Some Urgent Notemaking Questions Find Answers
writingslowly.com
The author shares practical advice on note-making, emphasizing manual thinking over AI shortcuts. They recommend using unique IDs to link notes and combining short atomic notes into mini-essays for better writing flow. Highlighting alone is less useful than writing clear notes that explain why something matters.
8 Mar 2026
I’ve found my highlights don’t get used for anything. My conclusion is that highlighting may look like useful work, but in practice it just isn’t.
Resulting rule of thumb: if it’s worth highlighting it’s worth writing a short note about it; and if it’s not worth writing a note, it’s not worth highlighting.
What I do instead: write a note. If I read something and think “that’s interesting”, I make a note and force myself to record why I find it interesting. This seemingly slows me down, but then I don’t waste time creating unused highlights that looked interesting for reasons I didn’t record and have now forgotten.