Note taking process towards an end

Purpose is one perspective you might take when researching note-taking and the tools at your disposal. Another is process.

Baldur reduces all note-taking into three steps: Collect, Contextualize, and Map.

Collect

The first step is simply to get the note into your repository. Whether it’s a cardboard box or a digital Kanban board, the priority is speed and reference.

Contextualize

This step will have different needs depending on the writer’s purpose. Creativity, strewn with sketches, colors and objects, needs a tactile way to shuffle items into piles/buckets. Knowledge, with its data-driven records, favors automation and hard links between distinct objects. Understanding, with its networks and inter-relationships, lands somewhere between the two, with both tactile and hard links serving to build a structure of interrelated ideas.

Map

Most note-taking I’ve seen stops at conceptualize. The concept of a Map of Content is the closest correlary, where notes within a context may grow into a directory which could be developed as a paper or blog post. Baldur describes the map as a distinct step towards an end product, not an aggregated conceptualization.

Self-Assessment

In my system, collection happens via quips. Contextualization is not automated and is handled both by tags, which offer a bucket-style organization, and backlinks, which are hard references between entries. Mapping is a fuzzier concept in my system, but gardens are the closest correlary. My gardens were started after-the-fact as a way to aggregate entries under a common heading. I could also consider starting a garden with the intent of filling it with ideas.