[Announcer voice] So when we left off, Longreads had decided to try something different for its year-end package: a series of essays from the editors that reckoned with some larger theme in the year’s best journalism. After looking over all the reading I’d done in 2024 for editors’ picks, I had isolated 8-10 pieces, all of which spoke to the idea that technological “progress” had come at palpable cultural cost.

But I also wanted to try something different with the way I wrote the piece.

In the past, I probably would have tackled this essay the way I always approached criticism. I’d have consumed the relevant texts—be that a book, a documentary, an article, or anything else—and waited for a thesis to fight its way to the surface, which more often than not happened when I was in the shower. (Showers and walks: easily my two favorite ways to knock ideas loose.) If a thesis refused to show itself, I’d sometimes just start writing to see what would happen.

Earlier this year last year¹, though, I stumbled into the rabbit hole of second brains. (Quick pause for the requisite “have you considered having a functioning first brain?” questions.) First, courtesy of my wife², came the PARA method, which I started using in my personal life. It’s simple enough to implement just about anywhere³, and powerful enough to use without thinking about it too much. A few months later—again courtesy of my wife⁴—I read a book called How to Make Notes and Write that completely upended my thinking around reading.

Waiting to begin reading, researching, making notes, and writing until you know exactly what and how you want to write is unproductive. You learn by writing. The way you begin writing notes, observations, and ideas may not resemble the final form of the output you want to create.

—How to Make Notes and Write

Yes, writing begets writing, just as reading begets reading. But crucially, thinking is accretive. I’ve long been conditioned to pitch an idea, then write about the idea. That particular cart-horse system reinforces microwaved takes, and it created a pattern in which I’m loath to write unless I know what I’m writing about. Make posits an alternative—a reversal, really. First, read. Let your curiosity guide you. Second, take notes on anything you find interesting. Small notes. As small as you can make them, really⁵. Categorize them. Over time, those notes will reach out to one another. Patterns will emerge. Observations, thoughts, connections. Then the writing you’ve been doing becomes a different form of writing altogether. Instead of reaching for the thought as you’re reaching for the word, you’re recording what already in your head (while presumably adding the intangibles that make your writing your writing).

If you’ve ever used any kind of “personal knowledge base,” this is probably duh territory. But for me, it was revelatory. It was a complete shift in how I’ve always thought about writing, and more importantly, it meshed perfectly with the idea of wanting to write in a way that ignores self and presentation. It’s an intrinsically self-suffused system, in which the words on the page are simply the final manifestation of a long process of collection and synthesis.

Of course, the distance between “finding an idea compelling” and “putting the idea into practice” can be vast. And to complicate things even more, “putting into practice” can mean multiple things. Some of those things I’ve done: read differently, take better notes, try to keep better track of my own thinking. But I hadn’t found an opportunity to use all that in the service of a specific project. And then came the year-end essay I had to write for Longreads.

So, this time, I resolved to go notes-first. I re-read all the articles I’d earmarked, taking notes every time a thought occurred to me⁶; if one thought felt related to a thought I’d already written down, I linked the notes. Ultimately, they started to take some sort of shape, and I could see the ideas that were linking multiple pieces.

That itself wasn’t an earth-shaking shift. It was a small group of pieces that I’d already considered to be thematically linked, so none of the common threads among them were surprising. What was more important was that I was no longer keeping thoughts in my head. Even if something felt like a passing observation, I jotted it down. I didn’t need to remember it anymore; it was just waiting for me, a sentence without a home. This wasn’t a hit-or-miss phenomenon, either: most of those notes made it into the finished piece.

As people, we like to think that we can hold on to information, but we also hugely overestimate our ability to do so. So many of our thoughts pop up and then disappear. Some are eclipsed by other ideas that feel more important, others are crowded to the margins, and a lot of them just blink out of existence altogether. (Believe me when I say that the four decades’ worth of rap lyrics in my head don’t like making room for new neighbors.) And the things that are easily retrievable aren’t things we’ve recently learned. It’s the things that have been drummed into our brains over time by repetition: the childhood phone numbers; the TV theme songs; the things we actively studied and memorized. That leaves a vast sea of things that we want to remember—that we would probably find helpful to remember—but probably never will.

I never really took notes when I read because it didn’t seem like it had a point. Scribbling in the margin of a book means that I’d have to go back through that book again, which … why? But now those notes are Lego blocks. Get enough of them together, and they start to fit together in different way—some obvious, some not. The key is that they’re always there when you open the box.

1. That’ll teach me to wait until January to write something about 2024, I guess. ↩︎
2. I think it went something like:
   Her: Hey, I got this book, and it sounds interesting, but I feel like I won’t do anything about it. Will you read it too and see if it’s something you want to do?
   Me: Sure! ↩︎
3. Seriously, anywhere you keep any digital documents: your computer’s file system, Dropbox, Google Drive, Notion, you name it. ↩︎
4. This time it went something more like:
   Me: I don’t know what’s going on when I sit down to write these days. My brain feels kinda gunked up?
   Her: Oh, you should read this book I have. ↩︎
5. I’ve seen the term “atomic” used—in part due to the book Atomic Habits, I’m guessing—but the name doesn’t really matter. What does matter is to try to keep each note to a single idea or thought so that later you can find them and combine those thoughts as easily as possible. ↩︎
6. I use Readwise’s Reader, a fantastic app that handles just about every kind of readable or watchable content: ebooks, PDFs, websites, emails, and more. Anything you highlight in Reader automagically ports over to Readwise itself, as well as to any other note-taking app it can talk to. In my case, those highlights (and notes I make on those highlights) show up in Obsidian. ↩︎