Why don’t I review my notes?

I don’t think taking notes is a natural behavior for me. In my earlier school years, I generally wouldn't take any notes at all. After some classes where note-taking was a requirement, I started warming up to the practice a little more. My note-taking habits are still inconsistent and unsystematic, but by the end of college I was much better about them than when I started out.

For me, the use in notes almost never lay in actually reviewing them. Just the act of taking notes during class was enough to improve my retention. I think taking notes requires me to pay closer attention than I otherwise would have, and needing to phrase things in my own terms helps me add structure to the concepts I learn.

Nowadays, while I still do a lot of learning, I don’t take many notes for it (perhaps I should!). But I do still take notes in the form of writing down ideas I have and saving bookmarks of webpages I visit.

A few years ago, around the time I joined Ctrl-C, I started a habit of bookmarking almost every site or article that I found interesting. This helps somewhat with what you might call “open tab syndrome”, because you can tell yourself you’ll come back to things later.

But will you (“you” being me in this case)? I find myself very rarely looking back through either my bookmarks or my idea notes. If I do, I’m usually looking for something specific that I already remembered somewhat. That certainly has its uses, but I wonder if I’m missing out on a lot of great things I squirreled away and then forgot about.

The problem is, looking up a specific note or bookmark feels urgent and relevant to the here and now, while reviewing all my notes in general mainly feels like a chore to me. On second thought, more than just being a chore, I kind of feel like I’ll be crushed by the sheer volume of backlog that I’d like to get to one day, that requires follow-up from me. I have just so many ideas and interests, and I can only really be interested in and committed to a few at a time.

But I do believe that if I just sat down and went through a bit every day, I could get through a lot of the backlog pretty quickly. What’s even better, I think I could reorganize and flesh out a lot of my notes, so that I feel comfortable leaving them for a while and then coming back to them when I’m ready. When I put it that way, it sounds worth it just for the peace of mind.