How to improve your thinking

“Writing is, without dispute, the best facilitator for thinking, reading, learning, understanding and generating ideas we have¹.” But for writing to help you think, you need some method for taking notes and organizing your ideas.

One way to improve how you organize your ideas is to learn from what others are doing. Enter Cory Doctorow. Doctorow is a journalist, activist, and a prolific writer, both in volume and quality. One of the best places to learn about how he takes notes and organizes his ideas is his article The Memex Method.

These three key ideas from the article can help you take better notes to organize your ideas:

• Use for note-taking what works best for you. What’s important is your consistency.

  Doctorow uses a private blog to collect his notes and information. This is a particular choice not seen many times, but it seems to work very well for him. Many people would use Evernote, Notion, Obsidian, or similar software for note-taking. (Note that Doctorow sometimes uses the term blogging to refer to his note-taking.)

• Be intentional in your information consumption.

  Doctorow has built an information workflow with the topics he’s interested in and follows regularly. Very different than randomly wandering around the internet or social media:

Every day, I load my giant folder of tabs; zip through my giant collection of RSS feeds; and answer my social telephones — primarily emails and Twitter mentions — and I open each promising fragment in its own tab to read and think about.

If the fragment seems significant, I’ll blog it: I’ll set out the context for why I think this seems important and then describe what it adds to the picture.

• When you write down an idea or a note, you cannot anticipate how that specific piece will fit into the overall puzzle, if it fits at all.

  You take notes for your future self. Ideas emerge when you “connect the dots”:

Blogging isn’t just a way to organize your research — it’s a way to do research for a book or essay or story or speech you don’t even know you want to write yet. It’s a way to discover what your future books and essays and stories and speeches will be about.

Writing is a powerful tool for ideation, learning, and understanding but only if you have a reliable system for capturing and organizing your notes and insights. The real payoff comes when you make note-taking part of your daily workflow.

Start today, don’t wait for the urgent to start taking notes.