Anne-Laure Le Cunff over at Ness Labs has an interesting article on the difference between note taking and note making. One way of thinking of the difference is to consider note making as active note taking. Rather than simply record what you hear or read you consume the material actively by putting it in your own words and relating it to other ideas.
This distinction is important for students because there’s an impressive amount of research showing that this sort of active note making results in far better recall of the material. Ali Abdaal has a whole series of videos on the subject if you’re interested in learning more.
Note making is important to more than students. Niklas Luhmann famously used the idea for the Zettelkasten that he used to power his research career. The idea is useful for anyone learning new material or recording observations for later use. The method that Le Cunff discusses has more instantiations that just a Zettelkasten and she mentions some of them in the article.
The TL;DR of the method is
- Put each note in your own words.
- Link each note to other related notes.
- Treat your notes as a living document.
That sounds a lot like a Zettelkasten but as I said, there are other ways of realizing the idea. Take a look at Le Cunff’s article for more details.