On a sunny spring day, during the lunch break, we were playing football in the schoolyard and got scolded by the vice principal. That evening, our last two classes were geometry. Our teacher was explaining Euclidean relations, repeatedly stating the formulas for us to write down and emphasizing how important it was to take notes. While loudly and clearly repeating the formulas, he made eye contact with me, saw that I wasn’t taking notes, and, with a slight hint of frustration, continued the lesson.
The next day, I asked my teacher a question in the teachers’ lounge. Before answering, he scolded me, saying this is what happens when I don’t take notes. Then, he asked me what I had scored on the first exam. My score was fine though, and he didn’t really like that, and told me that that grade was much more than what I deserve. :) (Disclaimer: He’s a very good teacher, a disciplined mentor and contributed a lot to my growth both personally and academically. The only reason I am mentioning this is to emphasize I really wasn’t into taking notes.)
But why wasn’t I just taking notes instead of bearing all these? Because, in my view, note-taking was not only meaningless but even harmful. While taking notes, I couldn’t think about what the teacher was saying, which meant I wasn’t truly understanding it. However, if I just listened and comprehended, I wouldn’t need to take notes anyway. And frankly, memorizing a few formulas didn’t require writing them down.
As a result, the notebooks we excitedly bought the day before school started would return home at the end of each year almost completely unused. Things weren’t much different in university either. I wasn’t too involved with notes — I simply listened to the lectures and tried to understand. If I didn’t, I’d find another professor’s lecture online and listen to that instead.
This habit naturally carried over into my professional life.
But over the years, I found myself in a completely different place. Shortly after starting work, I realized just how important note-taking actually is. My reasons are as follows:
- In your education, your note taking affects only you. You can rely on your memory, and if you forget something, you might get a lower grade and that is fine. But in professional life, forgetting something can negatively impact not just you but also other people.
- Throughout the day, there are dozens of tasks to complete and many people to talk to. However, both your time and theirs are limited. Not everyone is always available to answer your questions, and no one wants to be DMed nine times a day about different things. So, the 15 minutes you spend with someone are precious, and to use that time effectively, it’s crucial to organize everything related to that person beforehand and discuss each topic in an orderly manner.
- I hate the feeling of “I had something on my mind.” Our work is already mentally exhausting — I’d rather have my thoughts on paper so my mind can be at ease.
- I don’t like to be told same thing twice. If someone is explaining something to me, I ask questions until I fully understand, take notes, and refer to them later instead of asking again.
- I don’t like wasting 15 seconds in a daily stand-up trying to remember, “What did I do yesterday…” and keeping everyone waiting.
- In almost every meeting I attend, there’s something I need to follow up on afterward (ask this person that, write this to someone, etc.), and I don’t want to clutter my mind trying to remember it all.
Because of all these reasons, I take notes constantly throughout the day. At first, I had a single notebook where I wrote everything down. But soon, it became unmanageable. Not only did the notebooks fill up quickly, but it was also impossible to tell where anything was, and my handwriting was often unreadable.
Realizing that this wasn’t working, I switched to taking notes on my computer, creating a new “txt” file for each topic every day. This method was more effective than the first one, but it still lacked cross-referencing between notes. And unlike writing in a notebook, opening an editor to take notes wasn’t always convenient.
Then, I got a reMarkable 2. This was very similar to my first method, but since the notes were stored digitally, I could access everything at any time. I could create as many different notebooks as I wanted, and if I needed to view my notes on my computer, I could email them to myself. With a little effort to improve my handwriting, I thought I had finally solved my note-taking problem. This method worked well for a long time, but there was still one fundamental issue: the lack of cross-referencing. Even though my notes were somewhat organized and quick to take, finding a note I had written about “X” a month ago was still difficult.
Recently, I came across a note-taking tool while exploring the sponsors of an open-source scholarship: Roam Research. I’ll leave the link for those who want to explore the details, but in essence, you can think of it as a bidirectional graph. Anything you put inside [[ ]] creates a link, and when you click on that link, you can see everywhere you’ve referenced it across different notes. In fact, the collections of notes themselves are called “graphs.” The advantage is simple but huge — every note I take about “X” has a clear location. When I click on the “X” tag, I can effortlessly see what I noted on different days. It’s like assigning a “progress bar” to everything I’ve left unfinished or plan to revisit later. I feel like I can express everything on my mind in Roam, and I think that’s the most crucial feature of a note-taking tool. Like it is not perfect enough, Roam is also developed in Clojure💚.
Nowadays, if I have access to my computer or phone, I take notes directly in Roam. My reMarkable is always with me for times when I can’t use a computer, and at the end of the day, I sync my reMarkable notes into Roam. I just wish Roam supported Vim shortcuts — maybe I’ll build that myself. 103th message pushed into my side project queue. I’ll poll that a day, maybe.
This combination works very well for me. If my old teacher, Mr. Osman, saw me now, he’d be proud.
One last note — I’ve also tried AI tools like ReadAI, but half of the notes they take are nonsense. Hopefully, one day, AI will actually be able to do what everyone claims it can. It did though translate this post from Turkish to English fine (I just had to make 14 edits, yes, I have counted).