📝 Note-Taking vs. Note-Making: Crafting a PKM That Thinks with You

In this edition of Practical PKM:

DaVinci’s diverse interests
Creativity and Mental Lego
How to know what’s useful
Note-taking versus note-making
My notes from Steal Like an Artist
Something cool: Obsidian Gems
Last call for the Practical PKM cohort

Have you ever taken the time to look through Leonardo DaVinci’s famed Codex Forster notebooks from the late 15th and early 16th centuries?

You can take a look here.

The whole collection shows the complete range of DaVinci’s mind-boggling diversity of interests. He studied everything from hydraulic engineering to botany to architecture to aerodynamics and even anatomy.

Some entries are simple observations about his surroundings, while others include sketches of ideas and inventions. But in spending even a few moments perusing DaVinci's journals, one thing is abundantly clear:

The man had a lot of interests.

But DaVinci isn't the only one who kept a book like this. Others like Marcus Aurelius and Benjamin Franklin have kept commonplace books — which is a fancy term for a place to collect bits of information derived from other sources.

People have been collecting the things they are curious about into commonplace books for hundreds of years, with Obsidian being my favorite digital version. IMHO it's the perfect place to capture and connect your own notes and ideas.

But regardless of the app or tool you decide to use, you need some place to capture what interests you. Because each note or idea you collect there is another mental Lego block you can use to create something new in the future.

Creativity and Legos

Information is the fundamental building block of everything you do.
— Tiago Forte

Believe it or not, there was a time when I thought I wasn’t creative. But that changed when I read Austin Kleon’s Steal Like An Artist because I realized that creativity was simply a system.

I realized that when I created something, I was really just remixing things. I was just connecting the dots in new and interesting ways.

So if I wanted my output to improve, I actually needed to focus on the input and collect better dots.

So I started being more intentional about the books that I was reading, the podcasts I was listening to, the videos I was watching, and the courses I was going through. I picked things that piqued my curiosity and I believed would have future value for me.

Quote from Steal Like an Artist by Austin Kleon

I tried to collect as many mental Lego bricks as I could, believing that creating would be easier in the future if I had more pieces to work with when I tried to sit down and put them back together.

How to know what's useful

There's no surefire way to tell when something is going to be important in the future when reading books, listening to podcasts, or consuming various forms of media.

But there are clues based on what is of interest to you currently.

So when I'm consuming content, I am paying attention to which things pique my curiosity.

In other words, I'm looking for things that resonate.

When something resonates, that's a signal that maybe there is something more here and I should drop a marker. I should take a note.

These are the types of things that we want to collect into our PKM systems. The ones that we are curious about. Not the ones the gurus say are important. The ones that cause a spark, that we can play with.

And when we start collecting these things, we need a place to organize them.

The difference between note-taking and note-making

There are two different kinds of information that you collect into your PKM system:

Things you just need to keep in an archive in case you need it later
Things that you will use again to make something new in the future

Both types of information will be in your PKM system, but not necessarily in the same app.

You need a place for meeting notes or documenting customer service issues you’re dealing with. These are notes you take. Things you archive, just in case you ever need to review something. But you won't be creating anything new with them.

This information becomes part of your digital archives and searching to find it will be a piece of cake, no matter the hierarchy your past self used when filing the information.

But these things don't belong in Obsidian. That's the place for note-making, and it requires a different process I call The Creativity Flywheel.

The TL;DR with The Creativity Flywheel is that you don't really know what an idea really is when you have it. You need to give it time to develop and collide it with other notes in your PKM system before you can see what you really have.

As you collect new information and ideas that resonate, you start to get a clearer picture as you add more pieces to the puzzle. As you create opinion notes, they help you evolve and crystallize your thinking about things.

But you need to start by capturing and cultivating the things you are curious about and find interesting.

Keep it simple

You may have heard about the Zettelkasten method, an index-card-based note-making system invented by German scientist Nicholas Lumens.

Zettelkasten gave Leumens the mental building blocks he needed for writing a lot of academic papers in a very short period of time (kind of his claim to fame).

But trying to implement your own Zettelkasten can be so overwhelming that you give up on making notes.

The structure of your system and your process is less important than the process of reviewing, reconnecting, and remixing ideas into notes.

In the beginning, you may add more junk than information that will ultimately be useful — but that's ok.

Over time, you’ll get better at identifying valuable pieces because you’ll see connections between new ideas and what you already have.

Consume what interests you. It will provide natural fodder for things that resonate.

Start looking for answers to questions you have already captured in your PKM.

And remember: everything in your PKM is a work in progress and can be messy. Don't worry about it! The goal isn't to have a perfectly organized system. The goal is to make sense of things.

Focus on capturing your ideas and your thoughts, and trust that future-you will uncover something of great value.

Something Cool: Obsidian's Gems of the Year for 2023

In a recent Twitter post (I refuse to call it X) Obsidian posted a great list of all the finalists for the Obsidian Gems of the year. All of the finalists are organized by category, and I found some real gems inside the Best New Plugin category. Here's a list of the finalists with Obsidian Share links (opens in Obsidian) to the plugins so you can check them out for yourself if you're interested.

Book Notes: Steal Like an Artist

As I mentioned briefly up above, Austin Kleon's Steal Like an Artist was a very influential book for me. This book helped me to realize that creativity is a formula and the output I was achieving was simply the natural result of the dots I had been collecting.

After reading this book, I realized that if I wanted to be more creative, I just needed to collect better dots. My brain was going to connect them in new and interesting ways, and eventually, when I collected enough quality dots, my output would naturally improve.

(Spoiler alert: that's exactly what happened.)

It's not a hyperbole to say that this book changed my life.

My notes from Steal Like an Artist by Austin Kleon

And if you want to download my notes, click this link.

—Mike

Practical PKM