---
title: Should I be taking notes?
date: 2025-02-19T20:13:12.232Z
slug: 2025-02-19-should-i-be-taking-notes
author: Thomas Wilson

---
If the YouTube content algorithm knows one thing about me, it's that I love [Second Brains](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hSTy_BInQs8) / [Smart Notes](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L9SLlxaEEXY) / [Digital Gardens](https://youtu.be/0tY7Z53QJo8?si=omJMjI8T_uThULcH).

I hear a lot more about these ideas from people who like ideas.  I don't hear a lot about them from people producing substantial creative output (whatever that means).  From people who make things (books, music, video games), I hear a lot more about *doing*.  

Ideas, no matter how intricate or interconnected, are cheap.  The number of people whose livelihood depends on them generating and connecting new ideas is, I would say, staggeringly small.  It is a small percentage of the relatively tiny population of knowledge workers. 

I think most people would be better served by learning to better articulate their ideas.  I understand that making notes can be a way to force that articulation or clarity.  But I think most people will look for specific rituals or practices because it's what they see other people doing (definitionally), or perhaps because it's easier, or because it's *something*.

I [wrote recently](/blog/2025-02-14-reading-more-challenging-books) about wanting to read more challenging books.  Presently, I am working through "*All Things are Full of Gods*" - a five-hundred page tome on philosophy of mind but also GOD (?).  It is slow going.  To stop and pick out every intricate piece, every new idea, would take an already very slow read and bring me functionally to a halt.  

I have a job, and a human body, and a marriage to maintain.  I do not have the *time* to make notes.  I would not *enjoy* making notes.  What would I do them for?  Nobody has *ever* asked me about teleology.  Not even once.

I am a software engineering leader with friends who are wildly uninterested in the nature of consciousness (a fact which evidently baffles me) or GOD (that one I get).  Should I be making notes on this book?  I *feel* like I should be making notes on this book, because everywhere the algorithm sees me look, it shows me people who are convinced that note taking in the right way will make writing books (?) an effortless task. 

Reader, it will not.  No amount of writing, including this very paragraph you are reading, is effortless.  Because my thoughts are LITERALLY AN INDESCRIBABLE MESS.  Sorry, I didn't mean to shout.  It's just that language is such an imperfect tool to express the inner human experience, or my absolute conviction that one cannot use it to describe much.  Explain a taste or a smell to someone, or hunger, or a dream where you were doing a photoshoot with the colour yellow.  I don't know dude, made sense to me at the time.

Sometimes language is just a flat out *bad* tool for it.  I believe this to the point where I soldier through a challenging (generous) or dense (not) book about the nature of consciousness and mind to see if that can do anything to explain the wild force that is the conscious mind.  

Being told that in my, surely by now clinically interesting, desire to understand this part of myself will be made somehow better by recording, and then correctly associating, the ideas washing around on the surface of my brain… I don't know, I sort of doubt it.

Should I be taking notes?  Sure, maybe.  

I am engaging in what appear to me as existential questions.  It feels strange to me that this experience of questioning is made somehow lesser by a nagging voice that I could be making notes about it.