Every Intellectual Endeavor Starts With a Note

March 14, 2023

Writing does not begin with a blank page and an outline. It begins long before, with the daily practice of capturing and developing ideas in notes. The blank page is an artifact of a broken workflow.

"The quality of a paper and the ease with which it is written depends more than anything on what you have done in writing before you even made a decision on the topic." Sonke Ahrens, How to Take Smart Notes

Ahrens's most subversive insight is that the standard writing process is backwards. The conventional advice choose a topic, make an outline, then research and write creates the very problems it claims to solve: writer's block, shallow arguments, confirmation bias. If you start with a hypothesis, your brain automatically scans for supporting evidence and ignores contradictions. The alternative is to let topics emerge from the bottom up, from an accumulating mass of interconnected notes.

Luhmann wrote six notes a day for decades, eventually accumulating 90,000. This sounds monumental, but the daily practice is modest: read something, think about it, write one note in your own words, connect it to existing notes. Over time, clusters of notes reveal unexpected patterns and arguments. You do not sit down to write a paper; you discover that a paper has been assembling itself inside your slip-box. The decision of what to write about comes after you have a critical mass of material, not before.

This reframes productivity itself. Instead of measuring progress in manuscript pages which depend on unpredictable research, thinking, and revision you measure it in notes per day. A note is a completable unit. You can always write one more note today. As Pressfield learned: "Start the next one today." The practice of daily note-taking is the professional's equivalent of showing up to the gym. You may not see the results on any given day, but the compound effect is transformative.

Takeaway: Do not wait until you have something to write about write notes every day, and what you should write about will reveal itself.