The notes are the least important part of what youâre doing when you are writing, but weâre so conditioned to value results over process. That feeling that your notes (results) are not worth the effort, is your analytical mind asserting its importance over the writing (process), which you clearly feel is the more important part. Our analytical mind tends to do that. Itâs very egocentric and dominant. Itâs not even funny how deep this imbalance sits with our results-oriented culture. For note-taking you want to be process-oriented, open-minded, and explorative.
If you are following the Zettelkasten technique, as explained in How to Take Smart Notes, you will likely also experience how breaking longer notes down into smaller ones and linking them to each other is also more valuable than what you end up with in each note (not saying that thatâs completely irrelevant, just the least important of all those things). Doing this religiously over a long time will get you to a point where you can âhave a conversationâ with your former self by following trails through your notes, if you achieve a certain density of connections, thereby feeding your current thinking process with new (old) ideas. It takes a while for enough small notes to accumulate and be linked to each other (and your mind to forget about enough of them) to experience that effect.
Youâre investing in a network of materialized ideas, and most of the value is in the network of connections not the nodes and in how your mind reconnects to your writing, not in the words that are in the files or the database. Thatâs counter-intuitive to the world we live in, where process is just the necessary evil to get to results, and where we want to optimize process away as much as we can. But when we talk about thinking, all the magic is in the (sometimes horrendously inefficient) process.
@Jonas makes a good point that there are of course types of notes (which is clearly not a well-defined term), that can also be valuable by themselves. Perhaps youâre publishing some of your notes for others to read in a digital garden style public notebook. Then of course they should probably be written with your audience in mind, giving readers a chance to understand what you mean. That is more like classic writing, where of course the words themselves become more important. At that point however youâre no longer really note taking and more editing and publishing.