Your note-taking system is sabotaging your creativity
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I have a confession: I’m a recovering note hoarder.
My digital notebooks are graveyards of good intentions—thousands of highlighted articles, copied quotes, and half-formed thoughts that I swore I’d return to “someday”. Someday never came. Instead, I found myself drowning in a sea of saved content, feeling productive while accomplishing precisely nothing.
The uncomfortable truth? I had created an impressive digital museum of other people’s thoughts while producing none of my own.
Sound familiar? If your note-taking system resembles that drawer everyone has—you know, the one stuffed with batteries, old cables, and mysterious objects you’re afraid to throw away—then we need to talk about why your carefully curated collection is killing your creativity instead of feeding it.
Great note-taking deception
Most of us have been sold a lie about note-taking. We’ve been told that collecting information equals learning, that saving articles equals progress, and that highlighting passages equals understanding.
It’s like believing that hoarding ingredients makes you a chef.
Here’s what typically happens. You read something brilliant—let’s say an article about AI’s impact on creative work. You highlight the juicy bits, maybe add a comment like “interesting!” or “remember this”, then file it away in a folder labelled “AI” or “Technology” or, if you’re feeling particularly organised, “AI–Future Trends–2025”.
Three months later, when you want to write about AI’s impact on creativity, do you remember that perfect insight? Of course not. You end up staring at a blank page, despite having “read extensively” on the topic.
As Sönke Ahrens writes in How to Take Smart Notes, “Good, productive writing is based on good note-taking. Getting something that is already written into another written piece is incomparably easier than assembling everything in your mind and then trying to retrieve it from there.”
But here’s the catch: most of us aren’t actually doing good note-taking. We’re just stuffing everything into our metaphorical drawer—digital hoarding with a fancy filing system.
Graveyard versus the garden
The difference between a dead note-taking system and a living one is like the difference between a graveyard and a garden. Both contain organised collections, but only one produces new life.
A graveyard system stores information in neat, categorised tombstones. Everything has its proper place, beautifully organised and utterly static. You can visit your highlights and quotes, pay your respects, and leave feeling vaguely nostalgic about all that knowledge you once possessed.
A garden system, on the other hand, is messier but infinitely more alive. Ideas cross-pollinate, connections bloom unexpectedly, and new insights grow from the compost of previous thoughts. It requires tending, but it rewards you with a harvest of original thinking.
Charlie Munger, Warren Buffett’s partner at Berkshire Hathaway, understood this distinction. He advocated for what he called a “latticework of mental models”—a framework where “you’ve got to hang experience on a latticework of models in your head” rather than simply collecting isolated facts. As he put it, “If the facts don’t hang together on a latticework of theory, you don’t have them in a usable form.”
The secret ingredient that transforms a graveyard into a garden? Active engagement with your notes. Not just collecting them, but developing them, connecting them, and letting them evolve.
Collection trap
We’ve become addicted to the dopamine hit of saving information. That little satisfaction when you save an article to your favourite read-it-later app. The sense of accomplishment when you highlight a particularly insightful passage. The feeling that you’re “doing something” when you bookmark that Twitter thread “for later”.
But collection without creation is just sophisticated procrastination.
The uncomfortable truth is that highlighting and saving often becomes a substitute for thinking. We mistake consuming for creating, curating for contemplating. We feel productive while remaining intellectually passive.
Think about the difference between a tourist and an anthropologist. A tourist takes photos of interesting sights and moves on. An anthropologist observes, questions, connects patterns, and develops theories about what they’re seeing. Both might visit the same places, but only one creates new understanding.
Your notes should be less like a tourist’s photo album and more like an anthropologist’s field journal—full of observations, questions, connections, and evolving theories.
Why passive note-taking feels productive
Here’s why we fall into the collection trap: it’s easier and feels immediately rewarding. Highlighting a passage gives us the illusion of engagement without the mental effort of actually engaging.
It’s the intellectual equivalent of taking a selfie at a famous landmark—you get proof you were there without actually experiencing the place.
Our brains are wired to seek the path of least resistance. Copying a brilliant quote feels productive while requiring minimal mental energy. Developing your own thoughts about that quote? That’s work. It requires wrestling with ideas, admitting confusion, and risking being wrong.
Daniel Kahneman would recognise this as System 1 thinking—fast, automatic, and effortless. Real learning requires System 2 thinking—slow, deliberate, and demanding. We keep defaulting to System 1 because it’s comfortable, even though System 2 is where creativity lives.
Original insights don’t emerge from collecting information—they emerge from the friction of thinking through information.
As philosopher John Searle put it, “In general, I feel if you can’t say it clearly you don’t understand it yourself.” If you can’t explain an idea in your own words, you haven’t truly grasped it—you’ve just borrowed someone else’s understanding.
Luhmann revolution
German sociologist Niklas Luhmann understood this better than most. Over his career, he accumulated 90,000 notes and published over 50 books and 600 articles. His secret wasn’t superhuman productivity—it was a note-taking system that functioned as what he called a “creativity machine”. The famous zettelkasten method.
What made Luhmann’s approach revolutionary wasn’t the volume of notes but how they worked. Instead of organising notes by topic, he let ideas connect organically. Instead of copying information, he translated it into his own thinking. Instead of storing knowledge, he cultivated conversations between ideas.
The result? A system that didn’t just preserve thoughts but generated them.
And here’s the truly remarkable part: Luhmann never forced himself to work. When asked about his impressive productivity, he explained: “I only do what is easy. I only write when I immediately know how to do it. If I falter for a moment, I put the matter aside and do something else.”
His system removed the need for willpower by making the work inherently interesting. As Ahrens notes, “Not having willpower, but not having to use willpower indicates that you set yourself up for success.”
You either have the understanding to write deeply about the topic on hand, or you need to go back to learning.
Slow hunch and liquid networks
Steven Johnson, in Where Good Ideas Come From, describes what he calls the “slow hunch”—the idea that breakthrough insights don’t arrive in sudden flashes but develop gradually over time through the collision and connection of ideas.
He writes: “Most slow hunches never last long enough to turn into something useful, because they pass in and out of our memory too quickly, precisely because they possess a certain murkiness.”
This is where an external note-taking system becomes crucial. You can’t nurture a slow hunch if you can’t remember it long enough for it to mature. Darwin’s theory of evolution wasn’t a single eureka moment—his notebooks reveal it was a slow hunch that developed over years of careful observation and note-taking.
Johnson also emphasises what he calls “liquid networks”—environments where ideas can freely mingle and connect. Your note-taking system should function as this kind of liquid network, a place where a thought from a philosophy book can unexpectedly connect with an observation from a business article to produce something entirely new.
As Ahrens puts it, “The slip-box is not a collection of notes. Working with it is less about retrieving specific notes and more about being pointed to relevant facts and generating insight by letting ideas mingle.”
From collection to cultivation
So how do you transform your note-taking from a graveyard into a garden? The shift begins with a fundamental change in purpose. You’re not trying to preserve information—you’re trying to develop ideas.
This means:
Writing in your own words instead of copying quotes. When you force yourself to explain something in your own language, you immediately discover whether you truly understand it. I paraphrase ideas I read in my own words, to explain to myself what I glean from them and make connections to concepts and examples beyond why the text mentions. As Ahrens emphasises, the act of rewriting isn’t just about storage—it’s about testing and deepening your understanding.
Asking questions about what you read instead of just accepting it. What assumptions does this argument make? How does it connect to something else you’ve been thinking about? What’s missing from this analysis? List down the questions to start a discussion with an AI chatbot that works even more questions and discovery.
Making explicit connections to other ideas instead of filing things in isolation. Don’t just note that an idea is interesting—explain why it matters in the context of your other thinking. As I mentioned, I write with my own examples and analogies when paraphrasing the ideas. These are often along topics I care a lot about at the moment, allowing me to form connections with real problems or recent readings.
Developing arguments instead of just collecting facts. Take a position, explore it, challenge it. Treat your notes as an ongoing dialogue with yourself and the ideas you encounter. I’m an advocate for having strong opinions and to challenge one’s own stance constantly to find holes and weak foundations that could topple the argument. It’s trying to find ways to be wrong to improve yourself. People often mistake it as me wanting to always prove that I’m right, but the truth is the exact opposite. I want to be right, so I want to be proven wrong.
The goal isn’t to have perfect notes—it’s to have productive ones. Notes that spark new thoughts. Notes that reveal gaps in your understanding. Notes that connect seemingly unrelated ideas in surprising ways.
Compound interest of ideas
People often value the quality of a single note but the real value lies in how notes accumulate and interact over time.
Think of it like compound interest. A single note might be worth very little. But when that note connects to another note, which connects to three more, which sparks a question that leads to five new observations—suddenly you have something valuable. You have the raw material for original thinking.
Munger’s latticework concept captures this beautifully. You’re not trying to know everything—you’re trying to build a framework where ideas from different disciplines can strengthen and inform each other. A concept from physics might illuminate a problem in psychology. A principle from economics might solve a design challenge.
But this only works if your notes are written in a way that allows these connections to form. If they’re just isolated quotes filed by topic, they remain inert. If they’re thoughts developed in your own words with explicit connections to other ideas, they become alive.
Starting small
You don’t need to overhaul your entire system overnight. Start with this simple shift: the next time you read something interesting, don’t just highlight or save it. Instead, write down why it matters to you, how it connects to something else you’re thinking about, or what questions it raises. I do this in quick short bullet points to capture my rapid fire thoughts.
This single change—from passive collection to active interpretation—will begin transforming your notes from a storage system into a thinking system.
As Ahrens writes, “An idea kept private is as good as one you never had.” This inspired the push to publishing more of my thoughts on this blog.
Private also means not staying on its own without any contact with other notes. Your notes aren’t meant to be a private collection—they’re meant to be a conversation. A conversation between past ideas and present insights. A conversation that generates future breakthroughs.
Your future creative self will thank you for it. And more importantly, that self will actually have something to work with the next time inspiration strikes and you sit down to create.
Because creativity isn’t about having access to all the world’s information—it’s about having a conversation with the ideas that matter to you. And conversations require participation, not just attendance.
In the next article in this series, we’ll explore how to build a note-taking system that ensures you never face a blank page again. We’ll look at the three types of notes that transform reading into writing, and how to create a reservoir of developed thoughts that make creativity feel inevitable rather than intimidating.