefits of working with a coach?
I see this as the most crucial aspect of learning, of trying to get better at something.
Learning is social: we learn best from other people, directly. That’s a key reason I was driven to write my own book, Shu Ha Ri: The Japanese Way of Learning.
Reading all these American books on learning and improvement, I can’t help wondering if there isn’t a bias towards individualism at work here. Not that there’s anything wrong with individualism, but surely it isn’t the whole picture. Learning involves teachers. Is this claim so radical that it can’t be mentioned?
We don’t need to reinvent the wheel here. There’s a well-tested path and it’s clearly expressed in these three phases of the learning-teaching journey.
So sure, read another book about excellence. There are plenty to choose from.
But also, find the right teacher.
Now read:
What Billy Strings learned from his father
What Herbie Hancock learned from Miles Davis
The greatest experts are serial beginners
There’s a flaw in how we learn about expertise
I’m the author of Shu Ha Ri: The Japanese Way of Learning, for Artists and Fighters, available now.
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Beginners and intermediate learners fear ‘making mistakes’; experts seldom do. Not because experts don’t make mistakes: they do. It’s just that experts know what to do next.
Here’s Herbie Hancock telling what he learned from his mentor Miles Davis: Every mistake is an opportunity [openculture.com].
💬 I want to be just like him.
Imitation is one of the most powerful and underrated stages of learning. Billy Strings' story of learning guitar by watching his dad is the clearest example I’ve ever seen.
#Learning #Education #Music #ShuHaRi
"I want to be just like him"
“I want to be just like him.”
It’s difficult to overstate the importance of imitation as a crucial aspect of the learning journey. But it’s also hard to describe it in mere words.
In this deeply engaging YouTube interview with Rick Beato, virtuoso bluegrass guitarist Billy Strings recounts the way he learned his guitar skills early, at his father’s knee, by watching, by joining in. and by continually asking: “how does dad do it?”.
I’ve never seen a clearer example of the role of the imitation stage of learning, and exactly how it works.
I’m the author of Shu Ha Ri. The Japanese Way of Learning, for Artists and Fighters, available now.
Now read: Find the right teacher.
💬 “If it takes three years, find the right teacher.”
Sometimes the best way to find the right teacher is to start doing the work. Begin your learning journey visibly, and mentors may find you - like the barn builder who attracted an expert just by working in his driveway. Read more: writingslowly.com/2026/02/0…
How did you find your mentor?
#Learning #Mentorship #Writing #Creativity #Action #shuhari
Find the right teacher
There’s a Japanese saying that I included in my book):
If it takes three years, find the right teacher.
But sometimes, you just need to get started. Simon Sarris has a great story about this. He decided to build a barn by trial and error, with little previous barn-building experience. But because he was doing this near the road in front of his house, it attracted the attention of a regular passer-by who just happened to know, in detail, how to build barns.
“Mike would have never stopped by if I was not working conspicuously in my driveway, every day, under a pop-up tent. But I was, and he became interested in my progress, and it happens that he has been timber framing since the 90’s. Had I waited for such a teacher—for he has now taught me a good deal—I would have never found him. But I chose to start, and he was drawn to my adventure. Only by virtue of starting the work was the intersection of our lives possible.” - Start With Creation - by Simon Sarris
The moral? If it takes three years, find the right teacher. But if you start your learning journey with action, the right teacher might just find you.
So now here’s a question: Who was the right teacher for you, and how did you find them, or alternatively how did they find you?
(And yes, I have a story about a teacher who found me, but that’s a story for another time.)
Photo by Kazuhiro Yoshimura on Unsplash
Meanwhile, my book, Shu Ha Ri: The Japanese Way of Learning, for Artists and Fighters, is out now. Please check it out.
Discovery, aesthetics, and the art of self-publishing: my latest post explores Leonard Koren’s influence on my new book, Shu Ha Ri.
#WabiSabi #ShuHaRi #Japan #Aesthetics #WritingCommunity
Leonard Koren on Life as an Aesthetic Experience
I’ve never been much of a bathing person. Perhaps that’s due to unpleasantly lingering memories of luke warm water in freezing cold bathrooms in the UK when I was a child. The bath was fine enough, but getting out would be a real test. Even bathing, as an adult, in natural hot springs on Orcas Island in the US Pacific Northwest didn’t really do it for me. That was a little ‘rustic’, and not in a good way.
True, swimming here in Sydney where I live is fabulous, especially in the Summer, when the cool refreshment of the ocean waves is totally restorative. But bathing? Not so much. Until a few months ago, that is, when I visited Japan.
Every interface is an argument about how you should feel. - Phantom Obligation | Terry Godier
This is my view of writing and note-making apps, but we can change them, to feel how we want, not how someone else wants us to.
A channel of the Katsura River at Arashiyama, Kyoto.
Reviewing my photographs really makes me wish I was back in Japan.
I’m the author of Shu Ha Ri: The Japanese Way of Learning, for Artists and Fighters, available now.
#Japan #Kyoto #ShuHaRi #JapaneseCulture #JapaneseAesthetics #Photography
The Toe of the Year and the Curious Case of John Donne's Missing Commonplace Book
Last month, while my sister was moving house, she discovered a box of papers she’d never seen before. Inside was a collection of documents, decades old, that our parents must have gathered and kept from our childhood. There in a carefully wrapped pile was a sheaf of my sister’s old school reports. And next to them was a set of poems I must have written way back when I was a primary school student.
Perhaps you’ve had the experience of venturing into the attic or the basement and finding long-forgotten documents like these. But this chance rediscovery got me thinking about just how much has been lost to time.
Mostly we don’t bother archiving, and even when we do, there are later moments when we decide to spring-clean, rationalise, declutter, or tidy up.
These are all euphemisms for destroying the evidence.
Why your note-making tools don’t quite work the way you want them to - and what to do about it
Every so often I stumble upon a really clear articulation of a concept that makes sense of something I’ve been feeling but didn’t previously have a word for. I knew there was something there but I didn’t have the language to express it.
One of the most interesting articles I’ve come across recently is Artificial memory and orienting infinity by Kei Kreutler.
In this particular case the concept illuminated is the subtle, niggling tension between what I want to use my digital writing tools for and what they actually do. My writing tools, and possibly yours too, nearly do what I want, but not quite. What’s that about? Well, on reading this article, the tension became a whole lot clearer.
The Spiral of Mastery: Why the Greatest Experts Are Serial Beginners
The greatest experts aren’t afraid of starting again
Apparently, my tennis is rusty
Here in Australia the Christmas holidays take place in mid-summer, and my family spent a few days at a house with a tennis court. It was an amazing opportunity, for which we were hardly prepared. I hadn’t played in years. One family member had barely held a racquet before. But we all shared the same problem: our serves were terrible. The ball hit the net, or it veered wildly off court. The serve seemed like some monolithic, unreachable skill you either had or you didn’t.
The view from the court — that was amazing, but the tennis, to say the least, wasn’t flowing.
That was until someone suggested we break it down: grip, swing, ball toss, contact. We stopped trying to play and started drilling. Within a short while, the court was alive with movement and we were laughing instead of frowning with effort. Our natural talent hadn’t changed; it was just that our willingness to break the seemingly impossible into achievable parts made it somehow seem doable. And after a short while, it actually was doable. We were delivering serves that made it over the net, that you could also imagine returning.
This experience was a reminder that expertise is hardly ever about making a single massive effort to achieve something that seems impossible. You don’t get good at tennis all at once. Playing the game well is really a whole portfolio of tiny pieces of expertise you have to master one by one and piece together smoothly before you can reach actual proficiency. And even when you get there, that’s not the end. There’s always something, some element of your play, you can improve. Is mastery a destination to reach and then enjoy forever? No. It’s more like a spiral that requires us to return to the beginning again and again of a long series of micro-skills.
2025 marked 250 years since the birth of author Jane Austen. In 2026 she still has something important to teach us: “Feel the importance of every day, and every hour as it passes”.
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I’m the author of Shu Ha Ri. The Japanese Way of Learning, for Artists and Fighters, available now in paperback and ebook.
