Upgrade Your Content Creation Game: Why Writing Notes Should Be Your New Habit

Ditch your old note-taking habit

What we produce depends on what we consume and how we consume and digest it.

You can expose yourself to the best books, articles, or videos. If you don’t know how to extract their essence, it won’t do you any good to the quality of your production.

I came to the realization that I was doing it all wrong.

First, I mostly consume content (in a broad sense) passively. My brain is active and trying to understand and integrate the information I receive. And it is doing a relatively decent job at it with years of training.

But it is globally inefficient and it relies too much on my memory. And we know how reliable is human memory. Not much.

So I used mental repetition.

I try to explain to myself mentally the main takeaway from what I consumed at the moment. I hit pause or stop reading and re-explain what I received.

That’s better.

But still using only a part of the information and relying on this volatile storage that is my memory.

That’s when enters note-taking.

I’ve been taking notes regularly. Incomplete notes. Sometimes unreadable notes (my handwriting is awful if I speed up). Notes spread on different media, from a notebook (which one was it?) to Medium highlights or Twitter bookmarks (not really a note, but kind of).

But there is worse (yep!).

Most of those notes were excerpts from the original content. Copy/paste or manual copies.

And I didn’t see the problem until recently.

I already knew that my notes were often useless. Apart from helping me to stay focused.

I didn’t know how to approach this problem.

Until I stumbled upon the course 10x Writing by Todd Brison and Tim Denning.

The promise was irresistible to me: writing faster and better, the dream of any writer or content creator. (Because as I say often, writing is the backbone of any content).

I am still going through it but I consumed most of the lessons now.

And I learned a tip that changed my perspective on taking notes.

Finally!

Todd was explaining how he takes notes. Or rather that he wasn’t taking notes, he was writing them. Using his own words.

Like if he would explain the concept to someone else.

Instead of highlighting or copying/pasting or merely paraphrasing what you want to take out (my old habits), you deliberately write from your own perspective and background with the intention of sharing it with readers.

That’s a simple shift in how to handle information. But it has quite a few advantages

It will help you:

1. understand (because you reformulate the concepts),

2. memorize (because by writing you engage your brain more deeply),

3. integrate (because when you use your own words, you connect to your knowledge),

what you consume.

And you will build a database of ready-to-publish bits of writing about many topics that you expose yourself to. Thus likely to be topics you will create content about.

That’s a new practice to set up as a habit.

It takes more time and effort upfront. But see it as an investment, both for your skills and your future content production.

In most of the work I do, from science to writing, preparation makes a whole difference.

Taking the time upfront brings tons of benefits in the short and long term.

I haven’t implemented it yet but I believe it can help you and me to improve the quality and speed of what we create.

I am off choosing the tool to do it. Todd is using Roam Research. I am not a fan. I am currently using mostly Notion to take notes because it is well integrated with the iOS environment, but I don’t think it is the best tool for that.

Maybe Obsidian (but with the sync issue since it is not cloud-based), or my good old Dynalist (more limited but might be enough).

Anyway, that is a discussion for another time if you are interested in the topic of note-taking note-writing, and related apps (I am a nerd, careful!).

Be great!

Frank