I’ve been messing around with the idea of how to keep things I am thinking somewhere that is both easy to maintain and also not really in need of a lot of process to begin with. I read much of a book about Zettelkasten and decided a slip box is not something I need, but I liked a few ideas:

• Making little fleeting notes or having an inbox where just crap can go in without a lot of thought.
• Having a concept of a note that is representative of a more settled idea.

Today, spending a little time between pomodoros on some weekend work I incurred for myself, I revisited my habit of steadying my handwriting by grabbing a note card or sheet of paper and just writing whatever comes to mind until I feel myself slowing down and getting into a more deliberate mindset. In this case I wasn’t so much trying to get my handwriting steadied as I just wanted to kill five minutes between work blocks and didn’t want to get up and do something else. In the middle of doing that, a few things happened:

First, I had an idea I wanted to hold on to, and second I had a feeling about a thing I am dealing with.

I happened to be doing my handwriting fidgeting in my Supernote, and I was in the mood to be distracted by gadgets. Supernote has these ideas of keywords and headings:

Headings: Lasso a word and the Supernote highlights it and makes it visible in a ToC view for a given notebook.

Keywords: Lasso a word, and the Supernote does some text recognition and proposes a tag you can correct and then apply. That tag then appears in a special index view of a given notebook, so you can see what pages it appears on and tap them to jump to them.

I focused on the keywords idea, because I had just written a little about a topic and written a little about a feeling. I circled each and assigned them keywords. Now they’re findable in that scribbles notebook via the keywords screen. That seems cool.

Having done that, I sat there for a few minutes thinking about it, and realized when I’m doing my handwriting steadying, a lot of things can come up. I just usually don’t do much with it if it is a concept or a feeling. I usually only respond to tasks or actions I’ve suddenly remembered. Video games are another activity where things come up for me that I don’t do much with. It’s why I like simple, repetitive games: They soak up some of my available environmental awareness and leave me free to process stuff, which always surfaces after playing for a while.

That caused me to do a little research and I learned about the idea of the “default mode network":

… best known for being active when a person is not focused on the outside world and the brain is at wakeful rest, such as during daydreaming and mind-wandering. It can also be active during detailed thoughts related to external task performance. Other times that the DMN is active include when the individual is thinking about others, thinking about themselves, remembering the past, and planning for the future. The DMN creates a coherent “internal narrative” central to the construction of a sense of self.

… which seems to be what’s going on when I’m free-associating while I steady my writing or letting my mind wander when I’m playing a game.

So I made a pinned a notebook in my Supernote that’s just for doing that writing. It’s a swipe and a tap away from anywhere in the notebook. For the rest of the morning, as I did my work and took my breaks, I tried out “just writing” for my breaks. When the pomodoro would time out, I’d scan for ideas/keywords and lasso them for indexing. Then get back to it.

By the end of my working block, I had several pages and a few ideas. That led me to wonder what, theoretically, I would do with conclusions from those. So I made another notebook that I think will just have topical pages. If I were doing a Zettelkasten I would be making cards, etc. I think I am doing something more like a commonplace book. Since the Supernote has linking, I made a page for the general theme for these ideas and made links to the source writing.

I was talking to a friend at work about her daily routine and realized in passing that she’s sort of like me in that we both talk about things we’re “doing” that are probably best framed as a series of experiments that come and go, and stick or don’t. The idea of doing this sort of free-writing, DMN-activating activity in an electronic notebook is interesting for now, and it suits how I work during the day given I’ve got a big desk, can keep the notebook handy, and am trying to timeblock with it. But I can see foregoing the tablet and doing this with a physical notebook to helpful effect as well. If I had to pick which was nicer, I’d say writing in a nice notebook with a good pen is a bit more satisfying, but the Supernote is pretty nice on its own. (Not as nice as a reMarkable, which does a much nicer job of replacing paper, but is not nearly as good for linking or finding your way back to things you’ve written.)

I know someone else who takes a lot of typed notes. I find that overwhelming, and have noticed a few times that there seems to be some disconnect between what was captured in the detailed, heavily nested notes and what is remembered or effectively applied. I am a believer in the value of friction at capture, so if I stick with this the Supernote might not remain central, but the act of writing will.