Our Note Taking Has Not Changed. Ever.

Archimedes wrote on paper. Da Vinci wrote on paper. Steve Jobs typed on a mac. I notice a pattern here: we never moved beyond writing on a single sheet of paper. With so many technological advancements taking place, I think we forgot to question this decision we made in the beginning. Why do we limit ourselves by writing on a sheet of paper?

In the past, we had no choice. What else could we do? There were no whiteboards back then, let alone any computers of any sort. Heck, even figuring out how to get to pen and paper took several millenia. Only with the advent of pencil were we then able to transition to immutable thoughts.

Yet, today it's a much different story with even the sky not being the limit anymore. I think it's about time we went back to the root of all this: is writing on a single document really the best for us?

Single Sheet Writing

Of course, single sheet writing has its advantages. It allows us to quickly get things out of the way. All these racing thoughts in our mind can temporarily come to a halt.

Just like our invaluable paintings in the musuem, there is no doubt about how beneficial a brain dump can be. Less off our minds, lowered anxiety, a sense of calmness, and more control are all benefits of writing down our thoughts.

Now this works for therapeutic purposes, but does it have any actual use? My opinion is that there is indirect use, but not much we can do with them directly. Why? Because while in the short-term the thought gets written down, it soon gets forgotten among the heaps of paper. There is no building up of notes over time.

The only build up that happens is through the informal processes in our brain, but think about how bad everyone's memory is nowadays. Since we use Google for all our information, there is no reason anymore to exercise our memories, and this lack of exericse leads to severe degradations. No wonder everyone says they have the memory of a gold fish.

I think, however, it does not have to be this way. Writing is the first step. By all means, we must keep writing, typing, drawing, whatever it is we must do to get things out in the world, but, after that, we must also have all our works at the grasp of our fingers. Writing on a journal is super useful, but we need to be able to use all our journals accumulated across our precious years.

Having a way to do the next step after this is certainly possible, but the only reason we are not able to currently do so is due to design limitations. Yes, design limitations, not technological ones because the dream tool is within our reach.

The dream tool

Let's think about the problems here.

1. Notes get lost in our journals.
2. We forget important realizations
3. New notes are not able to take advantage of old ones
4. When we need to make decisions, we do not have access to all our notes

From this, it seems apparent we need something beyond paper. Sure, you can solve all the four problems above by spending more time going through all your folders (whether digital or physical), accumulating all your notes, and then marking all the relevant ones. Then you can finally take the new note.

Clearly this is super limiting in time, but it is one solution. I think we can do a hundred times better.

What if while typing someone instantly showed us all our notes? What if we could quickly add the new note and then draw mind map connections between all our old ones? What if we then had such a huge aha! that we could quickly take another note and repeat all of this until we are happy with the actual progress we have made?

This is my dream. A world where we are able to have all our learnings at the front of our minds without any limitations. In such a world, we would not have misled desisions and oopsies. We would not have biases that we were not even aware of. Everything would be front-loaded in our brains thanks to this brilliant dream tool.

I'm glad you were able to read to this point, but you still may be thinking "geez this does not seem that big of a deal". But, I strongly implore you to think how different your life would be if each life lesson you had would be in front of you when you were able to make an important decision.

Whether to take that new job, to date a particular person, to buy a particular house, to decide which book to read next, I think there is a statistic that says we make thousands of such micro decisions in the day.

Beyond just decisions, our fundamental curiosity is what allows us to keep on climbing higher. Building knowledge is something we have always done and passed down to our generations. It went from simple mechanics of gravity, to laws of motion, to steam cars to spaceships. Imagine a world where we all build our individual notes into actual knowledge that we ourselves are aware of.

My quest to change this

And that's precisely why I am building Constella. Even though now it seems like such a duh to be building this beautiful product with much love, I was actually about to give up on this. Short term capital gain pursuits enticed me for a bit.

It was only thanks to the wonderful support I got on reddit when I made a post to decide to publish what I had done that I finally had some sense knocked into me. I quit growing getconch.ai and went fully building Constella. I was just so delighted so many people found the tool useful and that I was able to tangibly improve someone's life. To make it more enjoyable from where it's important rather than solving a high-level business need.

This is just the beginning, and there is a lot of work ahead of us. I hope you enjoy the tool as it continues to evolve :)