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- You don't have to remember everything you read
You don't have to remember everything you read
on note-taking, remembering and finding joy in your practices.
If you search “how to remember everything you read”, you will see an incredible amount of content. People talking about active recall, spaced repetition, and a hundred other techniques, all of which will have given many people exactly what they needed to remember what’s important in their world. There are many professions and contexts where active recall of key facts is necessary. But this post is not speaking to those people, it’s for people like me who have seen this content, heard the terms but thought “surely that isn’t realistic, what if I don’t want to purposefully remember everything?”.
What I know now, a few years into a life supported by note-taking and digital systems, is that what’s realistic for each of us varies wildly, and everything comes down to personal goals and contexts. So for me, remembering things is not necessary; I offload the memory function to my note-taking app and wider digital system. I want to talk a bit more about this sentiment today.
I’ve come to feel a bit disillusioned with a lot of the ~ vibe ~ of pkm/pkm adjacent content, and I say that even as a content creator in this space. So much of what I read makes it sound like if I’m not creating output with my notes, or remembering a summary of every book or article I read, that I’m doing it wrong. But over the course of 2024, I became a lot more resolute in my own approach to note-taking and to my interests. This means I no longer care to align with what I read online, or if others think I’m doing it wrong or inefficiently, because frankly I’m having a great time. I want you to have a great time with your digital systems too.
This will look different for everyone. For me, this means having a place to deal with all the information I consume. I have diverse interests, I love rabbit holes, I like to scroll Tiktok and to read articles to learn the things I don't know... I consume a LOT. If I tried to remember even a percentage of it, it would be too much, and crucially I can’t see how much would help me in my daily life.
Instead, I believe the critical thinking from engaging with what I read is what helps me day to day. The lessons learned from organising information help me day to day, the skills learned from building systems for myself help me day to day. Best of all, having confidence in my own thoughts and conclusions helps me every day. But this all comes as a by-product of my general note-taking practices, and they have never included the need to remember highlights or summaries.
I don't mean to position my practices as the binary opposition to those who do find value in remembering notes or highlights. I think this framing would miss the point entirely: notes and your practices around them are for you and you alone, and no content creator (including me) should make you feel like you’re doing something wrong.
More importantly though, I think this choice glosses over the benefit of simply having a note-taking practice, and indeed any notes at all. In my opinion, it's not just about the notes and their potential use-cases, it’s about the practice of engaging with learning, or conversing with your curiosity. I believe it's vitally important to have a safe, calm, personal space to offload things from your brain, in which you can connect dots and think deeper. This is where my content comes from. I don’t write about the things I learn about and make notes about, I write about the lessons the process teaches me.
"the process is the practice. the artifacts are just the side effects"
The process is where you find yourself, your voice, your vision, your heart, and your soul. Everything else is a byproduct of that exploration.
— raul serpas (@raulserpas)
8:37 PM • May 2, 2024
Trying to remember everything you read is surely a practice on top of this. It's an added extra if you want it and an unnecessary extra if you don't. After all, you need to have the things to remember in the first place. Whether it’s notes you take on books or highlighted snippets from any source, you've got to start from somewhere. I believe it’s the act of engaging with the reading, note-taking, and/or highlighting that offers the strong foundation for you, not the active recall.
This post was actually prompted by an NYT piece called “At Capacity”. The author talks about how they read so much, remember so little and formerly were frustrated at these memory issues. Now they’re ok with letting the memories fade a bit. I don’t disagree with that at all. But Capacities (for me, replace this with wherever you take your notes) means that binary choice of remembering or not remembering doesn’t exist: Capacities holds the answer for me. It's an extension of me - I guess we remember together. Memory is fallible, so it's my view that we should let digital tools help us out. All they need is a good search feature. Now, instead of trying to remember pieces of something I've clearly forgotten, I just need to open Capacities and search. My notes are available offline and on all my devices, so I will find the exact source of information, my notes on it and many other things it may be connected to.
But I'll be honest here, it's not a common occurrence for me to need to retrieve information like this. Given my note-taking is about my own interests and questions central to my human experience, I don't talk about specifics with people often, and that's ok. My notes are for me. You might be wondering, "well how can you find something you kinda remember if you've not taken any notes on it?". I have a system for that too. 9 times out of 10, it's in Raindrop thanks to my resonance filter, which is how I ensure I only take notes on what interests me without losing the traces of the curiosity that sparked this interest. Raindrop has a good search feature too, so I'll find what I need.
Realising how "secure" these practices feel for me, I realised I could broaden an argument from before. A note-taking app is an extension of you, but so is the digital system these apps are part of. You can use apps and craft workflows to support the things about yourself that your brain doesn't need to hold alone.
I am chaotic, curious and deep thinking. This combination leads not to deep research sessions methodically undertaken for each of my curiosities. No no. It's fast, messy, half done, half read. I love this approach, and my systems support me in this. My whole system helps me make sense of the mess and play with it. When I put a research topic down in one month, I know exactly where to pick it up again 6 months later. I know where to find the bookmarks and where to do further research, and I know I'll have a great time when I do.
So to sum up, there’s no pressure to remember everything you read or all the notes you take. A note-taking app can simply be a place for you to offload the things that are relevant or interesting to you and a place for you to play with them. A note-taking app can have a million other functions too. But regardless of the function, you don’t have to remember all the things you put into it, you just need to remember where to go to ask questions if and when they arise.
Using a note-taking app to support me through my life has been transformative, and I’ve got all the benefits without ever worrying about spaced repetition. You should choose the methods that work for you, but just make sure you enjoy them. It’s a magical experience when you do. 💫

two entries from the same day of note-taking; it’s pure joy

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