(2021-10-18) Miller10 Favorite Takeaways From Linking Your Thinking Fall21

Jonathan Miller: 10 Favorite Takeaways from Linking Your Thinking Fall '21. Recently, I completed the Fall 2021 session of Nick Milo's Linking Your Thinking workshop. It is an Obsidian-centric, cohort-based course centered around a couple of core principles: note-making and maps of content.

Note-making is the idea that instead of taking notes, we should be making them. This implies that we should be working with our most valuable notes often and developing them over time.

Maps of Content, or MOCs, are a complimentary idea. MOCs are higher-level structure notes used to organize our more atomic notes over time. Maps of Content are a fluid, non-essential structure in the knowledge base, as opposed to a more rigid structure like a folder

Here are 10 of my favorite takeaways from the course

Important things reveal themselves repeatedly

we can operated in controlled chaos, doing only the bare minimum filing and organizing, and trust that important things will pop up many times

We oscillate between being open and closed to new information

Sometimes we are in research or exploration mode.

But other times, we are in sense-making or exploitation mode, and we need to close the gates to new voices and work with the abundance we already have.

Higher-order notes are a spaced repetition alternative

Making MOCs and structure notes as a habit is an alternative to more traditional spaced repetition methods like Anki. With MOCs, you still get the benefits of encountering important ideas repeatedly over time. But unlike traditional spaced repetition, you also get to encounter these important ideas in a variety of contexts. This is because a note can be connected to any number of MOCS.

Capturability and concreteness of the medium

our note taking systems overrepresent what's easy to capture, and underrepresent what is not

Perfectionism is about avoiding negative judgment

Maps of Content decouple client and data

Append-Only collections vs. Add-Remove collections

One convention I've liked in Obsidian is to manage add-only collections with notes, and manage add-remove collections with tags.

A Link attracts attention

Too many Links and You don't know what to Look At. The flavor is spoiled.

A byproduct of having a well-linked note is that you have effectively summarized it for yourself

Idea Overload

As you abandon note-taking in favor of note-making, a new problem arises. Now instead of not having enough time to read all the interesting articles and books you save, now you don't have enough time to explore all the interesting ideas you have.

there will never be enough time for everything, and trust your intuition on what's most important