4 types of notes
There are 4 different types of notes, and it is my belief your notetaking habits should revolve around these fairly unchanging set of rules, in a 2x2 matrix form
When I say
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“polluted notes”, these are generally sources of information that do not have an outstanding amonut of structure for long duration of notes
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Unpolluted notes are well organized from the get-go normally
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Internal driven notes are simply things where you drive the actions to jot down notes
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External driven notes are outside sources that prompt you to take notes
You can categorize every form of note you take in dynalist in one of these 4 sections. If you look back at that diagram, I have labeled each number for reference:
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Externally driven + polluted notes: These are notes that you should think twice before verbatimi adding it into your dynalist notes. These are the worst types of notes to have, and have a huge amount of waste to them. You should be nitpicking notes from external sources here. For instance, reddit.com . Its very externally driven and polluted sincei there’s a lot of garbage on reddit, but a lot of good things too. TL;DR : think twice before adding these notes / referring back to them, a vast majority of it is garbage. The good parts should be placed into #3
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Internally driven + polluted notes - These are your daily sprints. These are your pomodoros inside daily sprints. It is also your task management as well, since you don’t know how many tasks you are going to have and how many you will do. These notes need to be inherently organized by a fixed parameter like how I do it [✪ year→ ✪ week# → ✪ tag → ✪ notes] to bring order to it. Each ✪ tag is treated as a pomodoro. TL;DR: these notes are valuable to look back upon at the end of the week, but are poor to use as long term reference manuals, since only a small % of these notes are valuable. These notes are also subsequently where you generate the most number of ideas. The important parts should be dumped in #3
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Internally driven + unpolluted notes - These are your wikis, your SOP (Standard operating procedure), your personal-how-to-guides. If you’ve ever read a well organized / written blog, that blogger is treating their blog as internally driven + unpolluted notes. Subsequently some treat is as number 2, those blogs tend to be called “personal blogs”. Also, whenever you write a cheat sheet before a test, this is internally driven + unpolluted as well. TL;DR - These notes are the most valuable to look back upon indefinitely, and generally get slowly but methodically added over time
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Externally driven + unpolluted notes - These are your course notes. Notes on very technical youtube videos at least 10 minutes long generally, or playlist of youtube videos. Or lynda.com courses, udacity, personal professional development seminars, etc etc. These are also your book course notes from textbooks, notes from self-help books on kindle. They are unpolluted since they follow a well defined structure, defined by the source. TL;DR: These notes can generally get extremely long, and are good to look through when you need to find an answer to a difficult problem. They aren’t as good as number 3 for reference, and the important bits should be placed into #3
You should identify which type of notes you have. Each style of notes should be seperated by a different dynalist doc or folder. Or even a different app all together