An Intelligent Shoebox of Sticky Notes

I want to get a lot smarter to live as intelligently as possible. In some ways, that’s the whole goal of The Euv0ia Letter. Getting smarter is great, but how do you keep your insights and ideas from slipping into the shadows of your subconscious?

Spoiler: the answer is good note taking.

It’s important not to lose ideas, because good ideas are often hard to come by. That’s why I’ve spend so much effort over the years attempting to develop a good note taking system. Good notes that capture distinct ideas form the building blocks of greater understanding over time and work like compound interest. Invest time and attention on your notes frequently, and let your system pay out the dividends down the line.

Today, we’re doing a deep dive into some of the better note taking systems I’ve tried. I’ll share why I’m ditching all the popular methods you’ll find online to try something totally different and much more chaotic.

What is PKM

There’s a whole cottage industry on YouTube that revolves around the idea of “personal knowledge management” or PKM. In general, PKM is a structured way of organizing personal information, everything from reading notes, to contacts, to projects, lists, and more. At the core of any good PKM system is an efficient way to capture information, and a system for organizing that information for quick retrieval. Additionally, many people like to incorporate some way to integrate their notes so they can peruse them associatively. This is especially popular with writers and content creators, because creating connections between notes (usually via bi-directional links or other references) helps to spark creativity and enhances idea generation that supports creative content outputs.

Many note takers’ goal is to turn their preferred PKM system into a so-called “second brain”. The idea is that your notes eventually take on something like a life of their own, where connections between notes will lead you to greater insights over time, and where you won’t ever have to remember anything. Your notes will do the heavy lifting for you, freeing up your mind for creative endeavors, intellectual pursuits, or better problem solving. There are costs and benefits to this idea, and people tend to ignore the costs, in my opinion, but that’s a story for another essay.

PKM has become massively popular in recent years, and there are many, many complex ways to store notes that gurus and influencers swear by. Solutions can be anything from sophisticated software stacks to hand written note cards.

My PKM Journey - most PKM sucks

To be totally frank: I think most note taking methods suck. The truth is, there is no one-size-fits-all approach to note taking, and you should seriously question anybody who says there is.

At the same time, there are some methods that work generally well, in my opinion, so today, I want to dive into some methods that have actually worked for me. Hopefully, this will help you decide what method might work best for you, too.

Roughly speaking, note taking can involve one of three levels of structure:

1. High organization

2. Medium organization

3. Chaos + AI

I’ve tried each approach, and I’m currently pursuing the third option. Let’s see how each approach works, and then I’ll introduce a powerful new AI tool I’m using.

High Organization — Obsidian + Zettelkasten

Let’s start with the most structured approach to note taking. If you’re looking for an extremely sophisticated system, look no further than the Zettelkasten method.

According to internet lore, Zettelkasten — meaning “slip box” in German — was pioneered by the polymathic sociologist and theorist Niklas Luhmann who used his system of notes to publish hundreds of books and articles in his lifetime. The truth is that while Luhmann had a particularly smart way of indexing his notes, he’s far from the first to come up with the idea. Other luminaries of similar note taking include Thomas Jefferson, Gottfried Leibniz, and Carl Linneaus, and the idea of a note taking system probably originates in the commonplace book tradition.

More modern approaches to the Zettelkasten system usually involve incorporating digital solutions, with many people preferring to use the software Obsidian to host their notes. Obsidian is a ridiculously powerful (and free) software that allows you to create bi-directional links within notes, offers a graph view, and keeps the whole system local and in the form of markdown files. This is great for storing information long-term, since .md files can be re-uploaded to a variety of Obsidian alternatives and still preserve the formatting and linking.

Imagine having your own version of Wikipedia, but it’s just your own personal notes. That’s the kind of thing Obsidian let’s you create, and it looks pretty similar, with some additional functionality. I won’t belabor the point here. Obsidian is great. It’s powerful. And there are tons of resources online that will teach you how to use it, so I won’t go into depth here.

What I liked about Obsidian + Zettelkasten

• It’s easy to link notes

• Hotkeys make note taking quick

• Everything is local

What I didn’t like

• Obsidian has a somewhat steep learning curve

• Everything is local

• The learning curve is steep

• Search kind of sucks

• Actually doing it is challenging

The truth is, Zettelkasten is an extremely powerful method. But to make it work, probably the most effective way to use it is to imitate thinkers like Luhmann. I won’t go into all of this here, but if there is interest, I’ll write a separate post about how to set up a proper Zettelkasten. But here are some pointers:

• Avoid using tags, despite the popularity of this method

• Develop a good index

• Label your notes according to some type of pre-planned system that corresponds to the index

• Spend a lot of time with your note system

Search on Obsidian is terrible, for some reason, so to make the system work, you really do need a index or some other way to quickly and efficiently look up stuff. Also, although there’s added security with all the files being local and stored in markdown, which is great for long term, I didn’t like the fact that I couldn’t easily switch between a web and mobile version of my notes. But the biggest problem was with the concept of Zettelkasten itself. Suffice it to say, the main disadvantage with Obsidian and structured Zettelkasten style note taking is that it’s a little too structured for my tastes. What I realized eventually was that I was spending more time organizing my notes than actually taking notes.

That was counterproductive, so I moved on to something better as soon as I could.

Medium Organization - PARA with Notion

Next, I tried a less structured, but still pretty organized system of note taking that’s quite popular nowadays called PARA. I learned about PARA from Tiago Forte’s Building a Second Brain, which is a superb book about PKM and note taking. I loved the book, and I still use a PARA system for some types of note taking. It wasn’t until artificial intelligence really started to take off recently that I found what I think is a better solution.

Briefly, PARA stands for Projects, Areas, Resources, and Archive. The PARA system is folder based. You don’t need tags, and you don’t need a complicated note naming system or cumbersome reference system like with Zettelkasten (though it’s still an awesome idea to link notes). With PARA, you think about your notes in terms of interest and time. The Projects folder contains stuff your’e working on right now, such as upcoming articles or content, home improvement you’re doing currently, notes on what you’re reading right now, work projects, etc.,.

Areas, by contrast, contains more general, but still active, information that isn’t a top priority at this moment, but which you’ll need to readily access. For example, you might use areas to track your bills and utilities throughout the year, notes from older meetings that are still of ongoing or recurring interest, and so on.

The Resources folder contains general references. You might store notes from books there when they’re not relevant to current projects or ongoing areas of interest. This is another good spot for contacts that aren’t relevant to current projects.

Finally, the Archive is used to host everything else that doesn’t go above. Basically, once you don’t need information anymore, you can toss it into the Archive so that on the off chance that you one day need to recall it, you know where to find it.

For anything you’re working on, create related subfolders with files, images, attachments, PDFs, or whatever else and put them in the corresponding PARA folders above. Tiago Forte recommends moving everything you’re actively working on into Projects and removing it from Projects as soon as it stops being relevant (whether it goes into Areas, Resources, or Archive is up to you, depending on how relevant it is now or is likely to be in the near future, fluidly moving files as necessary. This keeps your setup clean, and it helps you focus on projects first.)

For the PARA system, I prefer to use Notion. I’ve also tried it in Obsidian, but lately, I’ve come to really like Notion, because of its clean interface and the fact that everything is web-based. It also has an app version, so everything syncs nicely. Notion doesn’t really have a folder structure, but it’s easy to get the idea to work by simply creating pages and with sub-pages. Doing this is extremely easy in Notion using the forward slash command.

What I liked about PARA + Notion

• Web based is awesome

• Linking notes is easy

• PARA is intuitive and faster to organize than Zettelkasten

• PARA keeps me project focused

What I didn’t like

• Still not fast enough

• PARA might be a little too project focused

When I say “fast enough” what I mean is that I struggle to keep myself focused and actually actively taking notes. I find myself wanting to organize things or procrastinate, and this is just wasting time. I want a way to take notes quickly and to not have to worry about what happens to the notes. In other words, I want to basically throw sticky notes into a shoebox.

At the same time, I want to be confident I can get the notes back out of the system when I need them. Both of the above systems kind of suck for this. It’s fine if you have the time to dig through the notes carefully and use some associative thinking. There can even be a virtue in that (I suspect it’s what made Luhmann so intelligent, for example). But there has to be a better way right?

Chaos + AI

A year or two ago, I read a torturously long book about the Zettelkasten system by Scott Shepherd called The Antinet Zettelkasten. The book is too long, and I don’t really recommend it, but there are a few high-level points Shepherd makes that are worth considering. One is that there is a virtue in handwritten note taking and that it’s really time spend with your note system that makes the difference when it comes to using the note system as a second brain. The other excellent point is that according to Luhmann, the notes system almost becomes like a mind of its own after a while.

What I’ve dreamed about for the last few months is the possibility of making a note system as close to a mind as possible. Wouldn’t it be great if there was literally a way to talk to your notes? Imagine you simply threw notes into a digital bucket, but the system itself was intelligent enough that you could chat with it about all the notes you’ve taken and derive insights? That would be frictionless and powerful.

I want an intelligent shoebox of sticky notes. No complicated organizing. Just raw power and ideas.

Until the advent of popular Large Language Models like ChatGPT, Grok, and Claude, this seemed like a far-fetched fantasy, but nowadays it’s perfectly feasible. Unfortunately, at first I couldn’t find any pre-built solution that would do the trick. I wanted something that could host my notes, required almost no organization, and which I could chat with. Importantly, I wanted the ability to save my chats with the system so that it could work from prior chats to increase the system’s intelligence over time.

At first, I thought about building my own system to do this, but I just don’t have the coding chops to do the job. Fortunately, through enough trial and error talking to Grok, I eventually stumbled upon a tool called Mem. And it’s awesome so far.

What I’ve Gained with Mem

So what is Mem? It’s basically exactly what I described above: a shoebox of sticky notes that you can talk to. Mem isn’t like other note taking apps, where you have to keep track of folders, tags, or really any organization structure. You just sort of…take notes. Mem stores these for you, and then you can use the intelligent search feature to find basically anything you want anytime you want. Mem will pull it right up.

It’s secret? Mem is actually an AI, similar to ChatGPT, though limited. For now, the tool can’t access the web, but it can understand literally everything you’ve ever taken a note on, and you can be pretty vague about what you want it to recall, and Mem will pull it right up. At least, that’s been my experience so far.

From any given note, you can pull up the chat feature, or the copilot tool in the side bar.

Mem’s chat feature provides some auto-generated prompts, such as “summarize this note”, but you can also have Mem pull information from any of your notes (or all of them). You can also access the chat function to the left side of the screen, which will open the chat in its own window.

Another amazing feature is the copilot function. Copilot will automatically find notes related to the current note you’re working on. This is a truly powerful feature, which basically replaces the need for any complicated organizing or searching on your part.

Unlike Zettelkasten or PARA, with Obsidian or Notion, you don’t have to try to painfully think through what notes my be related to the current topic to get good ideas. Mem does that for you. It automatically associates relevantly similar topics together, so perusing the copilot’s list of related notes is a great way to see if you’ve taken notes on similar topics in the past, which could spur new ideas and helps you to integrate your knowledge over time.

If you do want to add additional structure, you can. For example, you can still add tags to organize your notes, and I’ll admit this does have some uses. I try to keep mine very high level. I don’t tag every note, but sometimes it’s useful to have tags, because you can sort by tags on the home page. My tags mainly relate to my newsletter. Tags live under the “# Collections” button on the left side bar, along with Templates and Notes, Pinned notes, and “Recents”, which appears to be your five most recent notes.

Importantly, your chats with Mem can be saved as their own notes. This is a super powerful feature, and it’s something I found lacking in other note taking systems. The ability to save a chat as its own note is how I expect to turn my note taking system into something truly like a digital subconscious mind, because it introduces recursive reference into the system. My note taking system won’t just be referencing my notes, it will be referencing itself.

Mem also has a mobile app, which works great. You can login to Mem with your Google ID to make things seamless.

It’s not perfect, but I assume the system will get better and better over time as the Mem team makes updates and as the system learns my notes.

Like anything, Mem’s not all rainbows. There are a few things I think could be better:

• No tabs - With Obsidian, you can easily open a new tab using cmd+t (on Mac). This would be a useful function for Mem, since sometimes I want to chat in one full window and have a note (or two or three) open in other tabs.

  • No ability to pin a tab - likewise, since you don’t have tabs, there’s of course no way to pin one. But you can pin notes to the side bar, which is almost as good.

• No web connection - it would be great if, like more powerful models, Mem’s AI could connect to the web to do analysis and research from within my note system. I’d like to be able to compare ideas I have in my notes with external sources and save the results as a new note.

• Can’t pick a custom LLM - it would also be nice if Mem allowed one to use an API key to run a different model on the notes, such as Grok, or ChatGPT. For now, this isn’t possible, but I spoke with a representative from Mem, who told me it the feature might be coming eventually.

Why Mem Might (or Might Not) Be for You

Should you try Mem? It depends. On the one hand, I’m convinced that something like Mem is the future of note taking for many people. The chaos + AI approach is simply frictionless, and a lot of people need that (myself especially). On the other hand, there are downsides to the approach. With PARA or Zettelkasten, the system requires more out of you, which can yield greater cognitive/intellectual returns depending on how its used.

If you’re the type of person who likes to work slowly and deliberately on things — especially if you are devoting your time and energy to a single pursuit, such as writing a novel or working on academic scholarship — the structured approach of a Zettelkasten or PARA system with Obsidian or Notion might work better for you.

But if your goal is to make yourself smarter and maintain speed and flexibility, I recommend a more frictionless approach. For that, Mem is excellent. Being able to talk to my notes directly is just too good to pass up, and the ability to impose just a little bit of organization while allowing the system to recommend connections most of the time seems to be the sweet spot for me.

Perhaps other options will emerge in the future that will drive forward innovation in the note taking space. I would love it if there were a little more competition to bring out even better chaos approaches.

Closing Thoughts

Whether it’s Zettelkasten, PARA, Chaos + AI, or some other method, anybody who is seeking to truly increase their intelligence over time should have a functional PKM system of some type. PKM helps you make connections, increases creativity, and ensures you don’t lose track of ideas. History’s greatest geniuses nearly all used a PKM system of some kind, and I’m convinced you and I should to.

Which system you choose depends on your needs. If you’ve never tried it out before, I recommend starting with a regular journal and simply taking notes as you read, or capturing quick ideas. Leave a few blank pages at the beginning or end of the journal to use as an index. As you take notes, write the page number next to index key words when you’re finished. This will give you a taste for how to organize, and you’ll probably find it useful later at some point. Try that for a few weeks and see how you like it. Then, move to digital systems.

If you like working methodically and thinking super deeply about one or two topics, the Zettelkasten approach is probably a good choice. You can use Obsidian or Notion for this, or look for another solution. (The benefits of Obsidian and Notion, though, are that they both have lively communities if you get stuck.)

If you are more project based, I’d recommend trying PARA with Notion. Notion is just faster to use than Obsidian for many tasks, and it has a mobile app. That said, the more Chaos + AI approach using a tool like Mem probably works equally well for a project-based style.

If you’re like me and you have difficulty doing the organizing part (or you get obsessed with it to the exclusion of actually taking productive notes), then you should choose whatever is as frictionless as possible. I like Mem for this, because there’s not organization required at all for the system to function pretty well. Added organization just makes it better. Plus, I really like the idea of talking to my notes and deriving insights, getting that recursive element into the mix to make my note system smarter over time. So check out Mem if that sounds more your speed.

If you’ve got a preferred note taking method that’s better than the above, I’d love to hear about it. I’m always looking for ways to make myself smarter and more efficient, and that’s what The Euv0ia Letter is all about — living intelligently.

-euv0ia