Some changes I made while reading Jorge Arengo’s Duly Noted:
- Got most of my notes in just a couple places—mostly Obsidian and Notion. This meant emptying out/transferring from other note taking apps, and investing in an app to scan my paper notes into my digital repository. I still keep an analog planner and data trackers (I make my own bullet spreads) because I love being able to physically draw and write in them. The vast majority of my work, school and reading notes, as well as random interconnecting thoughts, are now in Obsidian though. Notion keeps my lists—groceries, books I want to read, and certain task lists.
- Inbox zero!—And fewer inboxes period. I have three inboxes for over twice as many email accounts now, and all of them have less than 6 current emails in them combined. I archived everything I could into a few clearly labeled folders, deleted what I no longer needed, and only kept current correspondence in my inbox.
- Most important, I started making much shorter notes. In Duly Noted, Arengo talks about the importance of making many “atomic” notes—a single idea for each note. He also discusses the differences between taking notes and making notes, a discernment I love. He states, “Note-taking is when you take notes to remember what you’ve heard or read…Note-making is something else entirely: instead of highlighting or capturing ideas from an existing source—a text, lecture, video, etc.—you write down what you’re thinking to make sense of your ideas (2023, p. 21).”
It’s sense-making, not note-taking I am doing right now. I am walking in a spot where knowledge paths, the physical paths of writing or typing in certain places, and the spiritual path of clarity and inner prosperity all converge. I am joyful and thankful to be here, even while the grief and guilt of being here while others suffer pulls deep at my heartstrings. The ‘verse is innately joyful and abundant. And so may it be.
Note: I have no affiliation with or make any money off any of these people or products, they’re just the things I’ve found and like right now.
Here’s what this essay looks like in Obsidian, where I wrote it first:
I highlighted it so you can see how I inserted internal hypertext as I wrote. Next to it is the local graph for this note alone, showing all those internal points of connection.
