I stumbled across Tim Berners-Lee’s 1995 talk on “Hypertext and Our Collective Destiny” last month, and while it hasn’t exactly transformed how I think about writing notes, it has certainly confirmed the direction I’ve already been working slowly towards.

There’s a lot of discussion online about the best systems and apps for taking notes, and poeple keep devising new ones almost every day, but this is missing something revolutionary that’s hiding in plain sight. The inventor of the World Wide Web wasn’t just solving how computers share information—he was creating a blueprint for how our minds should work.

This got me reflecting how I’ve been looking to create/adapt/bodge together a method for writing that suits the strange way I think, rather than just accepting someone else’s off-the-shelf offering, however flashy. My own bespoke creative working environment.

So, according to Berners-Lee, how should our minds work?

Categorical Thinking Is a Trap

Traditional note-taking systems lock us into categories that limit rather than liberate our thinking. This is exactly the problem that Vannevar Bush, one of Berners-Lee’s intellectual heroes, identified decades ago. In Berners-Lee’s words:

“The problem Bush was addressing, or the problem of the individual researcher, was one of system topology. The poor person has successively narrowed and narrowed his or her field of interest in order to cope with the information overload, and soon is connected only to things of very local interest.”

In the past I’ve certainly experienced this. Notes tucked away in separate categories create knowledge silos. According to Berners-Lee the uncomfortable truth is that these systems fail us when we need them most:

“The topology clearly doesn’t work, because there is no path for the transfer of knowledge from one discipline and the next.”

Every category we create essentially generates another silo — isolated and cut off from the cross-pollination that creates genuine insight.

I’ve previously written about Gottfried Leibniz, one of the last great polymaths, who was able to make innovations in several different fields partly because he didn’t keep his wide-ranging thought in neat compartments, but in thousands of pages of unruly notes which he had no compunction to cut up and rearrarange. It’s hard to imagine what a person like this would have been able to do with the World Wide Web.

The Web Structure Liberates Knowledge

Berners-Lee offered a solution that applies perfectly to personal notes:

“In providing a system for manipulating this sort of information, the hope would be to allow a pool of information to develop which could grow and evolve with the organisation and the projects it describes.”

His revolutionary insight?

“For this to be possible, the method of storage must not place its own restraints on the information. This is why a ‘web’ of notes with links (like references) between them is far more useful than a fixed hierarchical system.”

Traditional note-taking is like navigating with only predetermined routes. Web-structured notes give you the entire network, plus spontaneous shortcuts you never knew existed.

Keywords Restrict Natural Connections

Even our keywords and tagging systems can be too restrictive. In his 2006 paper on “Linked data - Design issues”), Berners-Lee warns about conceptual centralisation:

“If we make a knowledge representation system which requires anyone who uses the concept of ‘automobile’ to use the term ‘www.kr.org/stds/indu… then we restrict the set of uses of the system to those for whom this particular formulation of what an automobile is works.”

This seemingly technical point has deep implications for me as I’m writing and organising my notes. When I force myself to use rigid terminology or standardised keywords, I’m limiting the very connections my mind naturally wants to make. I’m not totally against using keywords, but Berners-Lee appears to be sounding a warning that has made me think a little more reflectively about what they entail.

Photo by Valeria Hutter at Unsplash.

Connected Notes Mirror Your Mind (OK, my mind)

The future of note-taking, in my humble opinion, isn’t about better folders or fancier apps, nor is it about succumbing to AI to write it all for us — it’s about reimagining how ideas connect. Taking a little bit of inspiration from Berners-Lee here’s what works for me:

• Create notes that link directly to related thoughts, regardless of category
• Use and even create my own language, rather than forcing standardised terms
• Allow connections to form organically, mirroring how my mind actually works ( I mean, I think that’s how my mind works)
• Focus on relationships between ideas, not so much on their classification

I’m trying to make it so my notes aren’t just a neat archive of what I’ve learned. Instead I want them be a dynamic reflection of how my thoughts work, so my writing process stays generative rather than restrictive. And my mind doesn’t work in folders and subfolders. It works in connections and associations that span domains and categories. The rhizome not the tree.

I expect there are people whose minds really do work in categories and who prefer to keep their notes in clear and fairly rigid folders. That might well work for someone else, but it’s not the only way to do things, and I found it interesting that the founder of the World Wide Web didn’t especially admire this approach.

And it might not just be about how my individual mind works. Perhaps it’s about how the world works too. Maybe the World Wide Web has been successful in part because it facilitates the expression of the web-wide world. One of the things I’ve appreciated from re-reading Berners-Lee is his vision of a Web that rather than constraining us, helps us to network both knowledge and people.

“The web is more a social creation than a technical one. I designed it for a social effect—to help people work together—and not as a technical toy. The ultimate goal of the Web is to support and improve our weblike existence in the world.”— Tim Berners-Lee, Weaving the Web

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Gottfried Willhelm Leibniz (1646-1717), that complex polymath who (probably) invented calculus, used to write down all his thoughts then cut up the pieces and attempt to rearrange them. He once admitted this had resulted in “one big chaos”.

Leibniz said he had so many thoughts in a single hour that it took him more than a day to write them all down.

“Sometimes in the morning, in the hour that I spend still lying in bed, so many thoughts come to me that I need the whole morning, indeed sometimes the whole day or even longer, to set them down clearly in writing.”¹

These are just a couple of the intriguing facts I learned from reading Michael Kempe’s excellent biography, The Best of All Possible Worlds. A Life of Leibniz in Seven Pivotal Days (Pushkin Press).

Image source: Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Bibliothek—Niedersächsiche Landesbibliothek.

Though he wrote and cut up and rearranged mountains of notes, he didn’t publish much in his lifetime.

“I wrote countless things about countless things,” he wrote to the Swiss mathematician Jakob Bernoulli in 1697, “but only published a few about few.” And he told the Hamburg lawyer Vincent Placcius: “If you only know me from my publications, you don’t know me.” ²

All this sounds quite dismal, but on the other hand Leibniz was a genius in several disciplines, who left behind “one of the largest literary legacies of any scholar in world history” (Kempe).

Furthermore, Markus Krajewski, scholar of media history, claims “any history of ‘assisted thinking’ with artificial intelligences finds a worthy starting point in Leibniz.”

Perhaps then his seemingly disorganised notes were just part of the genius.

Krajewski’s recent chapter “Intellectual Furniture: Elements of a Deep History of Artificial Intelligence.” sets Leibniz’s endeavours in the context of an intellectual history that stretches from the specialised furniture Leibniz acquired to arrange his notes, via the dawn of the computer age, all the way to the recent rise of artificial intelligence. Heady stuff!

In Hanover Leibniz kept a special cabinet for his notes, where he hung up the notes he had cut up in various combinations. This was his Zettelschrank, modelled on Thomas Harrison’s scrinium litteratum. After his death Johann Friedrich Blumenbach inspected this contraption and called it “the most fearsome and cumbersome machine that one could imagine”³. Well, I don’t know about that. Perhaps he didn’t have a particularly strong imagination.

Image source: Krajewski, p.186

This sense of being almost overwhelmed by information is really the prehistory of the situation we’re in now, where not only is there ‘too much to know’⁴, but AI is making more and more of it every second. Our information machines aren’t so much helping us to get the chaos under control as simply creating more and more chaos, faster than we can comprehend it, much less organise it.

Yes, we’re drowning in data, but it may be comforting to know that this is nothing new, and that despite the mounds of ‘stuff to know about’, some remarkable breakthroughs were still possible, and may be still. In 2013 Stephen Wolfram visited the Leibniz archives in an attempt to understand how Leibniz had achieved so much so early - and how he had also missed so much of what we now take for granted in the computational perspective on science.

With the utmost presumption, I’ve previously claimed that Leonardo, that other great polymath, might have benefited from a more coherent approach to making notes than his zibaldone. Dare I make the same claim for Leibniz?

Oh look, I just did.

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References

Kempe, Michael. The Best of All Possible Worlds. A Life of Leibniz in Seven Pivotal Days. Translated by Marshall Yarbrough. London: Pushkin Press. 2025.

• WSJ review.
• New Yorker review.

Krajewski, Markus. “Intellectual Furniture: Elements of a Deep History of Artificial Intelligence.” Chapter 8 in Bajohr, Hannes, ed. Thinking with AI: Machine Learning the Humanities. First edition. London: Open Humanities Press, 2025. PDF.

‘Leibniz, LLull and the computational imagination’ Public Domain Review.

von Rauchhaupt, Ulf. “Leibniz’ Manuskripte: Schönschrift war nicht seine Sache”. Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 2016.

Wolfram, Stephen (2013), “Dropping In on Gottfried Leibniz,” Stephen Wolfram Writings.

From a single idea to many, to networks of linked ideas to reconfigured networks of knowledge.

This is a model of how students learn, devised by educational psychologist John B. Biggs and presented in his co-authored book, Teaching for quality learning at university: what the student does.

The key concept here, ‘structure of observed learning outcomes’ (SOLO), is summarised quite well in Wikipedia.

(Image source: Biggs and Tang, 2011: 91.)

To me this diagram clearly relates to the process of writing and developing short, clear notes.

From a single note to many, to networks of linked notes, to reconfigured networks of knowledge.

The first, prestructural stage, though, isn’t simply empty in my experience. Instead I begin from a whole heap of ideas and thoughts jumbled together like pick-up sticks.

Image source: commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File…

The problem is it’s too easy to stay in this prestructural stage, where thoughts and ideas are plenty, but they’re a jumbled mess. That’s because even when we make notes, our notes remain either poorly organised, or else well-organised, but set up according to some pre-established schema that hinders further conceptual development.

This metaphor of straightening and sorting a convoluted mess is also key for computer programming. For example, it’s evident on the cover of a well-known book, A Philosophy of Software Design, by John K. Ousterhout.

The first stage proper, the unistructural stage, in my estimation, relates to the capacity to create an atomic note, that is, a note that identifies, isolates and deals with just one thought, idea or concept. This is the key move, and the reason I like to refer to ‘atomic notes’ as the leading idea.

The second, multistructural stage refers to the ability to do this repeatedly, reliably, and systemically.

According to Biggs and Tang, these early stages involve increasing the quantity of knowledge. In my adaptation, this simply means making more atomic notes.

The third, relational stage involves the process of making meaningful links, which is at the heart of the Zettelkasten methodology, and is also crucial for wikis.

The fourth, extended abstract stage relates to the ability to reconfigure networks of concepts to create new knowledge and insight.

According to Biggs and Tang, these stages move beyond the quantitive acquisition of knowledge and towards the qualitative:

“This distinction between knowing more and restructuring parallels two major curriculum aims: to increase knowledge (quantitative: unistructural becoming increasingly multistructural); and to deepen understanding (qualitative: relational, then extended abstract). Teaching and assessment that focus only on the quantitative aspects of learning will miss the more important higher level aspects. Quantitative, Level 1, theories of teaching and learning address the first aim only, increasing knowledge.” (Biggs and Tang, 2011: 90)

This is how I move: from jumbled thoughts to clearer single notes, from single notes to many, from many to meaningful links, and then—if I keep going—to something new.

The SOLO taxonomy shows why this progression matters. It’s not just about gaining more knowledge, but about transforming it. Make modular notes, link them, and let new insights emerge. This isn’t just a way for me to remember what I’ve learned—it’s a way to learn what I didn’t know I knew.

And if it still feels like pick-up-sticks in your head, don’t worry, there’s time—the game is just beginning.

Now read: Atomic notes and the unit record principle.

Reference:

Biggs, J and Tang, C. (2011): Teaching for Quality Learning at University, (4th Edition. McGraw-Hill and Open University Press, Maidenhead). ISBN: 78-0-33-524275-7. PDF

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