When I started my note-taking journey about four years ago, I didn’t really know how to do it.
It wasn’t something I practiced. In fact, I barely wrote notes at all. If I was lucky, I’d have the occasional scribble—tiny bulleted thoughts here or there. Never consistent. Never organized. That all changed when I needed to start.
I was dealing with memory issues, and I couldn’t afford to forget.
Systems
So I began researching and experimenting. I learned about Zettelkasten. Smart Notes. Atomic notes. The Cornell Method. Personal knowledge base systems (or PKM/PKB as folks call it). The bullet journal method. And on and on.
But over time, I noticed a pattern.
No matter how advanced or structured a method seemed, they all came down to something very simple:
- When you have a thought, write it down.
- Put it somewhere you can find it later.
- When you review those thoughts, they might spark new ones.
- Write those down, too.
And just keep doing it. Over and over again.
It doesn’t matter if what you wrote is good. It doesn’t matter if it’s 100% original. It doesn’t matter if it’s messy, or if you used pen and paper, or tapped it into your phone.
What matters… is that you did it.
The system
Eventually, I learned that this very process had a name.
CODE.
A simple framework popularized by Tiago Forte, the author of Building a Second Brain.
(Yup — the very steps I’ve been writing about recently.)
What I liked most about CODE wasn’t that it was a “system.” It’s that it didn’t feel rigid. It gave me room to figure out how I wanted to do each part.
Room to make it mine.
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Sidebar:
Real talk? I still haven’t read the book cover-to-cover. I’ve read articles, watched videos, and absorbed plenty of ideas around it.
I tend to work that way — learning broadly before diving into something deeply. By the time I get to the book, I often find that I already know much of what’s inside.
(But I’ll get there.)
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No way as way
Four years later, I’m still doing it. In fact, I’m doing it more than ever.
My note-taking system looks different now, but the spirit is the same. Along the way, I’ve experimented, borrowed, and blended techniques. I’ve taken the best of what I’ve found and shaped it into something that works for me. A reminder that it's about technique over tools.
This ongoing process of experimentation and refinement reminds me of something Bruce Lee once said:
Remember that man created method, and not that method created man.
A reminder to “use no way as way, and have no limitation as limitation.”
It’s not about the method. It’s not about the system. It’s not even about the notes. It’s about doing it. Discovering and doing it your way.
Write it down. Put it where you can find it. Look at it once in a while. Let it spark something new.
Then do it again (and again).