Note Titles That Work

Today I had to do some information retrieval within Obsidian. I haven't done that as much lately, so it was a good exercise to put my notes to a test. I say this because at some point I changed how I take notes. Instead of focusing on how I want to store or represent a piece of information, I think about how I want to find it in the easiest way possible. This made me change how I link different notes and how I use tags.

I was able to find the information I needed just fine but as I glanced at the explorer on the left side, I noticed a few notes that felt off. Some of them didn't make a ton of sense until I opened them, only then I was able to recall what they were about. This holds you back when exploring your notes, if you need to open them one by one to understand what they're about, you're doing it wrong.

I thought at first this was a reasonable mistake. I was titling my notes the way I would title a thought here or a blog post. It made no sense, I was trying to capture my attention or peak my interest so that I could go open the note. But that was not my intention. I realized (and I'm sure that if you read some of the books about note taking you might know this) that the punchline MUST be in the title. By reading that only, I should be able to tell exactly what the note is about.

That's not it though. I took the chance to review at random some of my notes (as you might guess, there's a plugin for that). If the title didn't capture the idea, I changed it. In doing so I discovered an additional mistake. While it is recommended that each note is about a specific and well-defined concept (also called "atomic notes"), I learned that it wasn't the case for me. I found myself unsure what the title should be because the note included different pieces of information. I was taking notes wrong and this exercise made that very clear.

Let's see an example, I had one note titled "Writing Guidelines" which would make sense for a blog post. The content included a few pointers and they were all very different from one another. On that same note, I mentioned that when you make an effort in writing something clearly it forces you to have clear ideas (or to make them so in the process), that readers have a limited attention span, and so on. I had no way to change the title effectively so I created separate notes. In our case: writing clearly forces you to have clear ideas, when writing remember that attention is a limited resource, ....

Thoughts

I underestimated how powerful proper note titles can be. It forces you not only to express the content effectively but also to make your notes truly atomic. This will inevitably lead to smaller notes in content and that's ok, it allows you to expand with examples that are coherent with the idea presented. I feel like I just leveled up my notes with "this one simple trick".