How I Use Notetaking: A Wellspring Of Insight
Don't try to pin down the value of today's notes, today. It will come.
Writing it down is the beginning of every reliable system.
| Steven Johnson
I’ve read a few pieces recently about notetaking1 that could be characterized as counter reactions to the often explicit recommendations for notetaking ‘efficiency’. For example, the zettelkasten theory that we should put what we read and care about into our own words, rather than copying others’ materials.
These arguments fail to acknowledge that we don’t necessarily know exactly what we think about some idea at the time we encounter it or when it mysteriously pops into mind. In my case, it can take years of noodling — and cross connection — before I have a clear idea of what I think about even a fairly well-defined concept or issue.
It may well be that those who seek to create ‘output’ — in the form of publishing articles, writing books, etc. — are satisfying their own need for certainty. But others, like me, are more sedimentary in our thinking, adding layers of insight and divergent perspectives over time, rather than a quick-drying watercolor of the topic.
I appreciated the commentary about ‘the scalable zettelkasten’ from the folks at Deepread.com (who are, yes, trying to promote a product) that prodded me to write this post [emphasis mine]:
The Scalable Zettelkasten: A Practical System That Works
The Minimal Viable Zettelkasten
A truly scalable Zettelkasten starts with the minimum viable system: simple highlights and brief notes, natural language for connections, and gradual building without pressure. This approach recognizes that consistency trumps perfection, and that small, regular additions create more value than elaborate but abandoned systems.
Your minimal system might be as simple as highlighting key passages while reading and occasionally adding brief comments or questions. These highlights become the raw material for later processing, but they don’t require immediate transformation into perfect permanent notes.
The “Simmer and Refine” Approach
Instead of demanding immediate processing, the scalable approach lets ideas marinate before formalizing them. This “simmer and refine” method acknowledges that insights often emerge over time, not in the moment of first encounter. You review and connect when inspiration strikes, not according to a rigid schedule.
This approach mirrors how actual thinking works. Ideas need time to develop, and connections often become apparent only after you’ve encountered related concepts. By allowing this natural timing, you reduce the artificial pressure that kills most knowledge systems.
These ideas jibe with something else I read recently, Steven Thompson’s Emerson’s Recursive Thinking Method. The Emerson in question is the writer, Ralph Waldo Emerson. The emphasis is Thompsons’:
Reading “Emerson: The Mind on Fire” by Robert D. Richardson has been a revelation. Emerson’s process, at first glance, seems simple enough:
1. Capture raw fragments — quotes, observations, fleeting insights.
2. Return to them over time, annotating, reframing, and connecting.
3. Use reading as a catalyst for generating new questions.
4. Sort notes thematically, even when the categories are unclear.
5. Revisit notes years later with new lenses, allowing questions to evolve.I recognized myself in the first step. My journals and reference notes are full of fragments — lines from books, thoughts from journals and hikes, clipped articles, and even memes. But I rarely return to them unless I’m citing something or building a Zettel notation. What I’ve been missing is the recursive annotation — the slow layering of thought over time.
Emerson didn’t just collect quotes. He returned to them, added commentary, reframed them, and connected them to other ideas. This recursive process often generated new questions. For example, a line about beauty might prompt: “Is beauty moral when it uplifts, or only when it aligns with truth?” These weren’t rhetorical flourishes — they were invitations to think further.
Reading, for Emerson, wasn’t about mastery. It was about provocation. He copied passages from Plato, Montaigne, Hindu scripture, and Carlyle into thematic notebooks — not to summarize them, but to test them against his own ideas. Feynman had a similar practice. He kept a dozen “favorite problems” in mind and tested every new idea against them.² Emerson’s version was more fluid, but the principle was the same: read to generate friction, not just understanding.
Even Emerson’s sorting process was a form of inquiry. He didn’t always know where a note belonged (Niklas Lunmann didn’t always know either). Sometimes he wrote in a general notebook and later moved it to a thematic one. The act of sorting forced him to ask: “Is this about beginnings or endings? Is this a moral insight or a metaphysical one?”
Most importantly, Emerson’s questions weren’t front-loaded. They evolved. A note written in 1832 might be revisited in 1845 with a new lens. His notebooks weren’t linear — they were recursive. The themes weren’t conclusions — they were containers for inquiry.
That’s the shift I’ve been missing. I’ve spent decades trying to reach conclusions, never realizing that the real purpose of note-taking might be to keep the questions alive.
I don’t think ‘recursive’ is the right term for what Emerson was up to. Maybe what’s involved is the embrace of uncertainty in notetaking. Instead of determining exactly the purpose a quote, article, or idea serves, exactly at the moment of its appearance on our radar, we might accept the indeterminacy of the note, and in anticipation of evolving into something larger, or part of other threads of thought.
This reminds me of the difference between abductive reasoning, on one hand, and deductive and inductive reasoning, on the other. Deduction and induction share the characteristic of simply organizing what is known in a well-understood way. The classic induction example:
All men are mortal.
Socrates is a man.
Therefore, Socrates is mortal.
And an example of induction, which deals with the probability that a statement is true:
Each time I do A under the same conditions, B occurs.
The next time I do A under these conditions, B will probably occur.
Neither of these generates new information. But abduction is the ‘logic of what might be’, as Roger Martin styled it. An example from Charles Sanders Peirce, the philosopher who brought the concept of abduction into modern logic:
The surprising fact, C, is observed;
But if A were true, C would be a matter of course,
Hence, there is reason to suspect that A is true.
Abduction, unlike deduction or induction, leads to new insights. Like induction, those insights may be wrong, but they open the door to further inquiry.
So, we should approach notetaking as a process of abductive sensemaking, and consider it as a way to pose questions that live over time, rather than seeking to answer then immediately. Another way to think about this distinction that notetaking is mostly about beginnings — the starting points of inquiry — rather than endings. For every note, I may add a question or two when entering it into my notebook. A day, week, or month later, I may return to that note — perhaps because I tripped over that question again, or discovered some new information about it, or awakened from a daydream about some related idea. I add a link, raise new questions, or, once in a while, I may find a synthesis of the original note’s ideas with something else I’ve written down.
It’s iterative abduction, or as I said at the outset, sedimentary. Layers of notes, layers of questions, layers of connections, layers of ideas. I never know how long it will take, which is why I have notes in my notebook (currently, an Obsidian vault with 15,289 files) that date back to 2008, and which I return to time and time again for inspiration and new insights, everyday
Or personal knowledge management, ‘building a second brain’, or whatever category you use.