Title: On Keeping Notes

The editorial in Overload 48 made me think of my own note-taking experiences. I take far too many notes (perhaps I don't trust my memory enough) and sometimes their quantity decreases their value.

I rarely take notes on paper; my handwriting speed is too slow for that (because of my bad eyesight), but I can touch type. My notes go into text files, the Emacs scratch buffer, or emails to myself (which in turn get archived into various folders). I also have a PDA and my notes can end up as appointments, to-do list items, jotter items, database entries or memos. In my eagerness to get something down without taking too much time out for the task, I rarely think to put it in the right place, and I often use cryptic-looking abbreviations (especially on the PDA). Some of my notes contain information about other people that I should keep confidential, and because this is mixed in with everything else, I cannot let anyone else look at my notes.

Every day I have to spend some time sorting out my notes. Sometimes it takes much longer than I'd like it to, and it feels like wasted time because I'm not actually getting anything done. I know that among my notes there are things that will be needing attention in the near future, but I can't single out what they are without going through all of the notes (and because of my low vision, I cannot "scan" text; I have to read every word of it, perhaps while pushing them around into categories by using cut and paste commands). Items that need attention may also take the form of email messages from others, objects on my desk, or files that are open, but the notes are the dominant thing. While I am sorting them out, the time is ticking away, and I sometimes feel that by the time I have finished sorting out my notes I may have no time left for doing anything.

Of course, pushing notes around is not really doing nothing, because the brain is at least thinking about what is written. Occasionally I cannot recall what I meant by a certain abbreviation, and I begin to be concerned that perhaps it means I ought to be doing something and I can't remember what (I usually get it eventually). Sometimes I take some kind of "mark and sweep" approach: Pick out which notes need attention today (or this week, or this morning, or whatever), and leave the rest to be sorted out later (in the hope that they will not be postponed indefinitely). Sometimes I find that I have "marked" too many notes and have to go through them a second time. Sometimes the non-marked notes are the ones that I don't foresee needing any attention at all; these go to an archive that does not get attention unless I need to retrieve specific things from it in future (in which case an automatic search usually does the trick, so long as the abbreviations are consistent). And sometimes I even manage to put some of my notes into a nice hierarchical order, if I think that there's a good chance I'll actually be using them later.

There is a trade-off between the overhead of taking notes and that of managing them later. I tend to trade heavily on the side of taking them quickly, because I do not want thoughts or conversations to be interrupted by note-taking. I do not believe that my strategy for taking and managing notes is the best one (it's probably far from it), but it is obvious to me that my life and work revolves around my notes, and I suspect that the same is true of others. More articles on the management of notes could therefore be interesting contributions to C Vu. Any takers?