Note-taking:
The hidden perfectionism that ruins your reading
I have a confession to make. It should startle you, but give me five minutes and it will make sense.
My note-taking system is a bit . . . shit. Obsidian hosts my notes, and my style is modelled around the zettelkasten system, which uses all sorts of clever principles to archive and connect great ideas. Ok, maybe it’s not so bad. I still use it almost two years later, and it’s not an ‘I can fix her . . .‘ situation, I promise. It’s genuinely great, so what’s the issue?
Despite my system’s strength, I’ll be the first to admit it’s full of holes. I don’t even have to tell you that—in the guide videos I shared, many comments were quick to point out the flaws.
Some bashed the laborious indexing process. Others saw atomic notes as redundant. A handful thought the entire system was pointless, and retreated to the comfort of their notebooks. Fair enough. Half of these criticisms are down to preference—it’s delusional to expect a PhD student and a casual history buff to benefit from the exact same strategy.
The other half of the criticism? Sure, I can also see that. My system is flawed—I know it, and yet I refuse to change it, but why?
Let’s time travel to when you first start the note-taking journey. At some point, frustration hits and you wish to graduate from aimless, shallow reading. Great literature has more to offer, and you know it, so you set out on a search for better ways to read. It pushes you to the sky, maybe even too close to the sun.
It’s not enough to ’just read books’ anymore—like a coal baron of the 1900’s, you throw enough effort at the book to chip away every last gram from the rich veins of knowledge. Underlining is a good start, but only the baby steps. Index tags are cool, but notebooks are better. Notebooks soon morph into a mere first-step, the entry point of a 6-step flowchart, one that seems to endlessly mutate with more and more features.
”aaaand . . . NOW it’s perfect!”
Said no one ever.
The mirage of a ‘perfect system’ tempts us into an obsessive whirlpool of tinkering, moving and remastering. Youtubers (who need clicks) will offer the new ULTIMATE system, the one that’ll change EVERYTHING, and the last you’ll ever need. If that was true, I’d still be using Google Docs.
The internet (and your good intentions) has you hopping like a nomad, from Notion to Evernote to Obsidian to Logseq, to whatever new notes app just dropped that month.
The lust for novelty and perfection can shadow the original goal: to learn better. Early on, I realized my true interests were slowly being forgotten, and I spent more and more time learning how to learn—an ironic loop you might also call . . . procrastination.
It’s like a gym-bro who sits at home and wastes his membership, all to ‘perfect’ his training plan before he steps foot in the gym. Those Youtube tutorials and scientific papers are cool and all, but not when they kill the very purpose you had for using them.
Back to my system: I don’t let the flaws bother me because it’s good enough. Rather than waste my time to find workarounds or overhaul everything, I give the current version room to help me learn.
The reader who actually learns with just a notebook will achieve far more than the neurotic tech guy who stresses over a 47-step GitHub contraption before he even dares put pen to paper. You don’t move house every time a room gets messy, so why throw out a note-taking system just because the next one is 5% neater?
Of course, be on the lookout for any improvements you can make. I recently removed the ‘status’ tag from my atomic notes because it felt pointless. I also write fewer atomic notes these days, just to respect the quality over quantity idea. These changes are small, gradual, and based on my real learning experience. For that reason, I know they’re truly useful and not based on online hype, or the idea that it might be better.
If your system really isn’t working, then you evidence for a bigger switch. I have had three different systems over the course of my life. Every approach had its lesson to teach, and whether each one was shitty or not, it represented an important step in the journey. Only through work, reflection, and error can you see what you need next, if it really is time to move on.
The point is to deny the promise of perfection and reject a system that drags you in the dust, endlessly demanding upgrades. Your note-taking ought to work for you, and your job is to give it the chance to.
Yours,
Odysseas
P.S.
You know that feeling where you want to share a cool idea, but as soon as you begin to talk, all that comes out is a half-baked, stuttering mess?
Hopefully yes, because the next video is on How to Articulate Yourself.
I have had this issue forever, and since I picked up a few cool tricks along the whole Youtube/writing road, I thought it would be good to share them. You'll see it sometime next week.
P.P.S
Since I refuse to end an email with only one post-scriptum:
Have a great weekend!