WPenner's Blog

MVP in this brief article does not mean "Most Valuable Player", but "Minimum Viable Product". It's an idea from Lean Manufacturing: What is the smallest possible solution that meets all the needs?

Lots of ink has been spilled on the power and technique of note taking, including a 700+ page how-to manual for taking notes on index cards! There are massive online debates about every nuance. We're going to try the opposite: what is the smallest version of note taking that meets the needs for productive note taking?

The Requirements

In order to know if we have an MVP that meets our needs, we're going to need to be clear about what those needs are. I'm going to make a few assumptions…

1. the goal of note taking is to produce more content of a higher quality.
   1. This means we're not just collecting information.
   2. We're not archiving things we've read / watched / heard.
   3. We're collecting only what will later be useful for clarifying our thinking, producing more original content and making our output faster and more prolific.
2. the tool is irrelevant to the process. Don't get caught up in the software or hardware. Any tool 60% productive and improving over time is good enough to start.
   4. If you want to use note cards, do it.
   5. if you prefer a digital system, use it. This system can work with Microsoft Word, Evernote, Obsidian, Apple Notes, Pages, Notion, and any other tool that allows you to a) create a title for notes and b) create links between notes.
   6. If you want a cross between analog and digital, go for it.
3. illustrating the process will be done in digital, but should be easily expandable to analogue systems. The exception is that techniques later in this series are digital only, leveraging some benefits digital has over analogue. Consider these are optional.

MVP Introduction

Here's an example of the simplest note I can imagine:

This is a very trivial note, but demonstrates two important principles.

1. It contains only 1 idea.
2. It has a title which to help find it in the future.

This note might belong to a cluster of notes:

In the file navigation, this set of notes' titles form a collection:

Note Atomic Idea
Note Definition
Note Example

Notice the keywords developing in this set of notes: Note, Definition, Example, Atomic, Idea. The file navigation system organizes these titles in alphabetical order for us.

As this structure develops, we notice that our collection of notes form a cluster of ideas which relate to what academics call "personal knowledge management (PKM)". We could then restructure the keywords in our notes' titles to better illustrate the branch of knowledge and how each note relates to each other.

1. Note Atomic Idea -> PKM Definition Note Atomic Idea
2. Note Definition -> PKM Definition Note
3. Note Example -> PKM Example Note

We now have the following cluster of notes:

PKM Definition Note
PKM Definition Note Atomic Idea
PKM Example Note

If you are more visual, think of PKM as the beginning of a branch of a tree. On that branch is a sub-branch of definitions and another of examples. The note titles create a kind of mind map. As we add more notes about notes, they would probably expand the set of keywords beyond definitions and examples. Each additional note adds leaves to a branch, turns a leaf into a branch or even turns a minor branch into a major one.

Does it fly?

Since we said the primary goal of our MVP note taking system is to produce content as efficiently as effectively as possible, let's take our current system for a test drive.

Our process is to start writing¹ something. We'll bring our notes' content into our draft with copy and paste. Then we'll edit the draft to fit the context.

To whom it may concern,

I am delighted to tell you about this note taking system I'm learning.
It all starts with a note.

>This is a note.

A note is a document or file that contains an atomic idea.
An atomic idea is written as a paraphrase of an idea, ready to be published, which contains all the information required to combine it with other notes in an intelligible manner.

Your faithful servant,
…

Okay, this example is extremely contrived, but so too are our example notes. Even with simple copy and paste, this first draft mostly makes sense.

Now, let's take a minute to edit it into better shape.

To whom it may concern,

I am delighted to tell you about this note taking system I'm learning.
It all starts with a note, an example of which looks like this:

>This is a note.

The main idea is that a note is a document or file that contains an atomic idea.

By "atomic idea" we mean a document containing a paraphrase of an idea. 
It should be a paraphrase ready to be published, containing all the information required to combine it with other notes intelligibly.

Your faithful servant,
…

Ah, that's more readable! And the entire process is extremely quick because instead of starting from scratch, we had ready-made content to apply to our writing.

Changing Structure

I've proposed using keywords in order to create note structures by filing the notes in alphabetical order. A question arises, though: can I change the keywords?

The reasons to change keywords I can imagine include:

• working on a project that gives the note a new context;
• seeing how notes relate that wasn't clear before;
• seeing the meaning of a note differently.

In analogue systems (i.e. paper and pens) such changes can be difficult. Writing in pen makes changing messy or cramped as we cross out and squeeze in new keywords. Writing in pencil to make changes easy risks losing the keywords entirely is the years fade and friction with other papers rubs off the writing.

Arguing by analogy is almost always suspect, but I'll risk it here: earlier I said we can think of our body of notes, and the clusters of notes created by keywords, as a tree with branches and leaves. Some people never change keywords; they like the natural look of the tree they're cultivating. Other people constantly change keywords and thereby the structure of the tree itself. They are Mr. Miyagi, the bonsai gardener from The Karate Kid, carefully improving the functional and aesthetic structure of the tree through years of tending.

Personally, I find benefit from tending my tree. I'm comfortable with the fact that my first thought is rarely my best idea; good thinking, like good writing, involves significant re-thinking. So, I have a personal rule to improve a note, every time I touch it. Sometimes that means improving the keywords and the resulting structure of my tree.

Other people claim that the wildness of their tree helps to keep things straight in their mind because the cards are always where they expect. To me, that feels like the same cope of people with a messy desk who believe they can find everything on it, despite research revealing the opposite is most likely true. I'd much rather put cards where I'm most likely to find them again than leave them stranded in obscurity.

The point, though, is to do what is best for you.

Proposal

My proposal is that this minimalist version of note taking, with just note content and a title containing cleverly arranged, structured keywords, is enough for most writing projects. The greatest 20th century example of a productive person using this note taking technique, Nikolas Luhmann, used a technique with index cards not much more sophisticated. He managed to be one of the most productive intellectuals of his era. (To be fair, his system used number/letter combinations as short-hand for keywords and featured an extensive index).

That means if you implemented only this MVP, you would have enough of a system to become extremely productive. If you want to move beyond analogue systems, though, there are some tricks I can show you. As we explore those ideas in upcoming installments of this guide, the focus on keeping our system reduced to the smallest set of techniques and the largest results will continue. If you're ready for that, check out the next instalment of the PKM Guide: Notes as Thinking Tools.