Cornell. Outline. Mind maps. Bullet journal. Feynman. Sentence method. SQ3R.
If you've ever Googled "best note-taking method", you'll know it's a rabbit hole. Everyone has a favourite and they all sound convincing.
Here's what helped me make sense of it. Rather than ask "which method is best?", ask "what is this method trying to do?" Almost every method falls into one of five categories.
1. Capture
These methods help you get information down quickly.
- Outline method—hierarchical bullet points. Collapse them for a helicopter view, expand for the detail.
- Charting—topics as rows, attributes as columns. Brilliant for comparing things.
- Sentence method—capture the key sentences of a talk, like highlighting a book.
- Mind mapping—ideas as nodes with children.
- Bullet journaling and daily notes—a routine of capturing thoughts and priorities.
Capture is the foundation, and I use the outline method all the time. But capturing isn't understanding.
2. Organisation
These methods help you see how ideas relate while you're learning.
- Flow method—you write in your own words and use arrows to connect concepts as you go.
- Box method—separate boxes for each topic, often with a small doodle. Great for visual learners.
3. Summarisation
These methods distil what you've learned.
- Cornell—the page is split into a narrow column for keywords and questions, a wide column for notes, and a footer for a summary. Ideal for revision.
- DaVinci—Cornell with more illustrations.
4. Understanding
These methods test whether you really get it.
- Feynman Technique—if you can't explain it simply, you don't understand it. Strip out jargon until a 12 year old could follow.
- SQ3R—Survey, Question, Read, Recite, Review. An active way to read textbooks.
5. Thinking
And then there's a category I think is almost empty: methods that help you have original thoughts.
This is where the Zettelkasten sits.
Spot the pattern
Look at the first four categories. They all do something to a single piece of source material. You take a lecture, a chapter or a page, and you condense it, organise it or explain it. The result is a tidy version of one thing.
That's how most of us were taught to take notes at school, and it's the right tool for passing a test on that one thing.
But what if you want to see how a book on habits relates to a book on mindset? Or notice something nobody has pointed out? Condensed notes on separate topics don't talk to each other. They sit in separate folders, each one a neat little island.
The Zettelkasten is different because it treats your notes as one connected system, a map where anything can relate to anything. It's less about making a shorter version of what you read and more about mapping your understanding to how your mind actually works.
The good news is you don't have to pick one. Outlining is a very popular partner to the Zettelkasten, and I use it myself to capture notes before I process them further. Think of the other methods as ingredients, and the Zettelkasten as the kitchen.
Which one should you start with?
Ask yourself what you actually want from your notes:
- "I need to get through an exam." → Summarisation and understanding methods.
- "I need to capture a fast-moving meeting or lecture." → Outline or sentence method.
- "I want to think better, connect ideas and create something original." → That's the thinking category.
If that last one sounds like you, keep reading this series.
Go deeper
In Atomic Note-Taking I show how the Zettelkasten fits in the bigger picture, how to blend it with the other methods, and how to build a workflow that takes you from capture all the way to original thinking.
