Digital Cognition

#distill

  • Main functions of a note taking tool
    • Incubate ideas over time
    • raw material for unique interpretations and perspectives
    • Create visual artifacts.
      • See things to understand them.
      • Gives us spatial reasoning and pattern matching
    • Form opinons backed up by resarch and intentional thought

  • Your notes should be:
    • Personal
      • Optimized for you
      • Not aimed at public presentation
      • Informal and Dirty
    • Unpolished
      • Messy, random, nonsensical, and not aimed at a particular outcome.
    • Diverse Mediums
      • Images, audio, video, tweets, books, articles, music, diagrams, sketches, code, demos, slides, websites, podcasts, and more…
    • Open-ended
      • You're always adding to and building your knowledge base.

We need to flip our approach to consuming information from fleeting moments of insight to investments in a long future of learning and creation. Browsing the library of your own mind is enourmously different to the generalized documents of strangers.

- Maggie Appleton