Note-Taking Is a Way of Talking to Yourself Across Time

Your past and future self will thank you.

“Recently, I have been feeling unsuccessful. It’s as if my goals, particularly long-term goals, don’t often seem to come to fruition. Am I a failure?”

I wrote those words in a notebook in June 2020, along with a list of things I wanted to achieve. Then I forgot about them entirely—until this past week, when I stumbled across that entry while flipping through my notebook. I’ll explain more about that journal entry in a moment, but first I need to explain how that accidental rediscovery made me realize something about the way I’ve been approaching note-taking.

For years, I convinced myself that mastering the art of note-taking—gathering quotes, data, and insights from every book I read and every corner of the internet—would unlock my ability to write well. If I could just establish a foolproof system, I imagined I’d never have to worry about what to write each week. Everything would be tucked away and organized in some spreadsheet or document, and I could finally relax and get back to living my life.

But, of course, it’s never that simple.

The reality is, I’ve experimented with every note-taking tool imaginable: elaborate setups in Notion and Obsidian, endless lists in Google Docs and Apple Notes, web clippers like mymind, and yes—even good old-fashioned paper and pen. Time and again, just when I thought I’d finally cracked the code, I lost interest in maintaining the system and slipped out of the habit entirely. There was no stickiness, no retention. I got discouraged and moved on with my life.

Earlier this week, staring at the wreckage of yet another failed system, I thought to myself: “Wait a minute. People have been taking notes for millennia without all of these fancy software tools that we have today. How did they do it?”

I wanted to understand what systems these writers had in place, even though all they had was paper and pen. What was their process? How did they store and reference their notes? How often did they collect them? What did they consider worthy of writing down, and what did they leave out?

I started researching some of the greatest writers to see how they managed their notes. Leonardo da Vinci blended sketches, observations, and ideas in his notebooks. Montaigne annotated and dialogued with classical texts in the margins of his books. Virginia Woolf kept decades’ worth of diaries, while Henry David Thoreau maintained a near-daily journal filled with observations of the natural world. Emily Dickinson often jotted down thoughts and poems on scraps of paper or envelopes. Mark Twain recorded jokes and remarks he overheard. The list goes on.

As I researched the note-taking habits of these great writers, a few through-lines became clear. Their process was never about efficiency or speed. They weren’t trying to capture thoughts as quickly as possible, but rather to linger with them. Often, there wasn’t a fixed end goal at all. Leonardo’s notebooks, Thoreau’s journals, Woolf’s diaries, and Dickinson’s scraps of verse were not streamlined tools for productivity so much as living spaces for curiosity, reflection, and experiment. They wrote things down not because they had to, but because the act itself was inseparable from how they thought.

This stands in stark contrast to the way we’re taught to think about note-taking today. Notes almost always carry a defined purpose: to study for an exam, to gather material for an essay, or to capture action items from a meeting. Because their value is framed in terms of utility, we’re encouraged to take them quickly and efficiently. Inefficiency feels like a flaw—after all, what could be the point of writing more slowly, more messily, or without a clear outcome in mind?

But above all, I realized that the most critical flaw in my own note-taking was that I simply wasn’t returning to my notes. As I mentioned earlier, there was no stickiness or sense of retention in any system I tried. Why was that? I think, in large part, it’s because I was collecting notes purely for the sake of collecting them. I never really intended to engage with them. I’d save a link to an interesting article or an X post, only to promptly forget about it. Or I’d jot down a quote without connecting it to anything meaningful, letting it drift away, untethered.

I realized I’d been approaching note-taking all wrong. The medium didn’t matter. In fact, paper and pen might be the best option. Notes aren’t just utilitarian; they’re fragments you leave behind for the person you’ll become. They’re not about efficiency, but about continuity—a thread of thought that outlives the moment it was written. And perhaps most importantly, note-taking is a way of talking to yourself across time. Yesterday’s self whispers to today’s, and today’s self prepares something for tomorrow.

Today, our problem isn't the scarcity of information. It's that we have far too much. We’re surrounded by an abundance, and we simply don’t know how to manage it. So we clip, save, and bookmark endlessly, but to what end? What’s the point of saving if we never return?

What I've learned from all of this—from the great writers who treated their notebooks as thinking spaces, from my own graveyard of abandoned systems, and from the abundance of information we're all drowning in—is that the real work isn't in the capturing but in the returning. Write before it matters, before you know what you're even trying to say. Don't wait for big ideas; just let the sparks fly. Then come back to those sparks regularly—weekly, monthly, whenever—because notes are dead unless you revisit them. Use them as a place to think rather than just store. Draft inside them, argue with yourself in the margins, reshape old thoughts as new understanding emerges. This isn't a system or a framework so much as it is a practice, like tending a garden where past and present versions of yourself meet.

Remember that journal entry I mentioned at the beginning? The one where I questioned whether I was a failure? I decided to write the first draft of this essay in that same notebook, using nothing but pen and paper. As I flipped through the pages, noticing stretches where I wrote almost daily and then nothing for months at a time, I found myself back at that June 2020 entry.

There it was, in my own handwriting: "Recently, I have been feeling unsuccessful. It's as if my goals, particularly long-term goals, don't often seem to come to fruition. Am I a failure?"

But this time, I’ll read further: "I want to make an album. I want to write a novel. I want to become a great cook. I want to get out of student loan debt. I want to travel around the world. Is it possible to achieve all of these goals? Are there enough hours in a day? Time always feels like it's slipping."

How interesting, I thought. Here I am, nearly four years later to the day, often feeling much the same. I wouldn’t say I feel like a complete failure, but there are certainly moments when my life isn’t quite where I’d like it to be, or when things haven’t unfolded as I’d hoped.

And yet, looking at those goals, I realize that since I wrote them, I’ve completed the first draft of a 100,000-word novel, paid off all my student loans, and, in 2023, spent three months traveling around Europe while working remotely. I was genuinely surprised to see that, of the five random goals I’d jotted down in that journal entry, I’d accomplished three.

If I hadn’t written them down, how would my present self be able to congratulate my past self for achieving what I set out to do? I felt like a failure then, and I’ve felt like a failure now, but I’ve been wrong—and now I have the proof, in my own words, scribbled across the pages of my notebooks.

This is the power of taking notes. Not to aimlessly collect items we’ll never return to, but to discover ourselves—and the beautiful world around us—in our hearts and in our minds, over the course of time.

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