Building a better note-taking system

A deep dive into the world of productivity and how I am refining my note-taking system to serve me better in the future

This is the behind-the-scenes commentary for the serialised novella The Calibray Job.

I've consumed a lot of productivity-related content over the years, from YouTube videos by creators like Ali Abdaal and Muchelleb to books by authors like James Clear and Oliver Burkeman. A lot of this information is incredibly useful. The problem is, it has, for me at least, served only to obfuscate the thing I am trying to achieve. I built a system so complex that it no longer served the purpose of helping me write and create and instead only distracted me more.

Sometimes the distraction was literal, I'd get caught looking for the perfect folder to store a note or losing an idea across a plethora of apps. Other times, the distraction was more centred around the imperfection of the system. I'd find my brain space taken up by thoughts of disorganised folders and notes, ugly Notion pages and misspelt words in my journal. Something had to change, right?

One of the overriding ideas within the productivity space is that your notetaking system is key to achieving your goals. James Clear, author of Atomic Habits, says, "Goals are about the results you want to achieve. Systems are about the processes that lead to those results." Another recurring theme I came across during my years of productivity research is the idea that many creators regret not having a system in place sooner. Take writer Ted Gioia, who wrote about wishing he'd developed his system earlier in life in a recent Substack post. He says, "I only wish I had started taking these higher-level notes at a younger age."

How I Take Notes

That's why I am writing this post. I have developed my system over time, blending the processes of many creators and adapting them to suit my needs. But my system isn't there yet. I still find myself distracted looking for the perfect place to store a quote or forgetting key ideas from a book I’ve just read. So I want to write out my system in order to find the gaps. I want to build my perfect notetaking system out in the open.

The current system

As I eluded to earlier, I've tried a lot of systems. And I mean a lot. I love nothing more than downloading a new productivity app. I've gone through complex project management tools and minimalist task managers, ending up with fragmented notes that speak to my scattershot approach to notetaking. So I simplified. I took the processes of a few creators and adapted them to work for me. The system isn't perfect, as we'll get into, but it is working.

Broadly, I now use three apps - Apple Notes, Notion and My Mind - and a physical Bullet Journal to take and organise all my notes. These apps have all been chosen by prioritising simplicity above all else. I wanted something that I could set and forget, so to speak. I also wanted to limit the amount of money I was spending on apps because, as I've already mentioned, it was getting out of hand.

These are just tools, though. The system for capturing, organising and expressing these notes is what is most important. One of the productivity thinkers I've jived with the most over the years has been Tiago Forte, creator of Building a Second Brain. Forte created the CODE method for notetaking. CODE stands for Capture, Organise, Distill and Express.

What I like about the CODE method is its simplicity. Currently, I make heavy use of the Capture, Organise and Express points in the method and I've found it transformative to my process as a creator. CODE, then, becomes the first ingredient in my notetaking system.

Quick Capture

Whenever I come across a piece of information I feel is relevant or have an idea relating to a story, I paste it directly into one of two places. If I'm on my phone and let’s be honest I am probably on my phone, I paste this into a note called 'Quick Capture' in the Apple Notes app. In some cases, if I've got my Bullet Journal to hand, then the note will go into that day’s Daily Log next to a note bullet.

I do love a TikTok

I don't think too much about the information I capture here, I'm more about getting that note out of my head and into somewhere I can pick it up again later. Some people refer to this kind of note as an 'Inbox' but the name isn't really important. What's important is to remember, as Forte puts it, "We are already consuming or producing this information, we just need to keep it in a single, centralized place."

This is where my first adaptation to Forte's system comes in. I love working with pen and paper. I also know that I won't always have my Bullet Journal to hand. If I were to stick stringently to Forte's method and only use my bujo for quick capture then I'd miss a lot of information ultimately defeating the point of the system.

So I use both. The Bullet Journal Method, and the book of the same name by Ryder Carroll, are both integral parts of my system. My Apple note is great for quickly capturing thoughts and ideas but what about when there's an idea that needs a bit more consideration? That's where my bujo comes in. As Austin Kleon says in Steal Like an Artist, "Carry a notebook and a pen with you wherever you go. Get used to pulling it out and jotting down your thoughts and observations. Copy your favourite passages out of books. Record overheard conversations. Doodle when you’re on the phone."

Thinking on the page

This might seem antithetical to the purpose of 'quick capture', and in many ways it is, but for me, both places offer different things to my notetaking system. For example, if I had an idea for a chapter or book I could summarise in a sentence then that will go straight into Apple Notes to be dealt with later. Sometimes, though, I have an idea that doesn't quite exist yet and the only way to fix it in place is to pick up a pen and my bujo and handwrite it down.

I think this has something to do with the tactile nature of writing things by hand. The smell of the paper and the feel of the ink on the page. Kleon describes it best, "It wasn’t until I started bringing analog tools back into my process that making things became fun again and my work started to improve."

WorkingMemory.txt

We've all been there, you're in the middle of writing a chapter and the fact that you need to take out the bins tonight pops into your mind ruining your flow. Now you're thinking about whether it's black bags or recycling going out tonight and not the task at hand. Enter Cal Newport and WorkingMemory.txt.

Of all the pieces of my notetaking system, this is the newest, I recently came across the idea in a YouTube video. Put simply, you have a note open on the screen while you work on a specific task where you can quickly jot down these extraneous thoughts so they don't distract you from what you're doing. As Newport puts it, "I didn’t have time to accomplish each new obligation as I encountered it, and (this is the important part) I didn’t have nearly enough working memory in my brain to remember them all, so I jotted them all down in my trusty text file."

This is yet another part of my system where my Bullet Journal is integral. Instead of using a text file on my computer, I use my bujo as my working memory. I knew that if I had a text file open on my computer that wasn't related to the task at hand it would likely be a distraction to me. So, instead, I have my bujo open on my desk to the Daily Log for that day and if something pops into my head while I'm working I simply jot it down there to be dealt with later. Get it out of your head so you can keep going.

Processing notes

So I've captured all this stuff, what next? Well, this is where we turn to our old friend Tiago Forte and another of his acronyms. Once a week I'll sit down and go through my Quick Capture note in Apple Notes and the Daily Logs for that week in my bujo and I'll start migrating my notes over to Notion where I have everything organised based on Tiago Forte's PARA system.

PARA stands for Projects, Areas, Resources and Archives. It's a contextual system for organising notes depending on where they might be of best use to you going forward. Projects are things that have a deadline like blog posts or planning a specific vacation. Areas are areas of responsibility that don't have a definitive end point such as your relationship or home. Resources are items of interest that may or may not be useful later but don't currently relate to a Project or Area. And the archive is, well, your archive.

I've tried a ton of organisation methods for my notes. I've gone folderless, I've tried getting super granular with my notes and none of them have ever stuck. In each instance, I kept returning to the distraction points I mentioned above. I couldn't figure out where a note should fit or I found that the messiness of everything was overwhelming my mind.

That's why PARA works so well, for me. Forte writes on the method, "Instead of putting more obstacles in your way, postponing the actions that will make a difference, it would pull those actions closer and make them easier to start and finish."

Can you tell I’m a nerd?

Simply put, if a note is related to an ongoing project such as The Calibray Job then it goes into the Projects page. If it is something that relates to an area of responsibility like a design asset or style guide then it is moved into an Area. If it's just something I find interesting but don't have a Project or Area it relates to just yet then it goes into my Resources page. I use Notion for this, but the system works pretty much anywhere you might take or organise notes.

Swipe file

There isn't really a neat place in this essay to drop this section, but I wanted to talk about my swipe file. This is another idea I picked up from Austin Kleon who in turn picked it up from newspaper journalists. Kleon writes, "It’s just what it sounds like—a file to keep track of the stuff you’ve swiped from others."

My swipe file is entirely visual. If I see a piece of art or a still frame from a movie, I share it to the app My Mind where it is automatically tagged ready for me to recall later. As a creative writer, I've found this visual swipe file invaluable.

It’s not all Star Wars, I promise

For example, when I plan out a chapter of The Calibray Job and I'm looking to set a particular mood or construct a specific setting, I'll turn to my swipe file for inspiration. I'll search for a colour or a tone and pull up everything I've saved that might spark a new idea in my mind. As Kleon says, See something worth stealing? Put it in the swipe file. Need a little inspiration? Open up the swipe file."

When I was working on coming up with the facility in The Calibray Job's latest episode, I gathered all my inspiration relating to the kind of mood or tone I wanted the location to convey and used that to inspire my writing. Honestly, if you take one idea away from this essay then let it be the swipe file. You don't have to use My Mind (although I do love the auto-tagging feature), you can use a literal file if it works for you but always save the stuff you find inspiring because you never know what it might spark.

“At their centre, poised over the blackness below, saw the facility. Like everything else below the surface of the lake, the facility seemed endless. An onyx sphere that looked at once like it had come from a distant alien world and as though it had been carved from the rock of the trench itself.” - The Calibray Job, Episode Seven

Notes from books and articles

This is one of the areas where my system is currently lacking. I've tried tools like Readwise but I rarely ever find that they stick. I have an idea of what might work, though, but we'll get to that in a moment.

I do, however, make use of a read-it-later app. Simply put, whenever I come across an article I like the look of I save it to my read-it-later app (I use Omnivore because it's free) and then I read it later.

Lessons in serialisation: why episodic storytelling rules

I tried using my Quick Capture note as a read-it-later app but it always led to it getting overwhelming, making processing the notes more difficult. I won't go into detail on why a read-it-later app is useful, Tiago can do that for me, but I did want to point out that I made heavy use of Omnivore to gather many of the quotes I used in this essay.

Improving the system

As I mentioned earlier, the purpose of this essay is to improve my productivity system. To write out what I do currently, where it works and figure out the gaps in the system so I don't look back and wish I'd done a better job.

I've already hinted at the biggest gap in my system. I don't currently have a great way to take notes from the books I read. Sure, I occasionally save a highlight on my Kindle or jot an idea down in my Quick Capture note, but these are only capturing a fragment of all the knowledge that might be gleaned from what I read.

Apps like Readwise are great for aggregating quotes but the problem I found was the quotes weren't being used for much beyond window dressing at the top of a blog post. Referring back to the CODE system Tiago Forte prescribes, I was missing the D. Which is to say I wasn't Distilling the ideas from texts I was reading.

This is where Ted Gioia comes in. His post breaking down his notetaking process inspired me to try a few new things to help me capture, learn and express ideas from the books I read.

Firstly, there's marginalia. For someone with pretty extreme OCD, the thought of writing in the margins of a book is horrifying. But, as my therapist says, I need to sit with that feeling of discomfort. So I'm trying it out. I'm underlining quotes and adding my own thoughts and ideas as I read. As Gioia writes, the benefit of doing this is that it makes me look out for key passages. He also talks about how returning to these books after reading is enhanced by this type of note-taking. "The greater benefit happens later—when I return to that book months or years after I read it. Now my markings allow me to re-experience all my initial impressions."

Then there's the book summary. A Gioia writes, "When I finish a book, the temptation is to start another one. (Don’t laugh, that’s what temptation looks like in my placid life.) But it’s useful to spend a couple more hours writing a brief summary of the book." I've never done this before, I give into that temptation to read another book.

The outcome of giving in to this temptation is that I am forgetting what I've just read and miss out on any of the potential ideas that it may spark. Gioia continues that the book summary “helps me mentally process what I’ve learned, and also serves as a useful guide later when I want to revisit the subject."

Then there's the king of all the notetaking techniques that Gioia espouses. Writing down all the ideas that the book inspired. "I didn’t start doing this with any consistency until I was approaching middle age," he says. "But this is the most powerful kind of note-taking of them all."

So this is what I've done. I've built an Area in my Notion called 'The Library' where I have a database for all the books I've read and want to read. Then, I built a template that asks a few key questions to prompt a book summary as suggested by Gioia. Drawing on the marginalia in each text, I'll produce detailed summaries that will help me formulate my own ideas. Then, I can move these notes into the relevant Projects, Areas or Resources where they might, as Gioia puts it, "serve as the building blocks for my own articles and books."

So, as you can see, this is all a work in progress. The system I am building is one that prioritises simplicity. It is designed to help me organise my thoughts more coherently in order to help me create more. This system is directly responsible for my having written and published two posts a week here on Substack for most of 2023 and it will be the reason why that output continues and evolves into the future. Because, as James Clear puts it, "You do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems."