Notes I take

I take two types of notes.

First, I take notes in school. These notes don’t go very deep into any subject and since they are taken during classes, they are not very good quality. These exist so I can share my notes and perhaps even share notes of others online, so that they are easily accessible and readable (I hate photos of paper notes). Everyone can learn from these and prepare for a test easily.

I don’t take notes from every class at school. There are three reasons for that:

1. I do something completely different during the class and I nor many others don’t need the notes.
2. I find the subject so utterly useless I can’t be bothered.
3. It’s math. Graphs and formulas are hard to put into markdown sometimes. (I’ll work on this)

I obviously took a lot of paper notes earlier in my school years. I am very slowly working on digitalizing them so that the notes here actually have some structure and go into every topic progressively, not randomly. I don’t get much free time on my hands these days, so this might take a while.

Second, I take research notes. Research notes are the notes I take while studying something on my own or while researching a topic I am interested in. These notes tend to be more rigorous and higher quality. These are the notes I actually use and care about. I also usually provide sources for these notes.

It is a matter of course that I don’t share everything here. I used to write a lot of personal notes (hopefully I will return to that in the future because I do find it useful to just write) and I will not be sharing those here or anywhere for that matter. I also took notes while preparing for a school presentation or other projects and these would be useless without any context. I might revisit them in the future, turn them into actual notes and publish them afterward.

Notes I used to take

As I mentioned earlier, I used to take a lot of paper notes when I was younger. But since I am a child of the 21st century, I couldn’t be bothered to use a pen and paper forever.

I started taking digital notes in 2020, approximately when COVID broke out. I used Notion at first. It has changed a little bit since I was using it. At that time, it seemed to be a groundbreaking new tool for note-taking and all the productivity gurus on YouTube were using it, so I had to too. Soon, I found it was better for project management, task management and planning in general than it was for taking notes, so I stopped using it after my peers introduced me to a new tool.

I used Obsidian for a while after Notion. Obsidian was a game-changer, primarily because of how easy it was to use and how easy it was to link notes together. I was hooked and developed a system for taking notes. It was perfect.

Many people right talk about Obsidian as the tool to create your “second brain, man”, but that’s not really how I used it. It was just a tool for taking notes. But then something was starting to change and I gave a higher and higher value to my notes and viewed them as my most incredible achievement. It’s weird to even say it out loud. Anyway, I was a part of the “second brain” and “non-linear learning” hype. I switched to Roam Research at this time.

I got Roam Research for free because I signed up for it in the earlier stage of development. I used Roam for quite a while and taking notes inside was great. Slowly, I started realizing that this whole “non-linear learning” was stupid and I also found many difficulties while using Roam. So I decided to create a note-taking system on my own and voilà here we are.

Language

I live in the Czech Republic. I go to a Czech school, I speak Czech every day, and I read Czech textbooks, so my notes are primarily in Czech. I might get turbo-autistic in the future and translate everything into English, we’ll see about that.