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#[1]The Verge
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* [4]The Verge homepageThe Verge logo./
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* [10]Apps/
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* [11]Tech
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Why note-taking apps don’t make us smarter
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Why note-taking apps don’t make us smarter
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/
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They’re designed for storage, not sparking insights. Can AI change that?
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By [12]Casey Newton, a contributing editor who has been writing about
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tech for over 10 years. He founded Platformer, a newsletter about Big
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Tech and democracy.
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Aug 25, 2023, 2:30 PM UTC| (BUTTON) Comments
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Screenshots of the note-taking app Obsidian.
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Screenshots of the note-taking app Obsidian. Image: Obsidian
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This is Platformer, a newsletter on the intersection of Silicon Valley
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and democracy from Casey Newton and Zoë Schiffer. [13]Sign up here.
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__________________________________________________________________
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Today let’s step outside the news cycle and turn our attention toward a
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topic I’m deeply invested in but only rarely write about: productivity
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platforms. For decades now, software tools have promised to make
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working life easier. But on one critical dimension — their ability to
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improve our thinking — they don’t seem to be making much progress at
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all.
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Meanwhile, the arrival of generative artificial intelligence could make
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the tools we use more powerful than ever — or they could turn out to be
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just another mirage.
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To understand where things went wrong, I want to focus on the humble
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note-taking app: the place where, for so many of us, thinking begins.
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I.
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Earlier this week I read a story about farmers. “America’s Farmers Are
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Bogged Down by Data,” read the headline on [14]Belle Lin’s story in the
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Wall Street Journal. I thought to myself: You and me both, farmer! And
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I read the piece.
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Over the past decade, farmers have been offered all manner of software
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tools to analyze and manage their crops. In general, though, the more
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software that farmers use, the more they find themselves overwhelmed by
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data that the tools collect. “We’re collecting so much data that you’re
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almost paralyzed with having to analyze it all,” one farmer told the
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Journal.
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As a journalist, I’ve never collected as much data as I do now. The
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collapse of Twitter has me browsing four or five text-based social
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feeds a day, scanning for news and thoughtful conversation. The growing
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popularity of arXiv and pre-prints in general has left me with a stack
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of research that I will never get through. Book galleys pile up in my
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house.
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A screenshot of the app Notion. A screenshot of the app Notion.
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A screenshot of the app Notion. A screenshot of the app Notion.
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A screenshot of the app Notion. Image: Notion
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Meanwhile, all day long I browse the web. Stories that might belong in
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Platformer get saved into a database in the productivity platform
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Notion. Every link that has ever been in this newsletter is stored
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there, in many cases with the full article text.
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Collectively, this material offers me an abundance of riches — far more
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to work with than any beat reporter had such easy access to even 15
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years ago.
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And yet most days I find myself with the same problem as the farmer: I
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have so much information at hand that I feel paralyzed.
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II.
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One solution to this data paralysis is to take notes. As a journalist,
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of course, I have always taken notes. A few years ago, I thought we had
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seen some true breakthroughs in note-taking, and increasingly put my
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faith in those tools not just to capture my writing but to improve the
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quality of my thinking.
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The breakthrough tool was [15]Roam Research. In 2021, I wrote here
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about [16]my first year using the subscription-based software, which
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had two key insights into knowledge work. One was to make professional
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note-taking feel more like journaling. It turns out that a fresh note
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created each day, labeled with a date, is a good canvas for collecting
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transient thoughts, which can serve as a springboard into deeper
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thinking.
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The second is known to note-taking nerds as “[17]bidirectional
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linking.” Standard links, like the ones you find on the web, go in only
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one direction — from one page to another. In a note-taking app,
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bidirectional links join two pages together. This effectively lets you
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add backlinks to any concept — a company that’s important to you, say,
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or a concept that’s on your mind — and then let you browse everything
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you’ve collected related to that concept at your leisure.
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A graphic from Roam illustrating bidirectional linking. A graphic from
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Roam illustrating bidirectional linking.
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A graphic from Roam illustrating bidirectional linking. A graphic from
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Roam illustrating bidirectional linking.
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A graphic from Roam illustrating bidirectional linking. Image: Roam
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On one level, that’s not so different from adding tags to notes. But
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tags are more about search. Bidirectional links, which some apps show
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you on pages that include snippets of all the other notes that contain
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the same link, are more about browsing and rediscovery.
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Initially, I threw myself into this kind of associative note-taking. I
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gathered links around concepts I wanted to explore (“the internet
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enables information to travel too quickly,” for example, or social
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networks and polarization). When I had an interesting conversation with
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a person, I would add notes to a personal page I had created for them.
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A few times a week, I would revisit those notes.
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I waited for the insights to come.
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And waited. And waited.
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Note-taking apps are up against a much stronger foe
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My gusto for concept-based, link-heavy note-taking diminished. Roam’s
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development slowed to a crawl, and I spent a season with the
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lightweight, mostly free alternative known as [18]Obsidian. Obsidian’s
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brutalist design wore on me, though, and eventually I decamped for the
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more polished user interface of [19]Mem. (These apps all enable the
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exporting of your notes in Markdown, making switching relatively
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painless.)
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I continue to journal most days, and occasionally find myself working
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to refine one concept or another among those notes.
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But the original promise of Roam — that it would improve my thinking by
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helping me to build a knowledge base and discover new ideas — fizzled
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completely.
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III.
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One interpretation of these events is that the software failed: that
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journaling and souped-up links simply don’t have the power some of us
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once hoped they did.
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Another view, though, is that they are up against a much stronger foe —
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the infinite daily distractions of the internet.
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Note-taking, after all, does not take place in a vacuum. It takes place
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on your computer, next to email, and Slack, and Discord, and iMessage,
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and the text-based social network of your choosing. In the era of
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alt-tabbing between these and other apps, our ability to build
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knowledge and draw connections is permanently challenged by what might
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be our ultimately futile efforts to multitask.
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Ezra Klein wrote beautifully about this situation this week [20]in the
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New York Times:
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Gloria Mark, a professor of information science at the University of
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California, Irvine, and the author of “[21]Attention Span,” started
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researching the way people used computers in 2004. The average time
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people spent on a single screen was 2.5 minutes. “I was astounded,”
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she told me. “That was so much worse than I’d thought it would be.”
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But that was just the beginning. By 2012, Mark and her colleagues
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found the average time on a single task was 75 seconds. Now it’s
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down to about 47.
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This is an acid bath for human cognition. Multitasking is mostly a
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myth. We can focus on one thing at a time. “It’s like we have an
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internal whiteboard in our minds,” Mark said. “If I’m working on one
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task, I have all the info I need on that mental whiteboard. Then I
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switch to email. I have to mentally erase that whiteboard and write
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all the information I need to do email. And just like on a real
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whiteboard, there can be a residue in our minds. We may still be
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thinking of something from three tasks ago.”
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My first thought upon reading this was that it seems rare for me to
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spend even 47 seconds looking at one screen on my computer without at
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least glancing at another. (I bought a 38-inch widescreen monitor for
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the express purpose of being able to glance at many windows
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simultaneously. At the time I understood this as a tool for enhancing
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my productivity.)
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My second thought is that if you want to take good notes, you have to
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first extract your mind from the acid bath.
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IV.
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Klein’s piece starts from the observation that productivity growth is
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now about half of what it was in the 1950s and ‘60s. The internet’s
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arrival briefly speeded it up, he writes, but the more we stared at our
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screens the slower our productivity improved. He worries that AI will
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have a similar effect on the economy — promising to make us more
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productive, while simultaneously inventing so many new distractions and
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entertainments that they overwhelm and paralyze us.
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The piece stuck with me, because there is one specific way I am
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counting on AI to make me more productive. It goes back to that
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database of links I’ve been building in Notion, and the insights I was
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hoping to get out of Roam.
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Saving an article in Mem. Saving an article in Mem.
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Saving an article in Mem. Saving an article in Mem.
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Saving an article in Mem. Image: Mem
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Earlier this year, like many productivity tools, Notion added a handful
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of AI features. I use two of them in my links database. One extracts
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the names of any companies mentioned in an article, creating a kind of
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automatic tagging system. The other provides a two- or three-sentence
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summary of the article I’m saving.
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Neither of these, in practice, is particularly useful. Tags might
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theoretically be useful for revisiting old material, but databases are
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not designed to be browsed. And while we publish summaries of news
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articles in each edition of Platformer, we wouldn’t use AI-written
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summaries: among other reasons, they often miss important details and
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context.
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At the same time, the database contains nearly three years of links to
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every subject I cover here, along with the complete text of thousands
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of articles. It is here, and not in a note-taking app, that knowledge
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of my beat has been accreting over the past few years. If only I could
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access that knowledge in some way that went beyond my memory.
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It’s here that AI should be able to help. Within some reasonable period
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of time, I expect that I will be able to talk to my Notion database as
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if it’s ChatGPT. If I could, I imagine I would talk to it all the time.
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Much of journalism simply involves remembering relevant events from the
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past. An AI-powered link database has a perfect memory; all it’s
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missing is a usable chat interface. If it had one, it might be a
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perfect research assistant.
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Today’s chatbots can’t do any of this to a reporter’s standard
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I imagine using it to generate little briefing documents to help me
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when I return to a subject after some time away. Catch me up on
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Canada’s fight with Meta over news, I might say. Make me a timeline of
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events at Twitter since Elon Musk bought it. Show me coverage of
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deepfakes over the past three months.
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Today’s chatbots can’t do any of this to a reporter’s standard. The
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training data often stops in 2021, for one thing. The bots continue to
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make stuff up, and struggle to cite their sources.
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But if I could chat in natural language with a massive archive, built
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from hand-picked trustworthy sources? That seems powerful to me, at
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least in the abstract.
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Of course, the output from this kind of AI tool has to be trustworthy.
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A significant problem with using AI tools to summarize things is that
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you can’t trust the summary unless you read all the relevant documents
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yourself — defeating the point of asking for a summary in the first
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place.
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Still, if you are the sort of productivity-tool optimist who will try
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any to-do list or calendar app on the off chance it makes you even a
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little happier at work, it seems to me that a database you can talk to
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might be the next-generation note-taking tool we have been waiting for.
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V.
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I’ve learned something else about note-taking apps, though, since my
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mania for them began in 2020.
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In short: it is probably a mistake, in the end, to ask software to
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improve our thinking. Even if you can rescue your attention from the
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acid bath of the internet; even if you can gather the most interesting
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data and observations into the app of your choosing; even if you
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revisit that data from time to time — this will not be enough. It might
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not even be worth trying.
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I’ll admit to having forgotten those questions over the past couple
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years
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The reason, sadly, is that thinking takes place in your brain. And
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thinking is an active pursuit — one that often happens when you are
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spending long stretches of time staring into space, then writing a bit,
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and then staring into space a bit more. It’s here here that the
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connections are made and the insights are formed. And it is a process
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that stubbornly resists automation.
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Which is not to say that software can’t help. Andy Matuschak, a
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researcher whose [22]spectacular website offers a feast of thinking
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about notes and note-taking, observes [23]that note-taking apps
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emphasize displaying and manipulating notes, but never making sense
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between them. Before I totally resign myself to the idea that a
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note-taking app can’t solve my problems, I will admit that on some
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fundamental level no one has really tried.
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“The goal is not to take notes — the goal is to think effectively,”
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[24]Matuschak writes. “Better questions are ‘what practices can help me
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reliably develop insights over time?’ [and] ‘how can I shepherd my
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attention effectively?’”
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I’ll admit to having forgotten those questions over the past couple
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years as I kept filling up documents with transient strings of text
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inside expensive software. And I accept that to be a better thinker,
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I’ll have to devote more time and attention to wrestling with what I
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find.
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If there’s a friendly AI to help me do that, though, I’ll be first in
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line to try it.
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IFRAME: [25]https://www.platformer.news/embed
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Chrome is about to look a bit different
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Tesla’s $25,000 ‘next-generation car’ will have a Cybertruck design
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iOS 16.6.1 fixes a big iPhone security vulnerability used to install Pegasus
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spyware
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You’ll soon be able to buy a brand-new Xbox 360
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References
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14. https://www.wsj.com/articles/americas-farmers-are-bogged-down-by-data-524f0a4d
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15. https://roamresearch.com/
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16. https://www.platformer.news/p/notes-on-a-year-using-roam-research
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17. https://maggieappleton.com/bidirectionals
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18. https://obsidian.md/
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19. https://get.mem.ai/
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20. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/28/opinion/artificial-intelligence-thinking-minds-concentration.html
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21. https://www.harpercollins.com/products/attention-span-gloria-mark?variant=40346590117922
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22. https://notes.andymatuschak.org/§Note-writing_systems
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23. https://notes.andymatuschak.org/§Note-writing_systems?stackedNotes=zsRuFxYgckGS81tr2eiBAP
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24. https://notes.andymatuschak.org/§Note-writing_systems?stackedNotes=z8V2q398qu89vdJ73N2BEYCgevMqux3yxQUAC&stackedNotes=z7kEFe6NfUSgtaDuUjST1oczKKzQQeQWk4Dbc
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53. https://www.voxmedia.com/vox-advertising
|
||
54. https://jobs.voxmedia.com/
|
||
55. https://www.voxmedia.com/
|
||
|
||
Hidden links:
|
||
57. file://localhost/
|
||
58. file://localhost/
|
||
59. http://theverge.com/
|
||
60. http://theverge.com/
|
||
61. http://theverge.com/
|
||
62. http://theverge.com/
|
||
63. file://localhost/
|