I’ve been thinking about notetaking and processes for turning information to meaning all year. That is, I’m always thinking about meaning-making, how to understand things, but especially this year, I’ve been looking at the intersections between meaning-making and how I process information.

It may have started from envy.

How did other people write curated newsletters with summaries of ten or more links, every single week? How did thinkers I admire synthesize ideas from various disciplines, linking to various texts and other sources, to come up with fresh ideas and arguments—again, every single week?

What did they have that I didn’t have?

They didn’t read more than I did, I was pretty sure, although they might read more purposefully or more widely.

They probably didn’t even write more than I did, although at the time my writing was more cautious, more in the realm of personal essays than ideas, because that felt safer—while it was more exposed, the personal terrain made it harder for anyone to disagree with facts or interpretation.

They must be doing something differently, I decided. Maybe they were on Twitter, like everyone was telling me I needed to be?

Fortunately, Sarah M. Chappell’s excellent Anxiety-Driven Research Series spelled it all out for me. Sarah had a process for researching and connecting her ideas, and that was how she came up with such good ones.

My takeaways from her piece:

• Research, but don’t let yourself go too far down the rabbit hole. Trust yourself to know when to stop, and trust yourself to know that it’s okay to write publicly without reading every single thing about a topic, which is impossible anyway.
• Curate the information you take in—decide what you find relevant or important, “using the original algorithm, your mind,” and save it for later, both so that you can properly attribute and so that you can digest this content at a suitable time, rather than scrolling through whatever social media throws at you.
• Engage with the information—highlight things, make notes of what connections or questions or examples arise.
• Use your research by putting it in relationship—both by putting your notes in relationship to each other, and by using these to come up with and communicate ideas.

I liked this quote from near the end of her series:

When all is said and done, collecting information is a disembodied act because collection alone is without context. It is only when the information is put into conversation, when it does draw on our memory, when it activate aliveness, that it can be rematerialized again.

Chappell also generously explained exactly how she does each step, including the specific apps she uses.

After reading Chappell’s series, I started saving and highlighting online articles (I tried Instapaper and Readwise Reader for this, before settling on Omnivore) and made a more conscious effort to highlight while reading on Kindle. I then set up all of these highlights to sync into Obsidian.

(The reason I hadn’t been highlighting much on Kindle before, despite using Kindle for years, was that I didn’t see the point because I never looked at the highlights afterward. It truly never occurred to me that maybe I could adjust the other side of that equation—making it worthwhile to create the highlights by setting up a process or workflow to make sure I did review them later.)

I downloaded Obsidian and it changed everything for my writing. It synced to my phone. I could type on my phone while nursing my baby. I could voice-record notes. Everything synced in from Kindle. There were folders and tags and plugins to set things up for longform writing or to organize smaller notes into projects.

I realized that what had seemed like a willpower issue—(why am I not writing?) or an intelligence issue (am I not smart enough?) or a time issue (when can I write, I have a baby)—was really an issue of workflow and tools.

I wished I had seen this sooner. I wished I had been given the tools or ways of thinking to even diagnose this as the problem, rather than just thinking I must be blocked.

I wished I had been given a way to imagine beyond how I was interacting with my own reading and writing and to imagine tools and approaches that might serve me better.

In Duly Noted: Extend Your Mind Through Connected Notes, Jorge Arango writes:

Carpenters work best when they have the right tools and materials when they need them. Their workshops provide focus, shelter, ventilation, and lighting, among other things. Carpenters configure these places to make their jobs easier. The right mix of tools, processes, and place enable states of mind conducive to good work. You, too, must make space for good work. By “space,” I don’t necessarily mean a physical space (although it helps to have a quiet place to work). Instead, I mean a collection of tools and processes that support your work and which you can “go into” to do focused work.

Although as a writer, I’d always had my various writing habits or rituals—my notebooks, my file organizations, my methods for revising, my preferred places to write outside the home, my freewriting prompts, my Scrivener software—I’d never thought about it quite like this.

About having a collection of tools and processes set up to support my work—not just the writing, but also the idea collection, the sorting, the thinking.

And about how to diagnose what tools or processes were missing when something was wrong. It’s so easy to say “writer’s block,” or to say, “do morning pages!” but how could I teach myself to get to the underlying reason why I felt I wasn’t having ideas or had nothing to say or had no time?

How could I envision the need for tools and processes that I didn’t know existed? How could I shift from the shame-based “I’m so lazy, I must try harder!” mindset to one that believed that maybe the problem wasn’t with me, but with my setup, tools and workflows?

(to be continued)