# Is Note-taking a favor or a burden to my future-self?

Notetaking isn’t just for recalling things you read in a book. I’m principally interested in recording good ideas, tactics, or facts that help me do and finish tasks well.  
  
Although, if you’re in the habit of reading great authors, that’s a pretty good reason to take notes. Why reinvent the wheel, especially if you have access to the best ideas in history? However, the impetus for notes includes so many sources other than books. The impetus can come from conversations, lectures, your own stream of consciousness, and even dreams.[^nc2mhmfibv9]

Notetaking, when successful, moves the burden of searching for information, or thinking from some point in the future to now. You’re outsourcing your future self’s thinking and searching to the present (and, potentially, a third party whom you’re quoting or paraphrasing).

Write too many notes, and the opposite happens. An excess of notes burdens your future-self, making them responsible for sorting and evaluating your notes, on top of deliberating how to best do the task these notes relate to. 

I’m a lousy notetaker and a prolific one. I have a huge collection of digital notes, clippings, paraphrases, essay-ettes and memos, amassed over the decades. And hardly any of it ever influenced an important deliberation. This is almost certainly because I have it ass-backwards: instead of outsourcing my future self’s thinking and searching to the time I took or wrote each note. I’ve instead burdened my future self with, what appears to be, rubbish.

> "Oh cool, Castle Bryant Johnston are the firm that did the opening titles of Cheers? *I'll figure out how this information is useful later..."*

There won't be a later...  
  
Broadly, the solution is simple, **"just think more now”.** More *now*? But *how*!?  
It's another of those annoying "devil in the details" "[draw the rest of the owl](https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/how-to-draw-an-owl)" situations.

I’m currently trying to develop tactics and rituals to put that into practice. The solution, counterintuitively doesn’t seem to be “I need an easier way to keep notes” or something an app can solve. Writing notes haphazardly, inspired by any seemingly interesting thought or quote, is probably only adding to the mountain of trash.[^jrq2xxohyo] And further burdening my future self to sort through it. I suspect the solutions looks more like [how to learn soft skills](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ZGzDNfNCXzfx6hYAH/how-to-learn-soft-skills) \- emphasis on using notes as launching points. And similarly [Murphyjitsu](https://www.lesswrong.com/w/murphyjitsu) \- imagine I put the note into practice, the outcome was bad, why?

[^nc2mhmfibv9]: Notes can be non-verbal. Graphs and symbols can be notes. Playing a guitar riff into your phone recorder that you may later write a song around is a note. Sketching a hand or a facial expression as a study for a painting is a note. There is a superficial overlap to pins on Pinterest and fashion moodboards. 

[^jrq2xxohyo]: Not an original idea at all, here I outsource (emphasis mine):"People have this aspirational idea of building a vast, oppressively colossal, deeply interlinked knowledge graph to the point that it almost mirrors every discrete concept and memory in their brain. And I get the appeal of maximalism. But they’re counting on the wrong side of the ledger. Every node in your knowledge graph is a debt. Every link doubly so. The more you have, the more in the red you are."Unbundling Tools for Thought - Fernando Borretti