Quick Guide to USING and IMPROVING Existing Notes

Cam Bestwick
Mar 1, 2024
3 min read

Updated: May 11

^Use this guide in situations where you will need to retrieve existing notes to fix them up and/or make use of the information within them.

Tips for improve your notes to prepare them for use

Try to only spend time improving your notes while you are already handling them. Touching them up a bit when while you already have them open (to use them) is far better than scheduling a separate time to come back and make changes.

Becoming more consistent at making and storing notes creates a virtuous cycle. The more predictable you become to your future self, who becomes more consistent at checking for old notes, and then benefits from the notes more. This makes you more motivated to make and store notes for them, and so on.

Using notes produces the ultimate form of feedback you need to make your notes good. Pay attention to this feedback. It tells you – with accuracy – how good the notes are, and how good they need to be, if you want to rely on them for this purpose in the future. It is the linchpin of the entire SUYU Notes system.

Be open to the diverse ways to improve notes. Improving notes is simply preparing them to be used. Different people will find different things useful.

Organise notes by topic, not by source )) Your ‘future self’ – who wants to use the information – will be thinking about topics, not sources, and will want to find all the notes they have on a topic quickly. For this, you need to:

Stop binding your notes to the moment you took them (e.g. "Notes from Week 8 Lecture"). Your future self won't remember or care very much. This is a powerful tendency to resist.
Start recording the source of the information using the “#” markup (or other markup of your choosing), so you can blend together your notes from different sources without losing track of where information came from.

Keep the notes understandable to someone who ‘wasn’t there’ when you initially encountered the information. Even when you are certain the only reader of the notes will be yourself in the future – it’s easy to forget all the details and context of that moment. Assuming too much will make the notes gibberish to your future self. Perhaps you have already had the experience of failing to understand your own old notes?!

Different ways to use notes might call for completely different improvements. Consider the way your notes will used. For example, the differences between your notes on what to do in an emergency situation might need to be extremely short and clear; whereas your notes on political philosophy will need more depth and density, because they will be pondered in a slow, thoughtful manner.

Solutions to common issues at the IMPROVE and USE stages:

When you don’t have enough time to make the improvements you want to…

Use the ‘^’ markup to write down what improvements to make next time you have the document open.

These are 'notes about the notes. For example, you could say something like:

“^Re-order this list to be chronological”
“^A Venn diagram that would summarise this concept nicely”.

Reminders of key note-making principles

You are following the SUYU Notes system, which is a double-loop cycle which keeps you iterative and keeps you from over-or under-investing in your different notes. The goal is to move your notes through the cycle quickly and repeat the cycle. It has four steps:

You encounter information in the world you expect to be important or useful in the future.
You capture some notes that represent the information.
You improve those notes by making them easier or better to use.
You use the notes to take better actions in the world

A good note-taking system will help you balance the effort you put into producing notes with the benefit you get from using them.
Being iterative in your note-making will help you balance the level of effort and benefit over time.
Smart note-taking usually means finding ways to make the smallest possible upfront investments (in your notes) with the largest potential benefits for your future self.
Try to only spend time improving your notes while you are already handling them.

More detailed explanations of these ideas and why they're important can be found in the resource: SUYU Notes — A Recap.