[Tiny Experiment] Intentional Slowed Note-taking Workflow
Choosing when to take notes, rewatching and letting go of ideas.
Experiment Declaration
Every day for a week, I am going to pick a piece of content and rewatch / reread according to this procedure.
Listen while doing something mindless physically (because this is the best way for me to pay attention to what I am listening to). E.g. Sewing or making coffee. Not allowed to take notes in this phase.
If it was inspiring, rewatch. This time, sit with a notebook.
I will keep an experiment log and post a note every day to document how the experiment is progressing.
Documentation
Every day I should be producing the notes on the content I have rewatched and my evaluation of how doing this experiment affects me.
Tiny Experiment Evaluation
Example of Content Notes
I will organize these by date as third level heading, in a log file for the entire experiment.
Each idea (see the colored markings in the photograph) in my notes, will require evaluation (should I make this into a note) and expansion into a zettel. So I expect this to take a few days.
Here are my answers to the questions
This is my process for working with the notes.
You can see that I was inspired to try out a new style of thinking on a whiteboard.
I am trying to group the ideas from the notes in this stage of processing. Which is why I have the need to look perfect from the first part of the video put together with socially prescribed perfectionism in the second part of the video. As I type out the notes, I strike out the ones that I have already set into my canvas.
I have been very tempted to do some form of AI or OCR on the notes so I can just get the text instead of having to type it out, but for now I am typing and finding that this does help internalize the ideas.
I struggle with doing this because I really hate inefficient manual workflows. The programmer in me is going, there is a smarter way to do this, but I think the struggle is important for my intellectual development.
I actually really do love what comes out of doing this process, which is where I try to voice my nonlinear ideas and as you can see here I elaborate more when I am dictating it out and the process of going from linear to nonlinear really helps me further develop the idea.
I am very smoothly making Zettels.
It is a bit tiring. So I am taking a break here.
Next day, process more notes.
Today, answer the other question.
Details, Considerations & Expectation
Based off my experience with my previous tiny experiment of making a Zettel everyday, I feel like this will be a rather exhausting process, but one that will drive me to be very active and inspired in the next week. I may go to the library again, or end up watching videos using my VR headset.
I am going to relax the constraints of the experiment in the sense that I don't have to watch a new piece of content every day. I am allowed to take some time away from the material, come back and revisit it (in the spirit of this experiment.
So re-watching and thinking upon a video or a chapter might take several days as long as I engage in the activity of re-watching the same piece of content and thinking about it for that day, I have succeeded.
My base requirement, is that I answer all the questions by the next day.
Experience Feedback
A problem came up in Step 3: Where I put my physical notes into my Obsidian Zettelkasten
As I try to move my notes from the physical notebook (pictures) to obsidian zettels, I realized that the short sentences that I took while I was listening to the video was not actually enough for me to capture the idea. I cannot remember what I was thinking.
This is pretty much the worst nightmare of anybody trying to capture notes for knowledge work.
I'm still keeping to the experiment protocol and just trying to manage this by accepting that some ideas are not that important. Also, by doing another round of re-watching the content and trying to expand on the notes that I have here.
I can tell, this experiment is going to be heavy on the rewatching.
The goal of taking notes used to be that you wouldn't need to read the original content again, saving you time. But now my philosophy is that I want to internalize the information to my mental model, and so any efforts to work with the information and wrestle with the concepts is good. Forgetting and working to remember is beneficial.
There is no such thing as an unproductive approach to note-taking because the process of working with the ideas is the goal.