Asymptomatic

Posts tagged: notes

Notetaking For Gaming

Continuing some of the thinking from my last post about Notetaking for Business, I had mentioned that I use Obsidian for all of my note taking needs. I make pretty extensive notes for my Dungeons and Dragons campaign setting that I play most weeks with a group of friends.

The notes I take for my game are pretty straight forward, but there are a lot of them. I do use some Obsidian-specific plugin features to enable my game to run smoothly, but this is more of an add-on than an essential component of my notes themselves.

Notetaking For Business

I have seen endless books and blogs and forum posts espousing the use of specific note-taking techniques that are meant to give a leg up to anyone who takes notes as part of their daily life. I am bothered that most of these techniques assume a certain disposition of note-taker – You are either a student taking notes for topics in class that you will later be tested on, or you are a “researcher” of some kind taking notes to help you think through complex topics for deeper meaning.

In the former case, students have a variety of note-taking tools that have lasted for what seems like millennia. Cornell Notes, a system designed in the 1950’s, is a note-taking strategy that allows students to quiz themselves on details they take notes on, which is generally regarded as a good practice for study. Sadly, there are many studies that report the general achievement of Cornell Notes takers isn’t statistically better than other students.

Notes

I’ve completely rearranged the way I take notes over the last month, using Obsidian as my primary tool for note-taking.

I’m using a kind of modified PARA system (Projects, Areas, Resources, Archives), where the top-level layers of my notes are organized into buckets based on their volatility. So things at the Projects layer change more quickly than the Areas, which change more quickly than Resources, etc. The names are, in my case anyway, just guidelines for how the documents in each section should be used.