Goal: Spend time on reading and writing, not maintaining or organizing.
How: Flat notes, hierarchical blocks.
Workflow: Write and let go. Search for it when you need it.
Folders or tags ❌. Flat notes and searching ✅.
Folders and tags keep you organizing, keeping you from actually getting things done or learning something new.
Flat note format ❌. Outliner (tree) ✅.
For readers:
An outliner makes the logical relationship between concepts much clearer.
For writers:
An outliner encourages you to think about or discover the relationship between concepts. As a result, while you are writing,
you reason and come up with new thoughts.
Pure Markdown ❌. Tree-based data model ✅.
You can’t put multi-line text (quote and code blocks) as a list item in an ordinary Markdown app reliably.
Removing space-consuming and unnecessary concepts like headings also make the note more space efficient, minimal, and readable.
Suggestions
A bookmark collector/highlighting in books ❌. A notebook for saving links or pasting external text ✅.
Not every external source is true, let alone in your situation. By highlighting in a book itself, you are assuming everything it said is true. What if two sources have contradictory opinions?
By integrating external sources in your note, you can easily organize them based on the relationship and ultimately form your
thought or conclusion.
Inklake