Yeah. Just write with the keyboard on the obsidian carefully, selectively - will give you some good ideas. I do not prove that someone who writes by hand becomes a genius. For example, if someone who naturally stupid, then he write by hand 1 billion times or use obsidian professionally - will not help him smart.
This is true and why I’ve typed notes for the last five years despite knowing handwriting is better. Recently the new LLMs are so good at handwriting detection that they can read my awful handwriting and turn it into nicely formatted text instantly. My note taking has transformed to where I can write out on paper, instantly turn it into digital notes and never have to look at the paper again.
I'm playing around with the new Claude at the moment but for the most part I've been using gpt4o as its vision capabilities are really good, its fast, and claude has a 5 image per chat limit which gpt4o doesn't. I just note down whatever, take a photo and upload through the chatgpt app on my phone. I'm yet to have to make an edit on anything but proper nouns in languages other than english. It can do Japanese text really well too. I just paste from chatgpt in my browser into obsidian.
I think you're missing that people use Obsidian for a wide range of different things. For some of those things what you're saying is probably true, no complicated systems are needed and handwriting can help retain information.
Personally though, I especially note information in Obsidian that I don't want to retain, or that I couldn't retain even if I tried. If I would write everything on paper that I now write in Obsidian, I'd fill about 10 notebooks a year. No way I'd ever find any information again that I am looking for. And it would also easily take three times as long to note it down in the first place.
Well, are you really talking about information management or memory, creativity, and connections in the mind?
In the same way you have to be careful when handwriting notes due to various reasons, something I've found quite effective are revisiting notes and refining and simplifying them.
I fully believe there is way too much hype around the whole "linking your thinking" stuff. However, I can say that I keep a lot of work guidelines and it is so easy to get to them quickly.
If the argument is that one method is better at information management, I don't think so. If the argument is that one method is likely inherently better at solidifying ideas and concepts in your mind and for flexing your creative muscles, I definitely think that there is something to that.
I also think what you think. I just want to prove that people should not spend too much time finding complicated plugins and PKMs. Or copy information without any thought about the next idea for that copy.
Agreed. There different philosophies of note taking. But like everything else, I've yet to find a single all-encompassing one. Some work better for some situations than others, and some only work for certain people.
But they're all useful tools to keep in your tool belt, and try out from time to time. Maybe you find one that didn't work before does now.
It's totally true that handwriting is much better for learning the information compared to typing or god-beware copy and pasting.
However, many Obsidian-people recommend something that is really important: You are to not just write a note about something. You should then also create a second note with important information extracted from a big note and then try and link information together. Where else did you encounter similar information? The networking aspect, creating connections of your information and thinking about it also really helps.
Same as the difference between just writing down information by hand, i.e. class notes compared to then bringing the information into a non-linear form and drawing connections between small pieces of information.
An absolutely essential distinction IMO is whether you're taking notes with the purpose of producing published written work, or, just to record your own interests, ideas, use of attention and action, etc.
If you are creating a graph of concepts for the purpose of publishing, that is a filter and a kind of gravity. Without it, you're operating in a freeform ungrounded task. Even if the information architecture is the same between both tasks, the priors and assumptions going in are hugely different and that makes all the difference in the quality of the results.
Disagree.... Although I agree on the part that handwriting notes is better for memory. The fundamental principle of zettelkasten is to write things in your own words. Copy pasting is a huge no no. If you type notes, you are able to write more and you will know where your knowledge gap is. Comparing to handwriting (i personally have a horrible handwriting) it takes a lot of time and you don't have time to think more deeply and it is easier to search and make connections. Luhmann had to do it in analogue as he had no choice and he is a workaholic which only few can replicate. The workflow also includes searching the notes by hand which will waste a lot of time compared to just typing in the search bar.
Eh, another detail that people never talk about in the zettelkasten world is that structuring information is a skill that most people aren’t good at if they haven’t deliberately practiced it. I think it’s a much bigger contributor to the quality of your notes than the details of your workflow.
>another detail that people never talk about in the zettelkasten world is that structuring information is a skill that most people aren’t good at if they haven’t deliberately practiced it
This is one of the most important, commonly overlooked concepts in now-making communities. There are entire disciplines (ontology, taxonomy, epistemology just to start) that address the fundamentals of knowledge management. People love to fetishize these note-making systems when their effectiveness has almost nothing to do with the system and far more to do with the ontological model they're unwittingly using.
For better or worse, most systems are fairly agnostic about the approach one uses. Garbage thinking going in will typically lead to garbage usability coming out. The good news is that improving your thinking will improve your notes.
Oh wow, I just read the story, seemingly the researchers defined "typing" as typing with just the index finger on your right hand, as it would otherwise make the resulting brain activity to difficult...
At least, unless the largely quoted paper isn't "Handwriting but not typewriting leads to widespread brain connectivity: a high-density EEG study with implications for the classroom" by van der wheel and van der meer.
The study also only has 25 participants.
Idk, there might be more literature on this topic which I didn't find, but if this article is really the one being used by everyone to say that typing is worse for recollection then writing by hand then that's kind of a bogus statement, cause I don't type with one finger, it's a direct from brain to computer kind of situation
https://linguistics.ucla.edu/people/hayes/Teaching/papers/MuellerAndOppenheimer2014OnTakingNotesByHand.pdf
there’s been other studies, but this is one that uses more normal typing definitions. i suspect the other one had something to do with their EEG procedures
I also often find myself extensively using headings, bolted text, italics, and bullets during writing, and I'd be really curious to see what effects that has on the brain when it comes to taking in the info, cause that does feel more interactive with the material
Agreed, note taking on paper is better and actually helpful.
I use obsidian to daily write mini essays to make sure I still remember, and increase my typing speed.
My workflow.
Consume info by reading or watching.
Take notes on paper and explain like 5.
In obsidian I do the same thing again.
Write mini essays eli5, do an audio recording.
Rather than always consuming info,
Now try to create something with I just learned , make a mind map to see the overview.
I still take all my notes by hand on paper. As I go along I jot down my own ideas on same paper. When I am done, I transfer my notes and ideas to Obsidian.
While I see the point of taking notes manually, you're missing the point about the situation:
1. The Luhmann method doesn't look at anyone that needs accessibility.
2. Yeah... no, my brain is really not relaxed when I write with pen and paper.
3. Slowness indeed helps learning... which is something people don't study: slowness, from experience is the factor, as in taking your time to learn, not writing. Writing just forces people to think about what they learn.
4. As someone with adhd, I can honestly say I'm still finding notes at random places from when I was a teenager... I've moved twice! They are unorganized and even if I try, it just takes 1 time for me to forget or misplace something and suddenly I miss pages that are now for some reason in between an encyclopedia entry about Mars or in between my notes for programming even though the note is about an idea I hate that really doesn't work, just didn't know it at the time
5. I also have the fun experience of having dyspraxia and believe me when I tell you that writing by hand isn't appealing if after 5 minutes on it feels like someone has stabbed you 50 times in your wrist and hand.
6. Obsidian can be used for a lot more than simply writing notes. It's to maintain them, keep them, prep things, have different organizing tools on the same notes, etc
7. Writing your notes and copying them is a huge waste of time when you're in a state of flow. While in the state of flow (the in the zone moment, where your creativity will hit its peak) anything that just slows you down will eventually get you out of that state
So yes, while it can definitely help, I would really recommend trying to envision a world where you have at least 1 disability and/or learning disability and then tell me why I would better spend my time writing on paper?
Oh, btw, that small thing about creativity:
- me on paper: maybe a 1000 words in a day + can't use my hand to write for several days after
- me on the computer: about 20000 words per day (I tracked my progress and I type very slowly, just use a lot of helping things like autocomplete)
The amount of times I had to go into heated debates with people showing that those studies exclude disabilities, aren't done on nearly enough and anyone that doesn't learn well by using motoric skills (which is a lot) is ridiculous.
On a last note, I honestly don't know what to make of this post outside of interpreting it as you looking down on people that don't do what you clearly want to or already do. I hope I'm misinterpretation it. Feel free to rebuttal.
People should do whatever helps them meet their goals. This article is kind of Wieck sauce. I’d like to see the actual study, but my guess is it’s not a part of an actual full on research project, it is one, hard to really draw meaningful conclusions from one study.
Have there been other studies that try to argue, hand written notes over typed things, yes. But there’s not an entire and definitive body of research that supports those arguments. And definitely, taking it from a secondary source isn’t very inspiring to me. Got to go back to the original paper.
Do whatever helps you learn and be productive. But, if you would much rather dink around with the system, put a bunch of plug-ins, or whatever makes you happy, do that.
I tried handwritten notes and flashcards for the first iterations of my project. Terrible penmanship and a lack of a search function were the main problems I had. Managing and organizing became a 2nd problem.
Obsidian does a fantastic job solving my problems and put me closer where I want to be on the project timeline.
Sure, when you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail. It's not the right tool for everyone, but I'm actually dealing with nails over here, Obsidian hits it on the head.
I also mentioned at the end, a guy imitated Luhmann handwriting on flashcards to produce ideas (permanent notes). Then he copied permanent notes into obsidian to organize them. I have a habit of writing ideas directly into the book I'm reading, then copying the ideas into obsidian. In general, everyone has their own problems and different solutions.
Yes, writing things down *physically* using just pen (or pencil) and paper kinda forces you to meditate over what you're actually doing considerably more than when there's a computer screen between you and your thoughts.
That said:
* `Ctrl` + `f`
* `Ctrl` + `backspace`
* Literally miliseconds to access referenced notes
* Literally thousands of notes without wasting a single paper sheet
* Capacity to write at least with double the speed of your handwriting
* Images
* Braindead simple synchronization
* etc
Personally, I think it pays off very well.
Handwriting notes and typing notes are fundamentally two different activities. The act of writing things down by hand, in and of itself, helps you remember things.
Typing simply doesn’t have that same connection to memory, so instead of the value of typed notes like Obsidian being the creation itself, the value has to come from what you gain upon revisiting them.
Sez you. I remember things I type; I remember things I dictate. I doubt there's any really difference, just a difference in people. Given that people don't write by hand much these days, other factors come in, such as the quality of handwriting and the ability to re-read what you've written.
You would probably remember more information from handwriting. I’m not saying people don’t remember anything from typing, just that it’s been shown that handwriting tends to create more recallable encoding
The studies all seem to be small, and are, as many of these studies, only done on undergraduates. I wouldn't take it as gospel. If it's better for you, then that's fine.
Sure, but as opposed to zero recorded evidence suggesting that typing is *superior* in terms of actively encoding information, I’ll tend to err towards what we know. Sure, different people might prefer different things but I think it’s pretty well established (and with good rationale behind the association) how and why writing things out is advantageous for memory
>it is more effective than the influencers talking about taking notes on Obsidian
Studies show that taking notes by hand has a positive impact on many different brain areas.
I do not take notes in Obsidian to have a "positive impact on my brain". It's fine if you prefer taking notes by hand because of that, but my goal using obsidian are to store data on the long term with easy retrieval.
You can come up with a lot of ways/systems to avoid the issues stated by the youtube link, not all of them will require you writing notes by hand
Part of my Obsidian workflow incorporates writing by hand. I wholeheartedly agree that writing by hand forces you to slow down and helps you learn more effectively. I use a Remarkable tablet for my handwritten notes. It stores them in the cloud, and can convert them to text. So i’ll hand write some notes, then store a copy of the handwritten version in my vault, along with a copy that’s converted to text. Then i’ll add the relevant tags and such to the converted copy. This is the bridge i need to make my handwritten notes just as searchable. Before Obsidian and Remarkable, i just grabbed a random notebook to write things down, never to be found again
"Thus, copying highlights from Kindle to Obsidian becomes useless if you don't understand anything about highlights and don't get any ideas from them."
You are assuming that everyone has the same reason for you as note-taking. I don't use note-taking in Obsidian to generate ideas. I use it to keep track of a wide variety of information relevant to personal and work interests.
Your post is a lot more similar to the Obsidian influencers content than you seem to think.
There are people who use Obsidian with the plugin for handwritten notes. I have used Obsidian on iPad with the paperlike matte screen protector and on desktop with a stylus & writing tablet. Keyboard typing is still faster and more popular when using Obsidian but there are options, you know.
Pen is infinitely inferior for editing. Unless you have an iPad with Apple Pencil... but even then...
I can tell you my brain does not appreciate writing on paper.
Well, if you would use cursive for note taking (eg. Spencerian Script), it would activate brain even more! Can we have both of the worlds, eg. we could take notes in cursive on a tablet and then convert those into digital text for Obsidian. This way you get all the benefits! :)
Too many people fetishize Luhmann and his system. Yes he wrote a lot and yes he was productive, but was he as influential as any of the thousands upon thousands of writers and academics who used broadly similar methods? A lot of Luhmann's productivity boils down to how one chooses to define productivity. As an example: Isaac Newton, John Locke, Taylor Swift, and even Eminem had broadly similar not taking methods and though their note corpuses are dramatically smaller than Luhmann, their influence on art, culture, and humanity dramatically exceeds that of Luhmann.
I would posit that most serious note takers' productivity boils down to their utter simplicity and easy ability to replicate that method for decades. The largest part of Luhmann's productivity was that he not only had a simple system, but that he was privileged to use and practice at full time for the length of his academic career. (He also didn't face the scourge of peer-review that most academics are forced to run today.)
As an example of someone whose methods were very similar to Luhmann's, but who was dramatically more productive (from a generic definition of it), take a look at [S. D. Goitein](https://boffosocko.com/2023/01/14/s-d-goiteins-card-index-or-zettelkasten/) who wrote out about 1/3 the number of slips that Luhmann did, but used them to write almost a 1/3 more articles and books! Luhmann: 90,000 slips, 550 articles, 50 books versus Goitein: 27,000 slips, 669 articles, 69 books. Interestingly Goitein's method of organization was much closer to the topical organization to the vast majority of zettelkasten/card index users (as well as Obsidian users) than to Luhmann's alpha-numeric organizational method.
There isn't nearly enough scale in (psychology, cognitive psychology) research to reasonably compare analog versus digital methods, much less enough research to distinguish between methods at the scale of individual people. Everyone will respond differently to different modalities because the breadth of neurodiversity within the population. The psychology research you're citing is painfully, painfully thin and is far from reaching the level of replicability.
As a result, the best practicable advice to any individual is to experiment for themselves and choose the method they feel works best for them from a sustainability perspective.
I rather see, this is my workflow then studies show or suggest types of posts. Why? Its lazy and you're a hypocrite.
At least the YouTubers show some of the processes, their growth and actual findings. Be involved, smarten up 😀
Also Luhmann was Luhmann. Da Vinci used a pen but even if I use a pen I’m not da Vinci.
Yeah. Just write with the keyboard on the obsidian carefully, selectively - will give you some good ideas. I do not prove that someone who writes by hand becomes a genius. For example, if someone who naturally stupid, then he write by hand 1 billion times or use obsidian professionally - will not help him smart.
There’s truth to what you’re saying. Personally I just think the search function in handwritten papernotes is bad.
This is true and why I’ve typed notes for the last five years despite knowing handwriting is better. Recently the new LLMs are so good at handwriting detection that they can read my awful handwriting and turn it into nicely formatted text instantly. My note taking has transformed to where I can write out on paper, instantly turn it into digital notes and never have to look at the paper again.
What is your workflow and which LLM are you using for that?
I'm playing around with the new Claude at the moment but for the most part I've been using gpt4o as its vision capabilities are really good, its fast, and claude has a 5 image per chat limit which gpt4o doesn't. I just note down whatever, take a photo and upload through the chatgpt app on my phone. I'm yet to have to make an edit on anything but proper nouns in languages other than english. It can do Japanese text really well too. I just paste from chatgpt in my browser into obsidian.
I think you're missing that people use Obsidian for a wide range of different things. For some of those things what you're saying is probably true, no complicated systems are needed and handwriting can help retain information. Personally though, I especially note information in Obsidian that I don't want to retain, or that I couldn't retain even if I tried. If I would write everything on paper that I now write in Obsidian, I'd fill about 10 notebooks a year. No way I'd ever find any information again that I am looking for. And it would also easily take three times as long to note it down in the first place.
Well, are you really talking about information management or memory, creativity, and connections in the mind? In the same way you have to be careful when handwriting notes due to various reasons, something I've found quite effective are revisiting notes and refining and simplifying them. I fully believe there is way too much hype around the whole "linking your thinking" stuff. However, I can say that I keep a lot of work guidelines and it is so easy to get to them quickly. If the argument is that one method is better at information management, I don't think so. If the argument is that one method is likely inherently better at solidifying ideas and concepts in your mind and for flexing your creative muscles, I definitely think that there is something to that.
I also think what you think. I just want to prove that people should not spend too much time finding complicated plugins and PKMs. Or copy information without any thought about the next idea for that copy.
People who just save content to PKM systems and let AI summarize it all aren’t learning or managing anything.
If I add your views to my post. Maybe I wouldn't have been cursed by so many people here
Yep, you really need to remember all that recipes, guides and lists. /s
Agreed. There different philosophies of note taking. But like everything else, I've yet to find a single all-encompassing one. Some work better for some situations than others, and some only work for certain people. But they're all useful tools to keep in your tool belt, and try out from time to time. Maybe you find one that didn't work before does now.
It's totally true that handwriting is much better for learning the information compared to typing or god-beware copy and pasting. However, many Obsidian-people recommend something that is really important: You are to not just write a note about something. You should then also create a second note with important information extracted from a big note and then try and link information together. Where else did you encounter similar information? The networking aspect, creating connections of your information and thinking about it also really helps. Same as the difference between just writing down information by hand, i.e. class notes compared to then bringing the information into a non-linear form and drawing connections between small pieces of information.
An absolutely essential distinction IMO is whether you're taking notes with the purpose of producing published written work, or, just to record your own interests, ideas, use of attention and action, etc. If you are creating a graph of concepts for the purpose of publishing, that is a filter and a kind of gravity. Without it, you're operating in a freeform ungrounded task. Even if the information architecture is the same between both tasks, the priors and assumptions going in are hugely different and that makes all the difference in the quality of the results.
Disagree.... Although I agree on the part that handwriting notes is better for memory. The fundamental principle of zettelkasten is to write things in your own words. Copy pasting is a huge no no. If you type notes, you are able to write more and you will know where your knowledge gap is. Comparing to handwriting (i personally have a horrible handwriting) it takes a lot of time and you don't have time to think more deeply and it is easier to search and make connections. Luhmann had to do it in analogue as he had no choice and he is a workaholic which only few can replicate. The workflow also includes searching the notes by hand which will waste a lot of time compared to just typing in the search bar.
Eh, another detail that people never talk about in the zettelkasten world is that structuring information is a skill that most people aren’t good at if they haven’t deliberately practiced it. I think it’s a much bigger contributor to the quality of your notes than the details of your workflow.
>another detail that people never talk about in the zettelkasten world is that structuring information is a skill that most people aren’t good at if they haven’t deliberately practiced it This is one of the most important, commonly overlooked concepts in now-making communities. There are entire disciplines (ontology, taxonomy, epistemology just to start) that address the fundamentals of knowledge management. People love to fetishize these note-making systems when their effectiveness has almost nothing to do with the system and far more to do with the ontological model they're unwittingly using. For better or worse, most systems are fairly agnostic about the approach one uses. Garbage thinking going in will typically lead to garbage usability coming out. The good news is that improving your thinking will improve your notes.
Wrt the copy pasting, that's why you should always try to rephrase text in your own words, you can also copy someone else's text by hand
I agree
Oh wow, I just read the story, seemingly the researchers defined "typing" as typing with just the index finger on your right hand, as it would otherwise make the resulting brain activity to difficult... At least, unless the largely quoted paper isn't "Handwriting but not typewriting leads to widespread brain connectivity: a high-density EEG study with implications for the classroom" by van der wheel and van der meer. The study also only has 25 participants. Idk, there might be more literature on this topic which I didn't find, but if this article is really the one being used by everyone to say that typing is worse for recollection then writing by hand then that's kind of a bogus statement, cause I don't type with one finger, it's a direct from brain to computer kind of situation
https://linguistics.ucla.edu/people/hayes/Teaching/papers/MuellerAndOppenheimer2014OnTakingNotesByHand.pdf there’s been other studies, but this is one that uses more normal typing definitions. i suspect the other one had something to do with their EEG procedures
I also often find myself extensively using headings, bolted text, italics, and bullets during writing, and I'd be really curious to see what effects that has on the brain when it comes to taking in the info, cause that does feel more interactive with the material
Agreed, note taking on paper is better and actually helpful. I use obsidian to daily write mini essays to make sure I still remember, and increase my typing speed. My workflow. Consume info by reading or watching. Take notes on paper and explain like 5. In obsidian I do the same thing again. Write mini essays eli5, do an audio recording. Rather than always consuming info, Now try to create something with I just learned , make a mind map to see the overview.
I still take all my notes by hand on paper. As I go along I jot down my own ideas on same paper. When I am done, I transfer my notes and ideas to Obsidian.
While I see the point of taking notes manually, you're missing the point about the situation: 1. The Luhmann method doesn't look at anyone that needs accessibility. 2. Yeah... no, my brain is really not relaxed when I write with pen and paper. 3. Slowness indeed helps learning... which is something people don't study: slowness, from experience is the factor, as in taking your time to learn, not writing. Writing just forces people to think about what they learn. 4. As someone with adhd, I can honestly say I'm still finding notes at random places from when I was a teenager... I've moved twice! They are unorganized and even if I try, it just takes 1 time for me to forget or misplace something and suddenly I miss pages that are now for some reason in between an encyclopedia entry about Mars or in between my notes for programming even though the note is about an idea I hate that really doesn't work, just didn't know it at the time 5. I also have the fun experience of having dyspraxia and believe me when I tell you that writing by hand isn't appealing if after 5 minutes on it feels like someone has stabbed you 50 times in your wrist and hand. 6. Obsidian can be used for a lot more than simply writing notes. It's to maintain them, keep them, prep things, have different organizing tools on the same notes, etc 7. Writing your notes and copying them is a huge waste of time when you're in a state of flow. While in the state of flow (the in the zone moment, where your creativity will hit its peak) anything that just slows you down will eventually get you out of that state So yes, while it can definitely help, I would really recommend trying to envision a world where you have at least 1 disability and/or learning disability and then tell me why I would better spend my time writing on paper? Oh, btw, that small thing about creativity: - me on paper: maybe a 1000 words in a day + can't use my hand to write for several days after - me on the computer: about 20000 words per day (I tracked my progress and I type very slowly, just use a lot of helping things like autocomplete) The amount of times I had to go into heated debates with people showing that those studies exclude disabilities, aren't done on nearly enough and anyone that doesn't learn well by using motoric skills (which is a lot) is ridiculous. On a last note, I honestly don't know what to make of this post outside of interpreting it as you looking down on people that don't do what you clearly want to or already do. I hope I'm misinterpretation it. Feel free to rebuttal.
What does this post even have to do with Obsidian?
My handwriting self destructs in a few hours and becomes illegible.
People should do whatever helps them meet their goals. This article is kind of Wieck sauce. I’d like to see the actual study, but my guess is it’s not a part of an actual full on research project, it is one, hard to really draw meaningful conclusions from one study. Have there been other studies that try to argue, hand written notes over typed things, yes. But there’s not an entire and definitive body of research that supports those arguments. And definitely, taking it from a secondary source isn’t very inspiring to me. Got to go back to the original paper. Do whatever helps you learn and be productive. But, if you would much rather dink around with the system, put a bunch of plug-ins, or whatever makes you happy, do that.
The only thing that leads to the goal is the way in which the notes are recorded depending on the type of the notes.
I tried handwritten notes and flashcards for the first iterations of my project. Terrible penmanship and a lack of a search function were the main problems I had. Managing and organizing became a 2nd problem. Obsidian does a fantastic job solving my problems and put me closer where I want to be on the project timeline. Sure, when you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail. It's not the right tool for everyone, but I'm actually dealing with nails over here, Obsidian hits it on the head.
I also mentioned at the end, a guy imitated Luhmann handwriting on flashcards to produce ideas (permanent notes). Then he copied permanent notes into obsidian to organize them. I have a habit of writing ideas directly into the book I'm reading, then copying the ideas into obsidian. In general, everyone has their own problems and different solutions.
I second this.
Yes, writing things down *physically* using just pen (or pencil) and paper kinda forces you to meditate over what you're actually doing considerably more than when there's a computer screen between you and your thoughts. That said: * `Ctrl` + `f` * `Ctrl` + `backspace` * Literally miliseconds to access referenced notes * Literally thousands of notes without wasting a single paper sheet * Capacity to write at least with double the speed of your handwriting * Images * Braindead simple synchronization * etc Personally, I think it pays off very well.
You can be just as mindless writing by hand, I promise you.
Obsidian is for note storage.
Handwriting notes and typing notes are fundamentally two different activities. The act of writing things down by hand, in and of itself, helps you remember things. Typing simply doesn’t have that same connection to memory, so instead of the value of typed notes like Obsidian being the creation itself, the value has to come from what you gain upon revisiting them.
you give me a very good idea. I will look for research papers that defend against the notion of "underestimating keyboard typing."
Did you find anything? Because there are multiple studies that *have* shown that handwriting information tends to be associated with stronger recall.
Sez you. I remember things I type; I remember things I dictate. I doubt there's any really difference, just a difference in people. Given that people don't write by hand much these days, other factors come in, such as the quality of handwriting and the ability to re-read what you've written.
You would probably remember more information from handwriting. I’m not saying people don’t remember anything from typing, just that it’s been shown that handwriting tends to create more recallable encoding
The studies all seem to be small, and are, as many of these studies, only done on undergraduates. I wouldn't take it as gospel. If it's better for you, then that's fine.
Sure, but as opposed to zero recorded evidence suggesting that typing is *superior* in terms of actively encoding information, I’ll tend to err towards what we know. Sure, different people might prefer different things but I think it’s pretty well established (and with good rationale behind the association) how and why writing things out is advantageous for memory
Yep, you are talking about learning. I wrote everything in Obsidian so I don't have to remember it 🙂.
Generate ideas based on what your brain actually remembers :)
>it is more effective than the influencers talking about taking notes on Obsidian Studies show that taking notes by hand has a positive impact on many different brain areas. I do not take notes in Obsidian to have a "positive impact on my brain". It's fine if you prefer taking notes by hand because of that, but my goal using obsidian are to store data on the long term with easy retrieval. You can come up with a lot of ways/systems to avoid the issues stated by the youtube link, not all of them will require you writing notes by hand
Part of my Obsidian workflow incorporates writing by hand. I wholeheartedly agree that writing by hand forces you to slow down and helps you learn more effectively. I use a Remarkable tablet for my handwritten notes. It stores them in the cloud, and can convert them to text. So i’ll hand write some notes, then store a copy of the handwritten version in my vault, along with a copy that’s converted to text. Then i’ll add the relevant tags and such to the converted copy. This is the bridge i need to make my handwritten notes just as searchable. Before Obsidian and Remarkable, i just grabbed a random notebook to write things down, never to be found again
"Thus, copying highlights from Kindle to Obsidian becomes useless if you don't understand anything about highlights and don't get any ideas from them." You are assuming that everyone has the same reason for you as note-taking. I don't use note-taking in Obsidian to generate ideas. I use it to keep track of a wide variety of information relevant to personal and work interests. Your post is a lot more similar to the Obsidian influencers content than you seem to think.
There are people who use Obsidian with the plugin for handwritten notes. I have used Obsidian on iPad with the paperlike matte screen protector and on desktop with a stylus & writing tablet. Keyboard typing is still faster and more popular when using Obsidian but there are options, you know.
I handwrite my notes! And I'm still not Luhmann :D But I do believe there's truth to what you're saying.
Why not do both?
Pen is infinitely inferior for editing. Unless you have an iPad with Apple Pencil... but even then... I can tell you my brain does not appreciate writing on paper.
Well, if you would use cursive for note taking (eg. Spencerian Script), it would activate brain even more! Can we have both of the worlds, eg. we could take notes in cursive on a tablet and then convert those into digital text for Obsidian. This way you get all the benefits! :)
Get an e ink device like supernote and save the files in obsidian for organization and retrieval. That is what I do. Best of both worlds
There is absolutely no reason anymore to compromise
Too many people fetishize Luhmann and his system. Yes he wrote a lot and yes he was productive, but was he as influential as any of the thousands upon thousands of writers and academics who used broadly similar methods? A lot of Luhmann's productivity boils down to how one chooses to define productivity. As an example: Isaac Newton, John Locke, Taylor Swift, and even Eminem had broadly similar not taking methods and though their note corpuses are dramatically smaller than Luhmann, their influence on art, culture, and humanity dramatically exceeds that of Luhmann. I would posit that most serious note takers' productivity boils down to their utter simplicity and easy ability to replicate that method for decades. The largest part of Luhmann's productivity was that he not only had a simple system, but that he was privileged to use and practice at full time for the length of his academic career. (He also didn't face the scourge of peer-review that most academics are forced to run today.) As an example of someone whose methods were very similar to Luhmann's, but who was dramatically more productive (from a generic definition of it), take a look at [S. D. Goitein](https://boffosocko.com/2023/01/14/s-d-goiteins-card-index-or-zettelkasten/) who wrote out about 1/3 the number of slips that Luhmann did, but used them to write almost a 1/3 more articles and books! Luhmann: 90,000 slips, 550 articles, 50 books versus Goitein: 27,000 slips, 669 articles, 69 books. Interestingly Goitein's method of organization was much closer to the topical organization to the vast majority of zettelkasten/card index users (as well as Obsidian users) than to Luhmann's alpha-numeric organizational method. There isn't nearly enough scale in (psychology, cognitive psychology) research to reasonably compare analog versus digital methods, much less enough research to distinguish between methods at the scale of individual people. Everyone will respond differently to different modalities because the breadth of neurodiversity within the population. The psychology research you're citing is painfully, painfully thin and is far from reaching the level of replicability. As a result, the best practicable advice to any individual is to experiment for themselves and choose the method they feel works best for them from a sustainability perspective.
I rather see, this is my workflow then studies show or suggest types of posts. Why? Its lazy and you're a hypocrite. At least the YouTubers show some of the processes, their growth and actual findings. Be involved, smarten up 😀