Don’t let any of the gurus put you on the dangerous path to productivity. Hold my hand and I’ll show you the way to reach the never-ending depressing valleys of unproductivity, confusing work, and wasted time.

You must follow all that I’m about to share religiously without doubting or listening to anyone else. You must set up your future version for frustration, hair pulling, and headbanging. You must act today to become the reason for failure for your future version. Are you with me? Let’s go.

1. Overly Complicate Organization

That’s the first step to reach your goal. You must overly complicate your categories, tags, and directory hierarchy. You need to tangle it so badly that even the app begs you to have some mercy on your brain. You have to turn into such a maze that putting new notes each time feels like a nightmare and retrieving notes created merely a week ago becomes impossible.

Also, don’t ever try to create a title sequence. Don’t even bother to write any proper title at all. Put in some numbers and letters and call it a title. I mean what’s the point of a title anyways right? You’re only interested in the contents of the note and you don’t ever want to find it again. So…

2. Dump All Information in One Place

Don’t try to clean and format the data before creating your entries. Treat your note-taking app like a trash land and throw everything in there. The files you’ll never need, the content that provides you zero value, and the snippet that never made sense to you. All the useless articles, pointless news, massive log files, subtitles of your favorite T.V shows, and everything in between.

Dump it all in one big note without headings, sections, or sorting. I mean, ain’t it better to have everything in one place? Right?

3. Scatter Information Without Linking

Who links between notes? Nobody got so much time to throw into the garbage. You’re a busy person and you got stuff to do. Throw information into the notebook wherever the new note opens. Why bother trying to link them together? Your brain will remember them forever and you can rely on it to know what items are relatable.

Or you can spend 1.5 hours search each time you need the information. That’s still better than having to endure the pain of linking them together like a baby.

4. Copy and Paste

If you’re taking notes from an article or a massive book, copy/paste the materials and go your own way. Don’t provide any context. Don’t provide any information related to why you’re putting it there. Don’t even bother to write down where the text comes from.

You don’t need to write what those words made you feel. You don’t need to take note of what thoughts it sparked. You don’t need to wonder if you even understand what you copied.

What’s the point of all these things? In the end, you only need the contents. And about all the things that I just mentioned, your brain will remember them anyway, right?

5. Oh! I’ll remember this term

There are people who try to explain the new terms thinking their future version won’t understand what they wrote down. They don’t know any better. You aren’t like them. You don’t forget anything.

Hence, whenever writing new vague terms, don’t try to explain them. Leave them there like that. You understand them at the moment so why bother thinking you’ll forget them ever?

6. Never Clean the Clutter

Notes are precious entities. Whatever you capture represents what you were reading at the moment. Even if your future self doesn’t understand a word in a note, they’ll at least know that you saved it for a reason.

Don’t let anyone convince you in deleting those extremely precious and sacred notes. Don’t clean your inbo..ah! well, you have them scattered everywhere probably. Don’t clean anything. Don’t remove notes that you don’t understand. Don’t delete notes that no longer provide value and are no longer relevant. Keep everything clutched to your chest.

Conclusion

If you haven’t figured it out yet, this post is obviously satire. If anything, I’d want you to implement the opposite of everything said. If you’re going to take notes, take them in a way that helps your present and future self, or don’t take them at all. You’re only setting yourself up for disappointment, confusion, and frustration in the time to come.

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