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Why note-taking apps don’t make us smarter

Why note-taking apps don’t make us smarter

   /

They’re designed for storage, not sparking insights. Can AI change that?

   By [12]Casey Newton, a contributing editor who has been writing about
   tech for over 10 years. He founded Platformer, a newsletter about Big
   Tech and democracy.
   Aug 25, 2023, 2:30 PM UTC| (BUTTON) Comments

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   Screenshots of the note-taking app Obsidian.
   Screenshots of the note-taking app Obsidian. Image: Obsidian

   This is Platformer, a newsletter on the intersection of Silicon Valley
   and democracy from Casey Newton and Zoë Schiffer. [13]Sign up here.
     __________________________________________________________________

   Today let’s step outside the news cycle and turn our attention toward a
   topic I’m deeply invested in but only rarely write about: productivity
   platforms. For decades now, software tools have promised to make
   working life easier. But on one critical dimension — their ability to
   improve our thinking — they don’t seem to be making much progress at
   all.

   Meanwhile, the arrival of generative artificial intelligence could make
   the tools we use more powerful than ever — or they could turn out to be
   just another mirage.

   To understand where things went wrong, I want to focus on the humble
   note-taking app: the place where, for so many of us, thinking begins.

   I.

   Earlier this week I read a story about farmers. “America’s Farmers Are
   Bogged Down by Data,” read the headline on [14]Belle Lin’s story in the
   Wall Street Journal. I thought to myself: You and me both, farmer! And
   I read the piece.

   Over the past decade, farmers have been offered all manner of software
   tools to analyze and manage their crops. In general, though, the more
   software that farmers use, the more they find themselves overwhelmed by
   data that the tools collect. “We’re collecting so much data that you’re
   almost paralyzed with having to analyze it all,” one farmer told the
   Journal.

   As a journalist, I’ve never collected as much data as I do now. The
   collapse of Twitter has me browsing four or five text-based social
   feeds a day, scanning for news and thoughtful conversation. The growing
   popularity of arXiv and pre-prints in general has left me with a stack
   of research that I will never get through. Book galleys pile up in my
   house.
   A screenshot of the app Notion. A screenshot of the app Notion.
   A screenshot of the app Notion. A screenshot of the app Notion.
   A screenshot of the app Notion. Image: Notion

   Meanwhile, all day long I browse the web. Stories that might belong in
   Platformer get saved into a database in the productivity platform
   Notion. Every link that has ever been in this newsletter is stored
   there, in many cases with the full article text.

   Collectively, this material offers me an abundance of riches — far more
   to work with than any beat reporter had such easy access to even 15
   years ago.

   And yet most days I find myself with the same problem as the farmer: I
   have so much information at hand that I feel paralyzed.

   II.

   One solution to this data paralysis is to take notes. As a journalist,
   of course, I have always taken notes. A few years ago, I thought we had
   seen some true breakthroughs in note-taking, and increasingly put my
   faith in those tools not just to capture my writing but to improve the
   quality of my thinking.

   The breakthrough tool was [15]Roam Research. In 2021, I wrote here
   about [16]my first year using the subscription-based software, which
   had two key insights into knowledge work. One was to make professional
   note-taking feel more like journaling. It turns out that a fresh note
   created each day, labeled with a date, is a good canvas for collecting
   transient thoughts, which can serve as a springboard into deeper
   thinking.

   The second is known to note-taking nerds as “[17]bidirectional
   linking.” Standard links, like the ones you find on the web, go in only
   one direction — from one page to another. In a note-taking app,
   bidirectional links join two pages together. This effectively lets you
   add backlinks to any concept — a company that’s important to you, say,
   or a concept that’s on your mind — and then let you browse everything
   you’ve collected related to that concept at your leisure.
   A graphic from Roam illustrating bidirectional linking. A graphic from
   Roam illustrating bidirectional linking.
   A graphic from Roam illustrating bidirectional linking. A graphic from
   Roam illustrating bidirectional linking.
   A graphic from Roam illustrating bidirectional linking. Image: Roam

   On one level, that’s not so different from adding tags to notes. But
   tags are more about search. Bidirectional links, which some apps show
   you on pages that include snippets of all the other notes that contain
   the same link, are more about browsing and rediscovery.

   Initially, I threw myself into this kind of associative note-taking. I
   gathered links around concepts I wanted to explore (“the internet
   enables information to travel too quickly,” for example, or social
   networks and polarization). When I had an interesting conversation with
   a person, I would add notes to a personal page I had created for them.
   A few times a week, I would revisit those notes.

   I waited for the insights to come.

   And waited. And waited.

   Note-taking apps are up against a much stronger foe

   My gusto for concept-based, link-heavy note-taking diminished. Roam’s
   development slowed to a crawl, and I spent a season with the
   lightweight, mostly free alternative known as [18]Obsidian. Obsidian’s
   brutalist design wore on me, though, and eventually I decamped for the
   more polished user interface of [19]Mem. (These apps all enable the
   exporting of your notes in Markdown, making switching relatively
   painless.)

   I continue to journal most days, and occasionally find myself working
   to refine one concept or another among those notes.

   But the original promise of Roam — that it would improve my thinking by
   helping me to build a knowledge base and discover new ideas — fizzled
   completely.

   III.

   One interpretation of these events is that the software failed: that
   journaling and souped-up links simply don’t have the power some of us
   once hoped they did.

   Another view, though, is that they are up against a much stronger foe —
   the infinite daily distractions of the internet.

   Note-taking, after all, does not take place in a vacuum. It takes place
   on your computer, next to email, and Slack, and Discord, and iMessage,
   and the text-based social network of your choosing. In the era of
   alt-tabbing between these and other apps, our ability to build
   knowledge and draw connections is permanently challenged by what might
   be our ultimately futile efforts to multitask.

   Ezra Klein wrote beautifully about this situation this week [20]in the
   New York Times:

     Gloria Mark, a professor of information science at the University of
     California, Irvine, and the author of “[21]Attention Span,” started
     researching the way people used computers in 2004. The average time
     people spent on a single screen was 2.5 minutes. “I was astounded,”
     she told me. “That was so much worse than I’d thought it would be.”
     But that was just the beginning. By 2012, Mark and her colleagues
     found the average time on a single task was 75 seconds. Now it’s
     down to about 47.

     This is an acid bath for human cognition. Multitasking is mostly a
     myth. We can focus on one thing at a time. “It’s like we have an
     internal whiteboard in our minds,” Mark said. “If I’m working on one
     task, I have all the info I need on that mental whiteboard. Then I
     switch to email. I have to mentally erase that whiteboard and write
     all the information I need to do email. And just like on a real
     whiteboard, there can be a residue in our minds. We may still be
     thinking of something from three tasks ago.”

   My first thought upon reading this was that it seems rare for me to
   spend even 47 seconds looking at one screen on my computer without at
   least glancing at another. (I bought a 38-inch widescreen monitor for
   the express purpose of being able to glance at many windows
   simultaneously. At the time I understood this as a tool for enhancing
   my productivity.)

   My second thought is that if you want to take good notes, you have to
   first extract your mind from the acid bath.

   IV.

   Klein’s piece starts from the observation that productivity growth is
   now about half of what it was in the 1950s and ‘60s. The internet’s
   arrival briefly speeded it up, he writes, but the more we stared at our
   screens the slower our productivity improved. He worries that AI will
   have a similar effect on the economy — promising to make us more
   productive, while simultaneously inventing so many new distractions and
   entertainments that they overwhelm and paralyze us.

   The piece stuck with me, because there is one specific way I am
   counting on AI to make me more productive. It goes back to that
   database of links I’ve been building in Notion, and the insights I was
   hoping to get out of Roam.
   Saving an article in Mem. Saving an article in Mem.
   Saving an article in Mem. Saving an article in Mem.
   Saving an article in Mem. Image: Mem

   Earlier this year, like many productivity tools, Notion added a handful
   of AI features. I use two of them in my links database. One extracts
   the names of any companies mentioned in an article, creating a kind of
   automatic tagging system. The other provides a two- or three-sentence
   summary of the article I’m saving.

   Neither of these, in practice, is particularly useful. Tags might
   theoretically be useful for revisiting old material, but databases are
   not designed to be browsed. And while we publish summaries of news
   articles in each edition of Platformer, we wouldn’t use AI-written
   summaries: among other reasons, they often miss important details and
   context.

   At the same time, the database contains nearly three years of links to
   every subject I cover here, along with the complete text of thousands
   of articles. It is here, and not in a note-taking app, that knowledge
   of my beat has been accreting over the past few years. If only I could
   access that knowledge in some way that went beyond my memory.

   It’s here that AI should be able to help. Within some reasonable period
   of time, I expect that I will be able to talk to my Notion database as
   if it’s ChatGPT. If I could, I imagine I would talk to it all the time.

   Much of journalism simply involves remembering relevant events from the
   past. An AI-powered link database has a perfect memory; all it’s
   missing is a usable chat interface. If it had one, it might be a
   perfect research assistant.

   Today’s chatbots can’t do any of this to a reporter’s standard

   I imagine using it to generate little briefing documents to help me
   when I return to a subject after some time away. Catch me up on
   Canada’s fight with Meta over news, I might say. Make me a timeline of
   events at Twitter since Elon Musk bought it. Show me coverage of
   deepfakes over the past three months.

   Today’s chatbots can’t do any of this to a reporter’s standard. The
   training data often stops in 2021, for one thing. The bots continue to
   make stuff up, and struggle to cite their sources.

   But if I could chat in natural language with a massive archive, built
   from hand-picked trustworthy sources? That seems powerful to me, at
   least in the abstract.

   Of course, the output from this kind of AI tool has to be trustworthy.
   A significant problem with using AI tools to summarize things is that
   you can’t trust the summary unless you read all the relevant documents
   yourself — defeating the point of asking for a summary in the first
   place.

   Still, if you are the sort of productivity-tool optimist who will try
   any to-do list or calendar app on the off chance it makes you even a
   little happier at work, it seems to me that a database you can talk to
   might be the next-generation note-taking tool we have been waiting for.

   V.

   I’ve learned something else about note-taking apps, though, since my
   mania for them began in 2020.

   In short: it is probably a mistake, in the end, to ask software to
   improve our thinking. Even if you can rescue your attention from the
   acid bath of the internet; even if you can gather the most interesting
   data and observations into the app of your choosing; even if you
   revisit that data from time to time — this will not be enough. It might
   not even be worth trying.

   I’ll admit to having forgotten those questions over the past couple
   years

   The reason, sadly, is that thinking takes place in your brain. And
   thinking is an active pursuit — one that often happens when you are
   spending long stretches of time staring into space, then writing a bit,
   and then staring into space a bit more. It’s here here that the
   connections are made and the insights are formed. And it is a process
   that stubbornly resists automation.

   Which is not to say that software can’t help. Andy Matuschak, a
   researcher whose [22]spectacular website offers a feast of thinking
   about notes and note-taking, observes [23]that note-taking apps
   emphasize displaying and manipulating notes, but never making sense
   between them. Before I totally resign myself to the idea that a
   note-taking app can’t solve my problems, I will admit that on some
   fundamental level no one has really tried.

   “The goal is not to take notes — the goal is to think effectively,”
   [24]Matuschak writes. “Better questions are ‘what practices can help me
   reliably develop insights over time?’ [and] ‘how can I shepherd my
   attention effectively?’”

   I’ll admit to having forgotten those questions over the past couple
   years as I kept filling up documents with transient strings of text
   inside expensive software. And I accept that to be a better thinker,
   I’ll have to devote more time and attention to wrestling with what I
   find.

   If there’s a friendly AI to help me do that, though, I’ll be first in
   line to try it.

   IFRAME: [25]https://www.platformer.news/embed

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