organising chaotic thoughts

for the longest time i was useless at taking notes, until maybe the last couple years my best effort for note-taking was a couple scribbles on the back of some printer paper- i would then go on to lose that scrap.

nowadays i use obsidian - @obsdmd on x

obsidian uses markdown for content, and the editing experience is very modern. all of the notes aim to be portable, so if you decided to stop using obsidian tomorrow you would have everything readily available as .md files and not some sort of binary blobs

the reason i’m writing this post at all is a common desire to “get into” note taking, as if it is some long winding path against the steepest angle of an insurmountable cliffside. i shared this feeling before, so i’m dumping what i know

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first steps

go and download obsidian, install it, create a vault, create a new file

congratulations. you are now officially a note-taker

that really is all there is to it, you could continue on from here just creating new markdown notes as inspiration strikes, that might be good enough for most people honestly

how to take notes

this might sound silly, but really this is the core of everything, note taking isn’t just one “thing”, it is a multi-dimensional matrix of preference and style influenced by goals, personality, subject matter, even things as minor-seeming as favourite colour

for those of us in the programming world we know this too well, one’s code editor setup both visually and functionally almost becomes a facet of our identity, even the smallest visual hitch can be the difference between hours of comfortable development, and being unable to focus due to that nagging internal voice repeating “something is off here..”

maybe just me

due to all of the above i would suggest first digging around in the settings, find a theme you like or make your own, go hit every switch in every menu until you have an experience you want to take part in. jokes aside i don’t think this is pseudo-productive behaviour- i believe this is crucial

know your tools, get the feeling right, and then the real work can begin

okay now how to really take notes

once you have sufficiently tinkered you can start taking notes, but you still don’t know how to actually write them

luckily nobody does. as part of this stage i want to encourage you to go and type “obsidian second brain”, or “how take notes obsidian”, or “obsidian zettelkasten” into youtube

what you will find is a thousand different ways to do everything, even in the same program there is so much available for different opinions of note taking, this can be really overwhelming

what i suggest at this point, and any further point in the future where you decide to dig in a bit deeper:

treat this vault as expendable, this is not the final product- this is a prototype.

so now we have a prototype vault, the content doesn’t matter, this is now not “serious” and more just a learning experience

links

this is my favourite concept and has really changed the way i take notes, my whole life used to be inside a shoddily organised git repo and i would constantly lose things and double-up on content

links change the game here.

so first the syntax, a link in obsidian uses the [[wikilink]] format, anything inside of those double square brackets is a link to another page, so your first page could have a link to [[Cow]] and another to [[Farming]], then the note you have about farming can link to cow, and vice-versa, forming a connection between these otherwise unrelated blobs of text

these links can go anywhere, and even more usefully the page that they link to doesn’t need to exist for a link to exist, try to create a [[Chicken]] link wherever you now are, and then click it. if you are following along you might now be starting to understand why this is so powerful

my current favourite note-taking technique involves creating an entry.md file as my starting point, then creating dead links to things i want to look into. i have rules about my links though, these rules formed over many months of slight friction, they are:

• all links must be capitalised ([[cow]] becomes [[Cow]])
• all links must be singular ([[Cows]] becomes [[Cow]])
• if a concept is specifically different in the current context to the standard context then add brackets to help split the concept ([[Paragraph]] for COBOL would become [[Paragraph (Cobol)]] - sorry i couldn’t think of a better example)

this makes sure that all of the references line up correctly and i am never treading on my own toes, if i didn’t follow these rules then i would have [[vector]] link to both [[Vector (Logging)]] and [[Vector (Mathematics)]], and potentially a third [[vectors]] entry floating around.

keep your notes clean, if you take care of your note-taking system then it will take care of you

process

okay so that was a lot, but now we can start to form some of these ideas into a workflow we can follow to take notes effectively

i recently shared a very early image of my dive into machine learning, this kind of both wide and deep subject is where a note-taking system comes in clutch, the image i shared was using the “graph view” feature

i recommend opening graph view and pinning it to the side of your editor, this feature will let you view a network of your notes, you can see what connects to which notes as well as unconnected “floating” notes

my notes here look overwhelming but we can quickly visually grep that there are in fact only four files, the larger white nodes on the graph, the other grey nodes are all pages waiting to be created

this has always helped me take effective notes

starting from an “entry file” which can optionally be excluded from your graph like mine if you want a clean disconnect from the cleaner parts of your vault, you can create a link to the very top level concept, in my case this was [[Machine Learning]]- this is the reason we are here, the thing we want to know and understand deeply

while you could start writing blindly about every facet of your topic in this first page, more often than not we don’t know anything at this point, do we even know how to define the thing we are linking? seems like a good opportunity to dig deeper.

what i like to do at this point is create jumping off points that are “sub-topics” of the main subject, much like a book can contain a table of contents to let you jump around easily our notes can leverage the power of links to create something very similar

the easiest way to do this is to dig into the definition for your page, for machine learning this could look like this IBM definition:

Machine learning (ML) is a branch of artificial intelligence (AI) and computer science that focuses on the using data and algorithms to enable AI to imitate the way that humans learn, gradually improving its accuracy.

this is a great starting point, though it has been refined for easy consumption and therefore doesn’t contain much “jargon”. wikipedia is also pretty good but suffers from entirely the opposite problem of being so loaded with specific terminology that it is difficult to feel like any progress is being made, this initial definition is up to you, we can always change it later if it feels beneficial to do so

i would edit the above like this:

Machine learning (ML) is a branch of [[Artificial Intelligence]] (AI) and [[Computer Science]] that focuses on the using data and [[Algorithms]] to enable AI to imitate the way that humans learn, gradually improving its accuracy.

depending on your level in the general subject or related fields you may want to highlight more words, or less words, but for now these two are a good starting point

now we just repeat, jump into [[Artificial Intelligence]], find and add links to your definition, click one of your new links

repeat this process until you are only hitting topics that you already know well, this is what i call a “baseline”, once you find your baseline you jump up a step, repeat the process in there, exhaust all of your options like you are a video game character stumbling around in dark corridors, once that layer is complete work your way up again

if anything ever feels purposeless or useless then delete the page but not the link, we can revisit this in the future if there is merit in doing so later on, otherwise we leave an imprint of the concept as an anchor for further exploration

the last step is to flesh out each topic, write as you learn, create new keyword links and dive deeper later on, it is entirely fine to have a “junkyard” or “scratchpad” which you write in the moment and refine later on, if that works for you then great

recap

obviously it would be impossible to cover everything related to note-taking in a simple post like this, honestly i encourage you to get really meta and make an entry for “Note Taking”, explore, wander down youtube rabbit holes for math/science/medical/law students and their techniques, the help documentation is really good, find people who use obsidian and think about what they are doing and how they are organising

there is a whole plugin system and a very active community, config, keymaps, themes, techniques, automation, so much to dig into, and now you have the bare bones of a system with which you can explore note-taking through note-taking

to summarise the process again:

1. create a [[Topic]] link in your entrypoint file
2. click that link
3. grab a definition
4. edit the definition to have more [[Link]]s to sub-topics
5. go to (2)

if you hit a point of reasonable knowledge:

1. go back up a layer
2. exhaust all links on this layer using the above
3. go to (1)

really that is all there is to it, feel free to ask any questions if you have them (either as a comment or as a dm, either is fine), have fun digging deep

note to self: take more notes about note taking

〆 alia