Happy Saturday!

Ideas taking shape

Those who follow my writing and videos know that I’m comfortable “thinking in front of you”—I don’t mind sharing while I’m still exploring a concept. This week’s Weekend Upgrade is a prime example.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how the notes we take inform the work we do. The effectiveness of the notes, and our access to them, will often determine whether that work gets done at all. That led me to consider what a “taxonomy of notes” might look like from an Action-Powered Productivity perspective.

Effectively, what are the types of notes we need to be able to capture quickly and reliably, and how does their structure vary depending on their purpose?

This Weekend Upgrade, then, is two things:

1. It frames my current thinking on notes and their relationship to action.
2. It is a high-level first pass at a taxonomy of those notes.

Please take my “thinking in front of you” as an invitation to engage! My free Action-Powered Productivity community is a great place for conversations, and the free Action-Powered Productivity Digital Conference next Thursday through Saturday (8/31 - 9/2) has presenters who are exploring this relationship between notes and action from their own perspectives. (And if you respond to this email, I won’t ignore you!)

💡 Identify the notes you work with 💡

👆 That’s your weekend upgrade.

Because my thinking is exploratory, I’m going to rely on a few visuals to help clarify the ideas.

Everything is a note, even tasks

The first layer of my thinking situates everything as a note. A couple of years ago, influenced by the “note to your next day self” concept I learned from Tracy Winchell (a presenter at next week’s APP Digital Conference!), I reframed my productivity as “communication with my future self.” Every task, each day’s agenda, my plan for next week, future goals—all of those are notes to my future self.

It’s a short step from that to realizing that everything is a note. The insight I’ve had recently is that those notes can be plotted on a spectrum from more to less actionable. We call the immediately actionable ones tasks. At the other end of the spectrum are inert notes, which I call records.

In between are notes at varying levels of actionable-ness. The clearer the intention stated in a note, the more immediately actionable it is. That’s not to say all notes should contain intentions, just that intention is a determiner for whether a note can, itself, generate action. Obviously a digital copy of the deed to my home has no intention, but I still need to keep it as a record.

The two required actions are Capture & Surface

Capture is when you write a note down and surface is when it returns to your attention. Our taxonomy will rely heavily on how we vary these actions, and how we vary them will depend on the requirements of different kinds of notes.

There are two types of information to capture with each note

When we capture a note, we must capture the information as well as the information about the information—that is, the metadata.

If it’s a task, “Replace the downstairs doorknob” is the task itself, and the date you intend to do it and the project it’s related to would be metadata.

If it’s a project note, “List of materials for the bathroom renovation” might be the note, and the project it belongs to would be metadata.

A useful shorthand is to think of the “who, what, when, where, why, and how” questions that reporters are encouraged to ask. That will cover just about anything you would need to capture.

“Now hold on, R.J.,” you might say. “This is going to take forever to take notes like this!”

It would, and I’d never recommend this if the final result were going to require you to do all this manually for every note. But by defining the structure required for various types of notes, we can preconfigure them to capture the metadata automatically, or nearly so. Then capture is fast and effortless.

Surface requirements determine capture requirements

What we need to capture in a note’s metadata is determined by the method we want to use to surface the note.

If it’s a task, the most reliable method is by scheduling it on a date (and, if you’re using a Tool for Thought for your system, having the appropriate queries set up to execute the surfacing).

Other notes may surface best in queries based on context, usually driven by tags or directly linked from a relevant task or project.

Some may show up when you review certain parts of your system, or after they’ve reached a certain “expiration.” Or they may show up randomly (by design), or when you filter your records, or search for them directly.

These surfacing methods correspond to the actionable-ness of the note. I wouldn’t schedule a digital image of my marriage license to surface to my attention every two weeks, and I wouldn’t leave a task drifting in a metadata-less void, hoping someday I’ll go searching for it.

A first pass at a taxonomy

I promised high-level exploration, and this is as specific as I’ll get (in this newsletter edition, at least). This is my first swing at what a taxonomy based on this Action-Powered Productivity theory of notes might look like. In no way do I consider this a comprehensive or exhaustive list!

The most actionable notes are tasks, and a comparison to the previous visual will suggest that those will surface most reliably if we scheduled them on a date.

Then we have notes tied to projects or clients—not immediately actionable themselves, but they’re required to facilitate action. These surface best by being linked to, or tagged with, specific projects, clients, and similar entities.

I’m proposing a proto-task layer for those “tasks” that sit in our weekly, monthly, someday/maybe reviews. They tend to pile up because we pretend they’re tasks and treat them that way mechanically—and then we chastise ourselves for not getting them done. But they’re not really tasks in any meaningful way until they’re surfaced by being scheduled. That’s when we’ve truly committed to them. Giving them a separate space to live as proto-tasks frees us from the expectation that they need to be done immediately, if ever.

Goals and plans surface in reviews, and ideas for further development may surface in reviews as well—though ideas might be part of specific subsystems built for developing those ideas. That might involve other layers of surfacing, unique to the specific types of ideas.

Procedures and templates might surface via age to remind you to keep them up to date, and you might filter a log of events to surface records for specific information.

And, of course, some records are deliberately inert—they will only surface when you search for them directly.

What do we do with this information?

Here’s what I’ve been building up to:

(1) The structure of different kinds of notes is determined by the metadata required to surface them in the desired way.

(2) There are only a few variations on surfacing methods, so you can capture a wide variety of notes with a few structures.

(3) If you preconfigure your capturing methods to reflect these structures, you will be able to quickly and reliably capture every piece of information that you need.

What I’m at work on—and what this Weekend Upgrade encourages you to explore—is what these different note structures need to look like. What metadata needs to be captured to make sure I see the information again when I need it?

I use Tana as my tasks and notes hub, so a lot of this is a question of fields, supertags, and searches. But I also use Keyboard Maestro to get information into Tana—especially from emails—so I need to configure those algorithms, too.

In the end, I’m still building Productivity Bridges, which increase the speed, accuracy, and quality of future work (see the last few Weekend Upgrades for more Bridge info). These Bridges invest a little time into optimizing my note capture methods, but the time—and frustration!—I save when they surface for me when I need them makes it well worth the investment!

What do I do next?

(1) Take 2 minutes and answer this question: What’s one thing I learned in this newsletter that I can put into practice right away?

By committing to a specific action, you make it much more likely you’ll do it.

(2) How do the notes you take align with my proposed taxonomy?

What have I missed? Let me know!

If this was valuable for you:

Share the newsletter with someone you think would also get value from it! https://rjn.st/weekend-upgrade-newsletters​

Until next time, friends:

If we know exactly how to capture every note we’ll encounter, and they show up right when we need them, our notes will become our superpower!

R.J.
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P.S. As I mentioned above, next Thursday through Saturday (8/31 - 9/2) is the first Action-Powered Productivity Digital Conference! We have a wonderful slate of presenters (see the list on Twitter [x]), and it’s free to register and attend all presentations live!