Duly Noted just celebrated its first birthday. It’s an opportunity for me to reflect on what’s changed since it came out.

The book’s central premise is evergreen: thinking isn’t limited to the spongy mass between your ears. Instead, you think by interacting with your environment and the things (and people) in it. You can leverage your environment to help you think better. In particular, you can use notes to augment your mind.

Many people think of notes as means for remembering things. But they’re more than that. Used mindfully, notes amplify your abilities for different kinds of cognitive tasks. Some kinds of notes help you remember things, others are good for planning, hashing out ideas, etc.

The book encourages you to build a “personal knowledge garden”: a notes repository that serves as a lifelong scratchpad for thinking and learning.

And this is where tech comes in. Computers enable you to build hypertext note-taking systems that augment your thinking in ways paper can’t. This makes for very powerful knowledge gardens – particularly if you take advantage of basic information organization skills.

That’s the basic gist. So, on to what’s changed. I wrapped up the manuscript in mid-2023. Which is to say, its content is actually around a year and a half old. That’s a long time given the pace at which technology (particularly AI) is advancing!

To put it in context: ChatGPT came out in the fall of 2022. At that point, I was mostly done with the first draft. The book’s structure and focus were set. And of course, at that point, I didn’t yet have lots of hands-on experience using AI to augment my own personal knowledge garden.

That’s no longer the case. If you’ve followed this blog for a while, you’ll know that I’m actively exploring ways to use AI to augment our cognitive abilities. That extends to note-taking as a means for thinking.

DN’s last chapter covers the use of AI in note-taking. I recommend employing it as an assistant, not as a replacement. (This post conveys the gist.) I stand by that. From my current vantage point (and firsthand experience) this manifests in two ways:

  1. Using LLMs to reflect and clarify note content
  2. Using LLMs to improve findability (including surfacing relationships between items)

It was possible to do both in mid-2023, and the book provides examples. But AI tools have greatly improved since then. But it’s also become clear to me that a third use case is feasible: keeping the garden organized.

To be clear, I don’t yet do this with my own knowledge garden. But I’ve used AI to keep my blog organized. The techniques I highlight in this post apply to knowledge gardens, especially if you’ve built your system on plain text. (E.g., using a tool such as Obsidian, which I cover in DN.)

A year on, I stand by everything in the book. Better thinking leads to better living – and improving your note-taking is among the easiest things you can do to improve your thinking. We have better tools than ever to help. DN provides a solid conceptual foundation.

If you haven’t yet read Duly Noted, buy a copy from Rosenfeld Media. Use code DNONE for a 20% discount. (Valid until February 10, 2025.)