Anabolic Note-Taking

Your Journal is Eating its own Tail

I’d let you in on a secret, but this hardly qualifies. My ambitions of intellectual productivity are foolish. I’ve tried index-card catalogues. Networked references in Roam. The old school Getting Things Done (GTD) system. Even a commitment to fill an entire notebook on a single, coherent topic. Each time I tried one of these productivity systems, it broke. More specifically, I felt like I broke it.

This isn’t a secret. These systems are New Year’s resolutions for aspiring authors and other knowledge workers. Even with the level of maintenance that a normal person can provide, productivity hacks degrade and fail. They remain hacks. And, unfortunately, guides for note-taking and productivity improvement never provide a plan B.

Your typical knowledge management / productivity system (KMPS) has five traits that produce total failures:

1. It requires a lot of maintenance.

2. It’s overly catabolic (the focus is on breaking down and compartmentalizing information, not using it).

3. Repair or salvage are out of the question.

4. Failures are antimemetic – embarrassing for users, bad marketing for systems – so they don’t get corrected.

5. Its designers and champions are unusually organized, Type A productivity nuts AND have multiple incentives to maintain the system.

Maintenance is an obvious problem. It’s easy to put off. It’s thankless (the benefits are hidden). Keeping a KMPS well-oiled is easily 10–100x more demanding than daily flossing – and how many of us do that? In reality, these systems almost always blow up. Then we abandon them.

Stewart Brand astutely points out how our understanding of repair is typically as a failure of discipline and something to be embarrassed about. Indeed, we should not feel that way.

Soften the paradox and the misbehavior it encourages by expanding the term “maintenance” beyond referring only to preventive maintenance to stave off the trauma of repair--brushing the damn teeth, etc. Let “maintenance” mean the whole grand process of keeping a thing going. From that perspective, occasional repair is part of the process. Close monitoring is part of the process. Changing the oil is part of the process. Eventually replacing the thing is part of the process.

Repair is a part of maintenance. Every note-taking system, health protocol, game plan, safety policy, and organizational design needs to accept that. Maintenance is not just preventive. It is also repair. It is also restorative. It is also anabolic.

Catabolism and anabolism are the twin aspects of metabolism. Catabolic processes break things down into smaller parts. For example, intense exercise, like sprinting, is acutely catabolic. It requires energy and breaks down muscle tissue. In the long term, with adequate recovery, it nets out.

You might be more familiar with the term anabolic, as in “anabolic steroids”, which denotes a process that builds things into larger parts. Muscle development, in the case of these steroids.

Productivity systems are notoriously catabolic. GTD breaks down projects into constituent tasks. Bullet journaling decomposes your day into objectives and accomplishments. The promise of networked graphs and index cards is to become an idea engine, but usually do nothing more than prematurely force your thinking into discrete “buckets”.

The promise of a KMPS is a powerful intellectual metabolism, but without corresponding anabolism, you’re left with runaway catabolism.

Anabolic Note-Taking is any system which skews toward building, rather than analyzing. For example – the way some people use Notes here is highly anabolic. It’s a combination of distilling concepts, poking the world to see what pops out, testing new language, sacrificing bits of your ego to the feed… then synthesizing the pieces into a coherent article. Those articles then build into a broader series or framework. That framework turns into leverage inside of an organization.

It’s unsexy. Kind of like the old fart at a local marathon who whoops everyone else’s asses because he walks an hour to and from work every day. Use it, or lose it.

Cataloguing and ontological dissection are fun, pleasing activities – but they are unproductive without the real work. Your local neighborhood Anabolic Note Taker can be messy and slow, and will still beat out someone with a rusting, Platonic KMPS. Because a sufficiently anabolic process can repair itself.

Bringing us to point 3. As far as I know, these tools don’t ever come with a guide on repair or salvage. If it fails, it fails – you might as well start from scratch. And maybe visit a confession booth on your way out. But even a failed improvement project produces some good stuff.

My recommendation is to gather up all your old, junky, half-filled notebooks, crumpled index cards, and Evernote pages, spend a couple hours going through them, and summarize it. Rebuild your Ship of Theseus. Get an LLM to help if you need. Post some Notes along the way. Just use those ideas.

Of course, it’s weird. First of all, old notes and ideas can feel dumb. But you should respect your past – taking notes is a symptom of being attentive. Plus, at least for me, those failed systems feel like my failures, rather than a natural lifecycle of a KMPS. No one really talks about note-taking gone wrong, both because they go out with a whimper, not a bang, and because no one has an incentive to. These systems aren’t horribly expensive to begin with – and it’s not like they break. You (unfortunately) can’t get your money back if your Roam graph falls into disarray.

Furthermore, organizations aren’t going to market their tool as “The Most Reparable Knowledge Management System on EARTH”. Clear implication there. Might as well say, “We Know Our Product Fails on a Regular Basis”.

Last reason that we’re stuck with fragile note-taking systems is that there are some people who are really fucking good at taking notes. It’s their favorite thing in the world. Plus, some of those talented note takers productize their process. Now they’re doubly incentivized: internally, because they like the maintenance, and externally, because their exceptional instantiation of their tool is an excellent marketing asset – it’s the promise of a note-taking system on anabolic steroids.