the “art journal”/“improve your creative work” school of note-taking. The purpose of notes in this school of thought is to improve the quality of your output and that’s unfortunately a very, very different thing from productivity because, quite often, making things better means being less productive:
- More time polishing.
- Letting the notes and the work rest.
- Doing the work to build up an emotional connection to the topic.
- Stepping back and giving yourself time to try to get a broader overview.
- The kind of pattern recognition and understanding you develop for a topic by writing deliberately aimless notes, ones you get from writing without a purpose or path.
- Looking at the work others do and taking in how it works as a whole.
- Exploring that work by engaging with it on its own terms.
I like this framing for how I use some of my own notes. They don’t need to “make me productive” because (from this article):
the likeliest cause of any increase in productivity is my decision to try to be more productive in the first place
And so I need to focus on actually producing something (with input from the notes) rather than making more notes. The notes are not the product. Engaging with the notes is a process through which I can engage with sources and get to ideas that I can publish and improve my writing/coding/etc.