A Taxonomy of Notes

cobblepot

Anyone have any comment on this article about different ways to classify notes?

I doubt that @sfast will have any opinion about it, but perhaps others will.

Sascha

Is this classification actionable? Does anyone draw practical conclusions from that?

ctietze

The only "taxonomy" I kind of liked (apart from Doug Barone's FSIM to categorize types of notes) is the "Semantic notes" convention. I still find some of the glyphs useful to this day to affect note sort order in a productive way.

But this goes in a different direction I can hardly grasp. The link you share here appears to me to tackle figuring out properties of a note. I'm a confuse, as people say.* Is this e.g. for archivists of notes in the world? Is it the upcoming Dewey Decimal Classification of producing notes? I don't know what to make of it.

• Medium. Where the note is recorded. This could be digital (on a phone, tablet, laptop) or analog (post-it note, notebook, index card, etc).

I don't understand why this is worth mentioning, and it makes me ask for some sort of advise what the taxonomy is good for. Is this taxonomy meant to be the XML of notes? Covering everything you could say about a note, but you have to figure out a subset of useful-to-you parts?

• Goal. Why the note is recorded. Notes can be taken with a variety of aims, such as productivity, memory, creativity, collaboration.

This might actually be a useful question to oneself when a note gets complicated to work with: what is it good for? Why do I have it? What can I make of it?

• Temporality. When and for how long the note is recorded. Notes can go from quick and ephemeral (“fleeting note”) to living archives you keep on adding to (“evergreen note”).

Also kind of useful, in the sense of the GTD flowchart: is it a reminder for yourself when you get back home to do a specific task? Then, in my case, it's an ephemeral written analog note. -- But I don't know what to do with this info

• Format. How the note is recorded. The note could be written (bullet points, excerpts), audio (voice note), or visual (screenshots, doodles, graphs).

Same. I don't see me questioning myself at some point, looking at this taxonomy, and then thinking: "heureka, I should take a voice note, that'd help, thanks for the reminder!" Again, I see how this is needed to make a complete taxonomy, but again, what for, if you're not an archivist?

• Method. There is a bit of overlapping with the format, but this looks at the specific method used for taking the note, such as the Cornell method, mind mapping, or Zettelkasten.

I'd argue this overlaps with Goal more than with Format. Because who cares if I take visual Cornell notes on a phablet -- except collectors of notes, that is. But why do I take the note, what for, that sounds interesting to me. Cornell notes during lectures for semi-structured recall and task generation afterwards, sure!

• Structure. How the note is arranged. Logs, lists, and excerpts are lower-effort, whereas outlines and summaries are more involved. Again, some overlap with format.

... and overlap with Method. Mind-Map is some sort of structure as well. Now I'm arguing about the coherence of the taxons already, oh no

• Source. Was the note generated from a book, a research paper, a newspaper article, a tweet, a podcast, a conversation?

That sounds like a universally useful thing for practitioners of taking notes. With a Zettelkasten, you want the source for later reference. With an emphemeral analog written list, you want the source to take proper action later, e.g. look it up. Not thinking about the source of whatever you're note-taking now may be cause of chagrin in the future.

What do you make of all this, @cobblepot? Is this a similar exercise to counting all the evergreen trees in the nearby forest, a completionist's task, or were you seeing some utility in this?

*: Well, 1 person from Italy I know of.

cobblepot

The article says:

"To my knowledge, there is no taxonomy consolidating all of these approaches."

I think that's the goal of the article.

@Sascha , it is actionable in the sense that notetaking systems invariably use some of these categories as ways to structure the system, and looking at a consolidation of many different types of notetaking systems might encourage someone to question their existing categories or think about potential new ones.

@ctietze , I think that from me the "goal" category was the most interesting to think about. It includes: productivity, memory, creativity, collaboration. These do not seem mutually exclusive and collectively exhaustive to me. There is overlap. The concept of "productivity" is highly ambiguous. It seems to me that productivity and creativity could both be either individual or collaborative efforts.

I'm not sure how this relates to the taxonomy, but I'm currently thinking about knowledge work methods as they relate to two aspects of systems: first, a spectrums from ease of processing on one end to usefulness (i.e. completeness of processing) on the other, and a division of steps between information encoding, retrieval, combination/generation, and organizing/output.

Edmund

Sorry for my late answer. And here is my visual with key terms used for my Zettelkasten:

A surprising insight:

• "Permanent Notes" are networked, but have no hierarchies.
• Many "Structures" are necessary to work without hierarchies.

Andy

@Edmund said:

And here is my visual with key terms used for my Zettelkasten:

Very nice! I don't recall seeing a more comprehensive list of synonyms for these types.

But as I understand it, "areas" from Tiago Forte's PARA is not a synonym for "permanent notes"; "areas" is a supercategory.

Andy Matuschak's "ephemeral scratchings" could be a synonym for "fleeting notes".

dylanjr

Hi @cobblepot.

Anyone have any comment on this article about different ways to classify notes?

None of the established note taxonomies work for me, so I recently developed a taxonomy for my own system.

Here's what that looks like

• Fleeting notes
• Buffer notes
• Source notes (AKA literature notes)
• Permanent notes
• Higher-order notes
• Project notes
• Periodic notes—daily, weekly, monthly, yearly,
• People/Entity notes
• System notes (AKA support notes)

@Sascha said:

Is this classification actionable? Does anyone draw practical conclusions from that?

For me, this form of classification is actionable—it helps me figure out where a new piece of information that I want to save should go.

Edmund

@dylanjr said:

None of the established note taxonomies work for me, so I recently developed a taxonomy for my own system.

Here's what that looks like

• Fleeting notes
• Buffer notes
• Source notes (AKA literature notes)
• Permanent notes
• Higher-order notes
• Project notes
• Periodic notes—daily, weekly, monthly, yearly,
• People/Entity notes
• System notes (AKA support notes)

Thank you for sharing. - Buffer notes are new to me. But I found a good post on this topic: https://forum.zettelkasten.de/discussion/161/differences-between-buffer-notes-outline-notes-and-structure-index-notes

Who coined the name? Any known reference?

Edmund

@Andy said:

But as I understand it, "areas" from Tiago Forte's PARA is not a synonym for "permanent notes"; "areas" is a supercategory.

Yes, and the two systems are very different. PARA is not a Zettelkasten at all.

Andy Matuschak's "ephemeral scratchings" could be a synonym for "fleeting notes".

ephemeral scratchings?!? - It sounds a bit strange ;-)

dylanjr

@Edmund said:

Who coined the name? Any known reference?

I think @Sascha may have coined the term. This article of his is where I first came across the term: https://zettelkasten.de/posts/buffer-notes/

It seems "buffer" is a German to English translation that some feel is confusing. Personally, I think it fits.

Here's a definition of buffer that's satisfactory:

3: to collect (data) in a buffer

Edmund

@dylanjr said:
Here's a definition of buffer that's satisfactory:

3: to collect (data) in a buffer

Then Buffer Notes are special types of “Project Notes”?!? Is there a term we would use in the “analogue world” of writing which is more common?

andang76

@Edmund said:

@dylanjr said:
Here's a definition of buffer that's satisfactory:

3: to collect (data) in a buffer

Then Buffer Notes are special types of “Project Notes”?!? Is there a term we would use in the “analogue world” of writing which is more common?

Yes, if I remember what I read in an article of sascha, in a buffer note you place a bunch of notes that you use for doing something specific, tracking what you'have already used and what is added during time.
In my model the most similar thing is a project/task note (I give to the term project a very broad sense) or a "purpose oriented structure note", or a "workbench note", when you collect, prepare, arrange and organize parts and components to assemble to make something.

My idea of workbench, where the wooden pieces are notes:
https://cdn.woodpeck.com/media/catalog/product/cache/26208d9473ddf6b783395684c4053ce8/s/n/sn10224.jpg

But now I think is more similar to a desk covered of papers, each paper a note, even if I don't like the term "desk note":

https://img.freepik.com/foto-premium/una-scrivania-con-sopra-un-libro-e-una-pila-di-fogli_883586-8476.jpg

(but I prefer a more ordered arranging of those papers...)

I've seen in a video of Christian he used a buffer note in the same way I have a workbench note for processing the content of a book before making zettels. For the purpose of making zettels from a source in his case, therefore, not an output from the zettels.

The most important point, beyond the metaphor, I think, is that a buffer note is a note that allow you to "collect a bunch of items for using them for something during time".

andang76

I've seen that there is a difficulty to understand the meaning of the buffer.

I think I've found a good way to explaining it, using a common experience.

Consider a youtube video. The line at the bottom of the video, just before the play/stop buttons, represents the loading progress of the video in your browser, and is a good representation of the concept of buffer.
You can think the buffer as the "memory" that your internet connection "fills" with the video second by second (the gray line become white), and that you "empty" when you watch the video (the white line become yellow) second by second.
This buffer for a video is useful because it ensures that you have an enough amount of video to watch, after an initial loading, even if the connection slow down for a while, avoiding the interruption.
Thanks to the buffer you don't have to do load-then-watch, load-then-watch, load-then-watch.

The buffer note works in the same way, I think @Sascha has thinked in this way. You fill it with notes in an ingestion phase, and you empty it when you use your notes for a given task. It works like the loading indicator of a youtube video. The buffer of notes let you adjust the rythm of creation and consume of the notes. You are not forced to use every single note as soon as you've created, you can accumulate first many notes and use them later together in a smooth way for the task.

One little difference betwen youtube buffer and buffer note. In youtube you have to watch the content in a temporal order, you empty the buffer in a sequential way (unless you click in different points of the bar).
In the buffer note you can decide in what order you consume the notes into the buffer, it's enough that the note you want process next is already inserted into the buffer. You don't need to process the notes in the exact order they entered into the buffer. It is a bit different from a true queue (first ingested, first consumed).

Edmund

@andang76 said:
I've seen that there is a difficulty to understand the meaning of the buffer.
The buffer note works in the same way, I think @Sascha has thinked in this way. You fill it with notes in an ingestion phase, and you empty it when you use your notes for a given task. It works like the loading indicator of a youtube video.
The buffer of notes let you adjust the rythm of creation and consume of the notes. You are not forced to use every single note as soon as you've created, you can accumulate first many notes and use them later together in a smooth way for the task.

Thank you for helping me understand the idea of a Buffer Note. Here my visual translation:

My difficulty in understanding is easily explained: I never used this concept. But it is an excellent idea to gather relevant information in one note before processing.

I typically work with visual outlines for each chapter, the concept from Victor Margolin (see: https://forum.zettelkasten.de/discussion/2432/victor-margolins-zettelkasten-process-for-note-taking-and-writing)

andang76

@Edmund said:

@andang76 said:
I've seen that there is a difficulty to understand the meaning of the buffer.
The buffer note works in the same way, I think @Sascha has thinked in this way. You fill it with notes in an ingestion phase, and you empty it when you use your notes for a given task. It works like the loading indicator of a youtube video.
The buffer of notes let you adjust the rythm of creation and consume of the notes. You are not forced to use every single note as soon as you've created, you can accumulate first many notes and use them later together in a smooth way for the task.

Thank you for helping me understand the idea of a Buffer Note. Here my visual translation:

My difficulty in understanding is easily explained: I never used this concept. But it is an excellent idea to gather relevant information in one note before processing.

I typically work with visual outlines for each chapter, the concept from Victor Margolin (see: https://forum.zettelkasten.de/discussion/2432/victor-margolins-zettelkasten-process-for-note-taking-and-writing)

It's not only for processing a source, but also (and mainly, maybe) useful for doing things with a bunch of notes you collect in a short-medium time.

Maybe you already use another kind of construct for the same purpose.
I suppose, when you plan one of your beautiful diagrams about your zettelkasten , you have the idea for your diagram, you start searching your note system, examining many notes, choosing betwen them ("so, I want to talk about my types of notes: this is ok, this is ok, this not") and place a link or a mention to the selected notes into a "list" before drawing.
If you first collect this list you want to represent before drawing the diagram, you have a buffer in the end. If you, instead, as you find a concept in your note system you immedialy draw it into the diagram, you are not using a buffer.

Watching the video of Margolins, maybe that large paper at minute 1:37 has a function of a buffer in the end

I don't have the buffer note in my system, too, but the same work is covered by other things. I often start preparing the "set" of notes that I want to use and then I start using them.