I have a confession to make. I’ve been taking notes the old fashioned way almost exclusively for the past week.
I wanted to truly understand how the zettelkasten system worked, without the often confusing and misinformed teachings of Obsidian gurus on YouTube. So I bought some 4×6 note cards and started taking source notes on them while reading, just like Niklas Luhmann, the founder of the note box system.
I get that using a pen and paper to write notes is by no means some kind of secret that people don’t know about. But for us digital note enthusiasts, its important to be intentional with how you are using these systems in a way that is adding value to your creative work and not distracting you.
Digital tools like Obsidian have their unique advantages that we already know about. Easy search, quickly connect and resurface other notes, the portability, integration with other apps, etc.
But after moving to a hybrid workflow of analog and digital notes, I realized there’s one big problem with digital note taking: there isn’t enough friction.
Now I can practically hear you thinking to yourself, “why would friction be good? My brain runs a mile a minute and I need to offload information as quickly as possible”.
I am here to tell you this is only delaying an inevitable burnout from information overload. Without friction, you are more likely to capture information that into your second brain that you will have to go through later to figure out what you want to do with it.
Let’s say you just made a bunch of highlights in an interesting article you read and you’re ready to import them into Obsidian. Now imagine you do that with 3 more articles, 2 YouTube videos and a podcast, all before you process the highlights from the first article you captured.
Do you see where I’m going with this? Now you have a bunch of tasks to do inside of your knowledge development system that is supposed to be fun and spark curiosity. What will you do with all this content? How will you organize it? After how long do you get rid of it? I’m overwhelmed just thinking about this stuff.
Many Obsidian and digital note gurus will tell you that the less friction the better. Capturing knowledge should be seamless and easy, they say. In the push of a button you should have an entire article imported into your digital note system. But all this does is create another inbox for you to manage within your knowledge base.
Here’s what most Obsidian and Notion gurus won’t tell you. Frictionless information capture isn’t a feature of digital note-taking, its a bug.
Writing notes by hand as the first step of knowledge capture not only will improve your focus, but it will imprint that knowledge into your memory as you physically etch the words onto paper. The age old practice of jotting down notes onto paper slows down your mind and allows you to ruminate on your reading.
When you capture knowledge by hand first then type those notes into Obsidian, you are practicing a memory technique called maintenance rehearsal. This helps you commit the knowledge to memory by encountering it multiple times before it even makes its way into your system.
For a long time I avoided this because I thought it wasn’t being “true” to the digital way of doing things. But I realize I was robbing myself of the incredible benefits of writing notes by hand.
I encourage you to try this practice. Get some note cards and start writing your book notes on them, then put them into Obsidian later. I will be releasing a video soon showing how this process works. It’s more simple than you think.
In the meantime, here is a video I made with a member of our community who I helped walkthrough my Obsidian vault. I timestamped the part where I explain how I write my source notes by hand on note cards then type them into Obsidian.