Reader, if you are anything like me when making connections between notes, you have experienced that after linking every note to anything that even seems remotely related to it, you end up with something that resembles the following:

(Source: https://every.to/superorganizers/the-fall-of-roam)

There sure are a lot of links here. But is our brain really such an unhelpful mess?

Today, I’ll explain why it’s easy to overdo links, and how instead, you can be conscious about making connections to learn deeper.

Due to the internet anyone today knows what a link is, and can connect various resources.

There are a lot of resources nowadays… ideally we’d like to read them all, and retain them all, right?

We link our notes to article A we want to read, and YouTube video B we want to watch, and something we scribbled down last week which seemed relevant to what we’re reading now. Again, you end up with something that resembles the screenshot inserted above.

This picture was taken in the app Roam Research, which introduces the concept of backlinks into note-taking. Like the author of the source article, my notes soon started looking like this after I first tried it.

Making connections is essential to learn - everyone knows this (and if you’ve ever been in a learning app where you couldn’t make connections - you might have felt limited like you were memorizing isolated facts).

But in order to get this learning benefit, you can’t just link anything to anything. Instead, you have to be conscious about your connections…

Which means using higher-order thinking. If you remember, higher order thinking is the upper half of Bloom’s taxonomy pyramid:

There are 3 major ways to this:

1. Name your connections [Analyze]
2. Prioritize your connections [Evaluate]
3. Make it flow [Create]

When visually mapping out a topic, its subtopics should be connected in a way that flows logically, with a clear start and end point. (This, by the way, is related to the Feynman technique: the way your map flows is the way you would teach the topic to someone else).

Contrast the above mess with this mind map (on the topic of the learning process)

Can you see how powerful this is for your learning, Reader?

By using links in this way, they will help you learn deeper. They also help you bring structure to your notes, rather than just resulting in an ever-growing mess.

Look at the links you’ve created for the topic you’re learning right now, and go through the 3 steps above to name, prioritize and arrange your links into a flow that helps you deeply grasp the topic.

Happy Traversing!

Dom

Founder

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