The building of a second brain is an interesting concept. I love the idea of storing information in some secondary place, other than your own brain, in order to circumvent the shortcomings of the human mind — forgetfulness, attention span and an outdated reward system.

Taking notes I find very peculiar. One of the realisations that has gripped me in the past few years is nicely formulated by Bob Doto in his book a system for writing:

“The ‘you’ that’s looking at your notes in the future isn’t the same ‘you’ that created them today.” — Bob Doto

This concept is one that I myself have experience deeply. I used to be sloppy and rarely note down the things that were noteworthy in my life. From school material to todo’s and anything that I would have to remember. It just felt superfluous. Why would I write this down when I already understand it at this moment? Even if I forget, I can easily look it up in the book in front of me, so why bother copying down something just for the sake of copying it? Writing down what a teacher was presenting on some slides, or I was reading in some textbook, felt like a waste of time. However, I’ve come to appreciate the art of taking notes, and it all started with this quote. This understanding did not come from the concept, but rather from experience.

On numerous occasions now, I have referred back to something I wrote down a long time ago, and actually found it useful. I found it useful because the “me” that was reading it was a completely different person from the “me” that wrote it. New experiences, new knowledge, and most importantly, a lot of lost ideas. I simply forgot. I forgot the thing I wrote about, as well as the memory of writing about it. And suddenly, at that point, I felt the distance between these two persons. These two ego’s. My past and present self, having a conversation. That’s the power of written language for ya.

So now I take care to write some things down. I do it despite my gut telling my it isn’t necessary or worth the time. Of course, gut, you are telling me that, but in a years time, you’ll be hungry, and I will have forgotten this! I write for that future person. However, a very important question still remains, because you can, in my opinion, go too far in writing things down. It is actually possible to waste time. Let’s not do that. So how do we avoid it?

A lot of people build their own personal knowledge bases that start to look a lot like small Wikipedias. I have my doubts about this approach. First of all, there already exists such a thing, it is called Wikipedia. It is readily available, usually accurate and more than sufficient to brush up on your knowledge on the Bell test, Turing machines or the Jurassic period. So, creating your own wiki seems to me to be a large waste of time. You are merely copying what’s already available to you. But, and here’s the rub, almost everything can be found on Wikipedia, so by that logic, you shouldn’t take any notes at allDisregarding practical notes like shopping lists and the name of your dentist, of course.?

In order to avoid redundancy, I only take a note of something when it satisfies one or more of the following criteria:

  • The note is an original thought.
  • The note is something I reference remarkably frequently.
  • The note is something I could look up, but I want to give it my own interpretation or contribution.

This way, I don’t get the sense that I’m doing something that isn’t worth my time when I’m taking notes. The things I write down are actually worth writing down. Because why bother otherswise?