The Notetaking Cold War

“The trail of the human serpent is thus over everything.” - William James

How should we organize our notes? 

It’s the bugbear of almost every productivity nerd, and answers abound: notebooks, tags, stacks, kanbans, links, bi-directional links.

In fact, there are so many answers to this question that people in our little corner of the internet actually fight about how to organize notes. 

(Tiago is, of course, the creator of the organizational system PARA and fellow Everything bundle member. Conor is the creator of Roam.)

The lines of battle have been drawn this way:

Tiago thinks notes should be organized by actionability, and that each note should go in one and only one place in the following categories: Projects, Areas, Resources, Archives. 

Conor thinks that notes should go everywhere, and that there’s no single top-down structure that can encapsulate all note-taking. 

They’re both extremely intelligent and thoughtful about this topic — so why do they disagree so thoroughly? And how should we decide between them?

I think if we take the time to actually examine the disagreement we’ll be surprised. I don’t think they actually disagree about as much as it may seem. Second, I think gaining a better understanding of the philosophical source of their dispute will help to make us better note takers, and importantly, better thinkers. 

Ready to dive in? Let’s go.

1 

Let’s start at the beginning. Why are we fighting in the first place? Why is organizing notes so hard?

That’s a good question to ask.

One obvious answer is that organizing information is just hard. But it turns out that it’s only really hard for certain types of information. 

You’ll notice that there’s no great debate about the best way to organize the information inside of a CRM. It’s fairly obvious how to do that: a CRM should be a long list of customers. 

If you want to get slightly more complicated with it you’d include a hierarchy. Each customer contains a list of attributes like name and address and phone number. Each customer is then contained inside of a company. Companies are contained inside of a geography. 

You can see here, we just built a very basic organizational system for a CRM in a few sentences. It’s not so hard. There’s room for disagreement over details. But no one is disagreeing over the fundamentals in the same way that note-taking nerds are. 

So why are notes different?

2

One way to think about knowledge management is as philosophy in action:

As we think about the best folder structures and tag hierarchies, we’re really doing philosophy.  And it turns out that there’s a two-thousand-year-old debate in philosophy that’s pretty similar to the debate between Tiago and Conor. 

Instead of being about how notes are organized, it’s about the way the world is organized. 

The questions that this battle attempts to ask are things like:

What is the world? 

What is it made up of? 

How do its constituent parts relate to each other? 

And how do we know? 

On one side of the debate, roughly are people who believe that there is a world out there, that it is universal, objective, and accessible by the human intellect. 

We’ll call these people essentialists. (Philosophers like Plato, Kant, and Descartes all fit under this label — though their philosophical stances vary widely) 

Essentialists think about truth in a very specific way. They think that a statement is true when it reflects something essential about the way reality is organized. They think truth is defined as a relationship between a statement and a state of the world.

One the other side of the debate are people who choose not to answer that question directly. They believe, roughly, that there is no objective place from which to decide what is true. They believe that there are many different ways to represent and organize reality. 

We’ll call these people pragmatists. (Philosophers like James, Wittgenstein, and Rorty — though their philosophical stances vary widely.)

Essentialists have a representational theory of truth. They believe that a statement is true when it represents the state of reality accurately.

Pragmatists have an instrumental theory of truth. They believe that a statement is true when it works — that the only way we can know if something is true is if, by acting according to it, the world reacts in the way we expect it to. 

To a pragmatist, statements aren’t more or less true in the sense that they more or less accurately represent reality — statements are just more or less useful. The useful ones we call “true” and the not useful ones we call “false.”

Essentialists think pragmatists have a childish version of truth. They think that pragmatists are arguing that everyone can have their own personal version of the truth, which is counter to the very idea of truth.

Pragmatists think essentialists spend too much time reading books and not enough time paying attention to how life actually works.

More importantly, because of the way they think of the world, essentialists and pragmatists engage in significantly different ways of organizing it.

Essentialists have a hierarchical view of the world. Each object in the world should fit into one and only one category, and each category should nest within a well-defined hierarchy. You can see essentialist principles in many places — like the system we have for categorizing animals, Linnaean taxonomy. Each animal fits into one and only one kingdom, species, genus, etc. 

For essentialists, it’s the philosopher’s job to define these categories and figure out where each thing in the world fits. Each thing has one and only one true place.

The pragmatic organizing project is very different. Pragmatists tend to have a networked, relational view of the world. They believe things are defined by their relations to other things, and that there are many different, valid ways to interpret what objects are in the world and how they relate to each other. 

To a pragmatist, what we call an object and how we categorize those objects are just a matter of perspective. Objects in the world can be placed in many different categories at once — we choose which categories and relationships are most relevant based on context.