Notetaking is only thinking if something comes out of it
The usual claim is that notetaking is itself part of the thinking process, and by notetaking what’s meant is re‑synthesising the information into your own medium rather than passively copying text verbatim. I still think that’s right as far as it goes. The problem is that everyone in this corner of the internet already agrees with it, so on its own it doesn’t tell me anything I can act on.
What the claim leaves out is that copying is also notetaking, and while I’m doing it the two feel more or less the same. Both involve reading something, opening a file and typing. Both produce a note at the end. I can’t reliably tell from the inside which one I’ve just done, which means the claim can’t be used to decide anything in the moment.
So the useful version is probably conditional. The thinking happens in the synthesis, and the only way I’ve found to tell whether synthesis actually occurred is afterwards, by whether the note turned out to be usable in something I was writing. That makes it a test I can only run later, which is annoying but seems to be true.
Opposes
- Opposes
- the unconditional version of this from Jethro Kuan and the wider PKM literature, which treats the act of taking a note as sufficient. If it were sufficient then five years of notes would have produced five years of thinking, and I don’t think it has in my case.
Also worth noting that if notetaking is thinking, then improving my notetaking system counts as improving my thinking, which is a fairly convenient thing to believe on a day off. See Shiny New Toy Syndrome. Instead it is the act of arranging notetaking for output that is thinking.
Bounds
- Bounds
- Take notes with the book closed, which is the practical version of the same idea. Closing the book removes the option of transcribing, so it forces the synthesis rather than relying on me to notice the difference.
Feeds
- Feeds
- Why I Write
Source
Captured on: , in from How To Take Smart Notes With Org‑mode · Jethro Kuan
The Feynman line usually quoted here (“Notes aren’t a record of my thinking process. They are my thinking process.”) appears to be a paraphrase rather than something he said. The actual exchange is with Charles Weiner in Gleick’s Genius, where Feynman objects to the notebooks being called a record and says he did the work on the paper.
Backlinks
Writing without an output isn’t worth doing
Opposes
Opposes
- Opposes
- the Feynman position, which is that the writing is where the work happens rather than being a record of work done elsewhere. On that view a page I never look at again has already done its job, and asking about the output is asking the wrong question. See the source note on Notetaking is only thinking if something comes out of it for the provenance of that quote, which is shakier than it usually gets presented.
Writing without an output isn’t worth doing
Bounds
Bounds
- Bounds
- Notetaking is only thinking if something comes out of it. These are close enough that they’re worth keeping apart deliberately. That note asks whether any thinking happened, and the test is whether I synthesised or just transcribed. This one asks whether the thing I produced is worth keeping. They come apart in the Feynman case, where the thinking clearly happened and the artefact is still disposable.
- Bounds
- A Writing Inbox is Needed to Develop Substantial Work, which is about the machinery for getting from a fleeting note to an output rather than about whether the output is needed.
Cite this note
@online{hoque2026notetaking,
author = {Sabiqul Hoque},
title = {Notetaking is only thinking if something comes out of it},
year = {2026},
url = {https://sabicool.github.io/Braindump/notes/20260828235900-notetaking_is_a_thinking_process.html},
organization = {Braindump}
}