Thanks Padmini. I am just getting into Roam Research and came across Zettelkasten and note taking. After reading many books, I too suffered not retaining much after reading. This is a good post to give me a good leg up in my note taking with Roam. Thank you.
Do you think it is really necessary to have literary notes vs permanent notes? Do you regularly go through literary notes and turn them into permanent notes?
I don't think it's necessary to have both. I see them as serving different purposes:
- Literary notes are notes you take as you read, to help you understand and reason about what you read. They're very tied to the source content.
- Permanent notes represent ideas you come up with yourself. They may be inspired by the literary notes you take or they could be random thoughts you get while jogging.
You can skip the permanent notes step if you only care about highlighting the main points of what you read to make it easier to reference them, and don't plan on building a network of ideas.
You can also skip the literary notes step if you want to be very selective on what you keep track of in your Roam notes, ie, if you _only_ want to store the big ideas.
In terms of workflow, I usually create permanent notes as I'm taking literary notes. I read, take notes, read, take notes, an interesting idea comes up, I create a permanent note, and go back to reading and taking notes.
Here's an example of a set of literary notes that are also all permanent notes. They're from a book I'm reading called Awareness, which talks about themes I care about a lot.
- [[I don't love a person, I love my idea of that person]]
- [[We want to be conditionally happy.]]
- [[You give power to everything you're fighting against.]]
Here are some of my literary notes for a blog post I read about writing. Lots of good ideas, but only a few big ideas that I wanted to add to my network.:
- Editing others’ work will help you filter the good, well-supported ideas from the bad.
- [[The mind is organized verbally.]] ----> the only permanent note here.
- Writing will help you live longer. Writing helps you think better. Better critical thinking and lower level of ignorance will reduce stress. Reduced stress means longer life.
- Set up a good workspace for writing.
- Best time to write is in the morning, after a good sleep and after food.
ok interesting, so it seems as you are taking literary notes you just process/write down things more directly related to the source, and if it's a "big idea" or makes you think of a big idea you turn it into [[big idea]] and then take some more notes in a dedicated page there?
Yes. One of the “features,” of a permanent note / big idea, is that you should be able to understand the idea in isolation, ie, without needing to read up on the source material.
For example, my permanent note “We want to be conditionally happy,” can exist in isolation from the book Awareness. The idea exists on its own and can be combined with other ideas.
If you look at my note for [[We want to be conditionally happy]], it contains my commentary on just that idea (without referencing the book), and links to other ideas.
Thanks Padmini. I am just getting into Roam Research and came across Zettelkasten and note taking. After reading many books, I too suffered not retaining much after reading. This is a good post to give me a good leg up in my note taking with Roam. Thank you.
Do you think it is really necessary to have literary notes vs permanent notes? Do you regularly go through literary notes and turn them into permanent notes?
I don't think it's necessary to have both. I see them as serving different purposes:
- Literary notes are notes you take as you read, to help you understand and reason about what you read. They're very tied to the source content.
- Permanent notes represent ideas you come up with yourself. They may be inspired by the literary notes you take or they could be random thoughts you get while jogging.
You can skip the permanent notes step if you only care about highlighting the main points of what you read to make it easier to reference them, and don't plan on building a network of ideas.
You can also skip the literary notes step if you want to be very selective on what you keep track of in your Roam notes, ie, if you _only_ want to store the big ideas.
In terms of workflow, I usually create permanent notes as I'm taking literary notes. I read, take notes, read, take notes, an interesting idea comes up, I create a permanent note, and go back to reading and taking notes.
Here's an example of a set of literary notes that are also all permanent notes. They're from a book I'm reading called Awareness, which talks about themes I care about a lot.
- [[I don't love a person, I love my idea of that person]]
- [[We want to be conditionally happy.]]
- [[You give power to everything you're fighting against.]]
Here are some of my literary notes for a blog post I read about writing. Lots of good ideas, but only a few big ideas that I wanted to add to my network.:
- Editing others’ work will help you filter the good, well-supported ideas from the bad.
- [[The mind is organized verbally.]] ----> the only permanent note here.
- Writing will help you live longer. Writing helps you think better. Better critical thinking and lower level of ignorance will reduce stress. Reduced stress means longer life.
- Set up a good workspace for writing.
- Best time to write is in the morning, after a good sleep and after food.
Thank you for asking this question!
ok interesting, so it seems as you are taking literary notes you just process/write down things more directly related to the source, and if it's a "big idea" or makes you think of a big idea you turn it into [[big idea]] and then take some more notes in a dedicated page there?
Yes. One of the “features,” of a permanent note / big idea, is that you should be able to understand the idea in isolation, ie, without needing to read up on the source material.
For example, my permanent note “We want to be conditionally happy,” can exist in isolation from the book Awareness. The idea exists on its own and can be combined with other ideas.
If you look at my note for [[We want to be conditionally happy]], it contains my commentary on just that idea (without referencing the book), and links to other ideas.