how i'm taking notes (for now)

notetaking strategies and productivity

Hello friends—

A little while ago, I asked people to tell me about their preferred annotation practices. I am not a very nosey person, and I don’t care much about the mental processes of other artists or scholars, but I am powerless to resist the idiosyncratic material culture that arises from a particular writer going about their work.

I don’t care if you commune with the spirits or how many drafts you do or don’t do. I don’t care if your stories begin with a character or a question. I don’t care if you outline or let the muse guide you. I really, truly, truly do not care. Tell me about your pencils. Your notebooks. Do you draw margins on the right-hand side? If so, how wide? Do you use a special paper? Do you have a favorite eraser? Lately, I’ve been thinking about getting a paperweight—do you have one? Can I see it? Talk to me about your folders. I’m partial to the tri-fold ones common to Canada and Europe.

In some ways, this is deeply prosaic and pointless. It’s hard to imagine that you need this exact kind of eraser to make your writing good. Because you don’t, actually. However, I do like hearing about the ways people have made a comfortable, cozy corner inside of their process. The ways they’ve made their process material, solid. Maybe it’s bad to admit this, but I’m not interested in any writer’s life outside of what kind of fountain pen they use. Don’t tell me anything else, I don’t want to know—it’s boring.

Notetaking sits at an intersection between the material and the nonmaterial in writing, being both a physical process and a mental process. For a long time, I didn’t really take notes as I read. I didn’t know how. But over the years, I built a process of notetaking that was mostly underlining and writing gay in the margins. This process was sufficient for my needs at the time: consuming works and laughing at them as I read. I wasn’t writing criticism or writing essays that had a significant aspect of research or analysis. I was writing little personal essays of which I was the subject and the main source of ideas. Again, this was fine because the scale of my nonfiction projects was always personal and there wasn’t some huge need for me to read five books and then craft an argument. My essays were about how sad I was, and I didn’t need a source for that.

However, my needs have changed. I am writing more criticism now. I write reviews. I also give lectures and talks. I teach classes. All of this requires a bit more organization and thought than writing lol gay in the margins. It also requires more detailed recall of the information I am reading, and more analysis too. I am also writing my first long piece of nonfiction—a book of literary criticism. I don’t want to write a book of criticism that doesn’t have any books in it. I would like to write the kind of literary criticism that has moved me over the last couple of years, a book rich with reference and analysis and close reading rather than a series of witty bon mots and descriptions of art and a pathological fear of being uncool or too literary.

I recognized that this would require a more robust annotation practice than I have. I took to social media and asked people how they went about their own annotating and research. Most people came back with some version of I underline and make margin notes. At first, I despaired because I do that! I do! I underline! I underline (perhaps too much sometimes, but I can at least acknowledge when I do that!) and jot in the margins.

Then I watched a few videos on YouTube about “how to take notes” and this one guy, a philosophy YouTuber (he’s plain-looking, but light-haired and nerdy, and I need him kinda bad, ngl, but he’s straight and married, which seems to be the only kind of man I can feel physical attraction toward, unfortunately), explained that after he annotates a book, he “exports” the annotations to notecards after a given session or at the end of reading the book. He got the process from this other guy who exports to his commonplace book, which is a big plastic tub filled with binders of notecards strapped with rubber bands. Someone else “exported” to a journal, another commonplace book, for easy reference and recall. Other people used various cloud-based programs like Notion to break books down into bullet points for ease and flow. There is a whole sector of productivity YouTube and BuJo YouTube that have converged around the best way to create “idea clouds” from the books you read.

There is a rather distressing undercurrent to some of these approaches. The distressing undercurrent is of course AI, and the fact that many of these software hook into AI services to quickly summarize a book or even to turn summarized notes into other forms, generating books, videos, podcasts, or even short films, etc. I am trying very hard not to think about the min-max theology of the algorithm that finds its greatest avatar and evangelist in the ProductivityBro.

If you avoid looking too hard at the shadow of AI that hangs over this process in the context of the digital contemporary, you can begin to appreciate the beauty in approaching a text like a whole tuna or beef carcass that must be processed and into cuts that can be processed into food.

Anyway, I thought to myself, I do the underlining part, but not the exporting part. To see if it actually made a difference, I started testing out the exporting in my teaching. A couple weeks ago, I taught two rather complicated essays by the theorist György Lukács. I had read the essays and was familiar with them, but it’s quite another thing to teach the essays to students. I wanted to be able to answer their questions about the arguments raised in the essays and to help clarify anything they hadn’t understood. After all, I hadn’t understood everything in the pieces either the first time I read them either and the whole point of discussion is to be able to ask questions. I wanted the class discussions to be productive and interesting for them. This required reading the pieces more carefully this time around, and making sure I understood more of what Lukács was saying. Especially the bits where he’s very idiosyncratic.

This seemed like a perfect time to try out a new annotation style. I read the pieces as I normally did, underlining, making margin notes. Then, I took a couple hours to export the underlined passages. That is, I typed all of the quotes I had underlined and wrote a couple sentences analyzing the quote, and making a note to myself about why I thought it was significant or funny. The thing about having to type the quotes is that I was able to identify when I’d underlined something because it would be necessary to the discussion and when I had underlined it because the writing was good or particularly sharp or mean in a way I liked. The quotes that weren’t necessary to articulating his argument or my read of his argument, I didn’t type. The ones that were, I did. Having to type the quotes with my own human hands exerted a selective pressure that made me think even more about the piece and that deepened my understanding of it.

I think those classes went really well. Those discussions were the most prepared I’ve felt all semester. It’s not that the craft discussions have been going badly all semester. Not to toot my own horn, but I think they have gone well! It’s just that I felt more prepared and I had engaged the text more deeply. I could guide us with more confidence and ease than in previous sessions where I’d just underlined and written margin comments.

I’ve also been using this technique to prepare for my Henry James seminars over the last month or so. I read and underline, and then I write by hand the quotes that I’ve underlined. This makes recall during discussion so much easier. I can call upon more relevant examples. The text shimmers at the surface of my thoughts. It feels more immediate to me. Also, as I write the quotes, I am thinking about the text, and an argument begins to build over the course of the writing session. Connections occur to me in a way that was only very subliminal before. When I export, I feel that I move from a passive to a more active reading role. My notes and underlines have a function now.

The last couple of days, I have been in chilly Vancouver. I had an event on Thursday night, but before that event, I had to give my Henry James seminar. I spent the early part of the day “exporting” my underlines to my writing pad. It was very soothing. But also, I reflected on the fact that I really do feel…better? More informed? More prepared? Idk, I feel something different when I prepare this way. Not just underlining and annotating, but moving my notes from the book to a document. It makes them more readily accessible to me.

Over the summer, I trialed a different approach that my friend Adam Dalva showed me. When he is reviewing a book or going to discuss it with the author, underlines and then keeps a running index of page numbers and brief quotes in the front of the book so that he can draw on it. I did this for a few books I reviewed this summer and to prepare for a couple of events. It was good, but I feel that the current method is superior, at least for me and my uses. The consolidation is greater, and it’s easier to then go on to use those quotes for something else—an essay, a newsletter, a quote, etc.

I posted a picture of my notes for the James seminar on social media, and somebody asked me if it slows me down. Someone else said that they liked the idea of it but time :(. Someone else asked if there is a software that can speed up this process because the slowness is probably not worth it.

I don’t really…understand the line of thought. I mean, I posted a picture of my notepad and said something like “The people who said that exporting your underlines were right. It does help.” And some people were like, “Does it slow you down?” But I feel like they are asking a question without really knowing what they are asking. Does it slow down what? The notetaking? The reading? Whatever is downstream of those activities for you? Why is speed being taken as some sort of de facto virtue? We know that a lot of things that are done quickly can also be shit. Slowly made things can also be shit. Speed is not really a useful in determining quality or efficacy unless what you are after is speed.

I can’t help but to think that a subtle reframing has occurred when I am asked questions like this. Questions that reframe productive away from “produces results that are good for my use case” to “produces results FAST.” Those are not the same thing.

This notetaking technique obviously won’t work if you are trying to prepare a text five minutes before class? But also…why would you think that this technique would work for you if you are trying to prepare a text five minutes before class? Like, a productive notetaking technique is a technique that produces results suitable to your uses—be it writing an essay, a novel, a book, a memo, etc, whatever—and sometimes that suitability will reflect time and speed, sure. But not always. A useful notetaking strategy is not always about speed. I recognize that we live in a capitalist hellscape and the language of commodification has rotted all of our minds and stolen our souls, sure. But that doesn’t mean that we should or need to concede to its logic at every turn.

I mean, surely, we all know that there are some things which simply take time. There is no way to min-max around this fact. Some things take time. And if you want to do them, you have to budget the time to do them. It’s also true that sometimes, there isn’t enough time to do the things we would like to do in the fashion we would like to do them. And that can be very frustrating. Sucky. We can acknowledge that certain structural factors—patriarchy, capitalism, sexism, racism—mean that certain groups of people are less likely to have all the time they would like or need to do the things they need to do or would like to do how they would like to do them. This is legitimately frustrating. Enraging. Unfair. And I agree, that sucks. It is one of the great examples of inequality of our era. People should be able to have time! And subsidized childcare! And freedom from tyranny and the evils of occupation. And a living wage! I could go on, but you get my point.

To go back to AI for a moment. I think that justifications for AI art and the Min-Max Optimization Gospel stem from a cheapening of the idea of time in the same way that other emanations of Capitalism stem from the cheapening of labor. Or they seem to operate according to a similar syntax. What I mean is that you often hear people defend AI as a democratization of tools and proficiency. Like, why should someone have to spend 10,000 hours learning how to use Photoshop or how to make movies, when they can just script it and have a machine generate the image. It’s productive. This cheapens the idea of time, to me, anyway. Why should one have to invest time and effort into acquiring proficiency, why should that be expected of these people whose time would be better served thinking of ways to wring money out of a chatbox, I guess. We have this idea that not only should things cost us very little in terms of effort and also material resources, they should cost us very little in terms of time too.

In the same way that I think there are accessibility and democratization of tools arguments for some kinds of AI, there are arguments to be made about the Optimization Gospel benefiting people who are systematically under-resourced in terms of time. However, those structural issues should have structural solutions. Everything else is a temporary stop-gap and represents the devolution of responsibility back to the individual when the failing wasn’t theirs in the first place.

Anyway, I don’t know how to answer that person’s question about whether or not this technique slows me down. For what I am using it for, it is perfect. If I had other needs, I’d just, idk, try something else.

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