Chris Maiorana has an interesting post on note taking with Emacs. He says that Emacs and, in particular Org mode, have all sorts of functions to make taking notes easier but that it’s easy to get bogged down in trying to decide what packages to use and how to organize your notes.
Maiorana’s suggestion is to just take notes and not worry about any details in the beginning. After you have a hundred or so notes you can worry about the best way to organize them and you’ll have a better idea of what packages you should use to take and organize them.
He has another suggestion for the type of note to take. It’s something he calls “The Undergrad Note”. The idea is that each note has
- A claim
- A quote illustrating the claim
- Your explanation or justification for the claim
He gives an example from Dostoyevsky’s Notes From Underground. It illustrates nicely how the method works: You make a suggestion or supposition about something, supply a quote or other evidence about the quote/claim, and, finally, offer a justification for your claim.
His post is a reminder that you can’t do it all with tools. Sometimes you need a method too. The Undergrad Note method probably won’t be a perfect fit for your needs but as Maiorana says, that doesn’t matter. The point is to get use to taking notes and discover the best method for you to do that.