Use Cases
So, why do people take notes?
Learning
The note taking isn't as important as fully ingesting and internalizing the material. Here, it's important to use notes to transfer summaries of the learning material. Notes are referenced later for studying. For avid note takers, flash cards are created to test their memory.
Recipes
Here, notes are relatively simple. Note taking becomes a system of record. These notes are referenced and searched frequently. They are occasionally updated, and annotations are sometimes added.
Archiving
In this effort, documents and materials are scanned and annotated for later reference. A key thing here is for materials to have their original assocations preserved. This includes the person and/or organization that the materials originated from, as well as the author of them. When a person is researching a particular topic, disparate archives will generally need to be consulted in order to form a full picture. This is facilitated through the creation and maintenance of collections.
Journalism
The challenge here is a constant stream of incoming information and needing to quickly and consistently collect them into locations for later reference. Perceiving and maintaining the evolution of trends, patterns, and timelines are the main uses of notes. This can be accomplished by separating things into raw materials, annotations, notes, and finally, narratives and drafts.
Creative Work
Here, work starts with collecting inspiration. Once enough inspriation is pooled together, ideas emerge. From those, disparate thoughts, concepts, and connections are made until they evolve into snippets, characters. Then, those emerge into formal drafts and scripts.
Life Organization
For notes that focus on the self, dates and tracking data carry the highest importance. Knowing what happened when, and how things like mood, weight, diet, and connections change over time are the goals of this kind of note keeping. In addition, in some cases, the note taking itself is therapeutic, untangling the inside of the brain and putting it to paper. Reviewing notes usually involves searching for highlights, small details, and trends. A significant note taking method for this is represented in bullet journaling.