Most of us are good at writing notes and bad at reading them. The app fills up with meeting notes, half-thoughts, links saved “for later” and quotes from books, and very little of it is opened again. The notes weren’t useless when we wrote them. They just weren’t written to be come back to.
This article is about the difference. None of it depends on a particular app. It’s four habits, each small, that together turn a pile of notes into something you return to: capture fast, title the first line, link on purpose, and revisit on a rhythm.
Why most notes are write-only
It helps to be honest about what happens to a typical note. You write it in a hurry, in the middle of something else. It has no title, or a title like “Notes 3 Oct”. It sits in a folder with two hundred siblings. Nothing points to it, so nothing leads you back. A month later you vaguely remember that you wrote something about this, search for a word you think you used, get forty results, and give up.
Every part of that story is a fixable problem:
- the note was hard to recognise (no real title);
- it was isolated (no links in or out);
- and there was no occasion to see it again (no rereading habit).
Notice what isn’t on the list: the tool. People change apps hoping the new one will fix this, and for a few weeks it does, because a new app is an occasion to look at your notes. Then the novelty wears off and the old pattern returns.
Habit one: capture fast, decide later
The moment of capture is the worst moment to organise. You’re busy, the thought is fragile, and every decision — which folder, which tags, which template — is a reason not to write it down at all.
So make capture as close to zero effort as you can:
- One place to write. One inbox, one app, one keyboard shortcut. If you have to choose where a thought goes before you can write it, some thoughts won’t get written.
- No required fields. A note with only a sentence in it is still a note.
- Accept mess. Typos, fragments, half a link. The point is to catch the thought, not to finish it.
The catch is that “decide later” only works if later actually happens. That’s what the other three habits are for.
Habit two: make the first line a real title
The single most useful thing you can do for a future reader — usually you — is to make the first line of a note say what the note is about, in words you would search for.
A good first line is:
- specific: “Why the Tuesday deploys keep failing” rather than “Deploy notes”;
- a claim or a question when the note has one: “Short meetings need a written agenda” says more than “Meetings”;
- in your own words, the ones you’ll type into a search box in six months.
This sounds trivial, but it changes how notes behave. A list of titles that are claims and questions can be skimmed like a table of contents. A list of dates and vague nouns has to be opened one by one. Andy Matuschak’s public notes on “evergreen notes” make a similar argument — that note titles work best as complete, sharp statements — and they are worth reading if you want the long version.
If you only adopt one habit from this article, adopt this one. Many apps, Aloha among them, already treat the first line as the title, so it costs nothing extra.
Habit three: link on purpose
A note on its own is hard to find again. A note that is connected to two or three others gets found on the way to something else.
Links don’t have to be clever. The useful questions when you finish a note are plain:
- What did this come from? A book, a meeting, an earlier note.
- What does it contradict, or agree with?
- What would I want to read next to it?
One or two honest links beat ten automatic ones. Linking everything to everything is the note-taking equivalent of putting every word in bold: the signal disappears.
This idea has a long history. The sociologist Niklas Luhmann kept a slip-box (Zettelkasten) of tens of thousands of cards, each numbered and pointing to others, and credited it with much of his writing. You don’t need his system to borrow the principle: a note is more valuable for what it’s connected to.
Links you can see
In most apps a link is a bit of blue text you only notice when you open the note. That’s fine for following links, but it doesn’t show you the shape of your notes — which ones are hubs, which are lonely, which clusters belong together. Graph views try to show this; we look at what they’re good and bad at in Obsidian graph view: what it’s good for, where it falls short.
Habit four: revisit on a rhythm
Here is the uncomfortable part. Notes you never reread are, in practice, notes you didn’t take. The value of a note is realised when it meets a later version of you with a new question.
Rereading doesn’t need to be a big ritual. What it needs is a rhythm and a reason:
- A rhythm: a fixed, short slot. Ten minutes on Friday afternoon is enough to start. Put it in the calendar like any other appointment.
- A reason: something to do while you’re there. Merge two notes that say the same thing; sharpen a vague title; add the link you didn’t think of at the time; throw away what’s dead.
The second point matters more than it seems. “Review my notes” is a chore with no finish line. “Fix five titles” is a task you can complete. There’s a fuller treatment of rereading — including why spacing helps and why where a note lives affects whether you remember it — in Why you never reread your notes, and how to fix it.
Prune without guilt
Rereading is also when you delete. A note that has stopped being true or useful makes the rest harder to find. Keep what you would want to read again; let the rest go. If deleting feels too final, most tools let you archive or undo — use that, and get on with it.
Putting it together
A workable routine fits on an index card:
- During the day: capture everything into one place, with no decisions.
- When you finish a note: rewrite the first line into a real title; add one or two links.
- Once a week, for ten minutes: reread a handful of notes, fix what’s vague, link what’s related, delete what’s dead.
That’s the method. It works on paper, in a text editor, in Obsidian or in Notion.
Where Aloha fits
We make Aloha, so here is how it relates to these habits. Skip this if you’re happy with your setup.
Aloha is a viewer for the notes you already have. It opens your Obsidian vault or your Notion pages and shows them as a small town: a note is a house, and a link between two notes is a road from one door to the other. Roads get better as more links share them, so the links you use most are easy to see.
It helps with the rereading habit in two ways. A note you haven’t opened for a month fades until you open it again, and R walks you to the nearest note you haven’t visited yet. Ten minutes of walking round your own notes is a reasonable Friday review. How it works has the details.