With the proliferation of content across the internet and social media, there is an endless stream of noise competing for our limited attention. Yet hidden within all that noise are those rare signals – the key pieces of information, inspiring quotes, and thought-provoking concepts that have the power to spark new ideas and change the way we think. This is where searchable digital notes come in. By having a system to capture, organize, and search notes across the various content we consume and create, we harness the power of our own curated repository of knowledge. As our external brains, searchable notes allow us to leverage our past learning’s, perspectives, and mental models to find connections and insights for the future. No longer confined to fuzzy human memory, searchable notes create an enduring record of our thinking that is recalled, referenced, and built upon over time.
Signal amidst the noise
The amount of information available today is astounding navigate here for online notepad. By one estimate, humanity created 2.5 quintillion bytes of data in 2020 alone. That’s 2.5 followed by 18 zeros! With so much content being produced across websites, ebooks, podcasts, videos, and social platforms, our cognitive capacity feels hopelessly outmatched. It’s like trying to get a sip of water from a perpetually flowing firehose. Even within our narrow niches and interests, there are usually far more ideas and perspectives than we could ever fully synthesize and absorb.
All information is created equal. In any given field, there are certain seminal thinkers, foundational frameworks, and repeating uniquely insightful principles. For example, in psychology, we might point to thinkers like Daniel Kahneman on biases and heuristics or Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi on flow states. In nutrition, writers like Michael Pollan emphasize eating mostly plants. In fitness, high-intensity interval training (HIIT) reliably emerges as one of the most time-efficient methods. The duration of such a signal matters. Finding and integrating these core theoretical building blocks and mental models allows us to construct more accurate worldviews and make better decisions.
However, identifying these signals amidst the broader noise is difficult. With content siloed across so many sites and stuck in our ephemeral short-term memory, we often struggle to retrieve the key pieces of information we’ve previously encountered. All the while, our cognitive biases like availability bias make us gravitate toward the most recent, flashy, or controversial ideas rather than the highest signal ones. We end up feeling overwhelmed by the infinite noise rather than empowered by the few bits of signal buried within.
Power of searchable notes
This is where actively taking digital notes that we can easily search and reference later becomes game-changing. By extracting the key signal from materials as we consume them and organizing those insights in an external brain we can query, we overcome the limits of our internal memory’s capacity. No more forgetting that one passage we read that would be perfect for our current work. No more googling dozens of combinations of keywords trying to rediscover an article we remember existing but don’t recall the specifics of. With searchable notes, we can instantly pull up the seminal frameworks, examples, quotes, and learnings that are most relevant to our current endeavors.
