Process Matters

Writing notes by hand and rephrasing them in my own words is more valuable to me than relying on AI tools.

I’ve been taking an online class from Sara Soueidan called Practical Accessibility. It’s great, I highly recommend it. But I don’t want to review the course right here, I want to talk about how I’ve been taking the class.

The process generally looks like this:

1. I watch a video lesson. These are generally between ten and thirty minutes long. I am not taking notes at this point.
2. Having been through the material once, I go through the lesson again. Soueidan provides a transcript of the video, so I’ll refer to that as well as the video. Now I take notes. But I do it in longhand, on paper.
3. I’ll look through some of the additional resources and queue these up to read later in Readwise Reader.
4. Once I’ve been through several chapters, I re-write and organize my notes in my own words as if I am writing for someone else. These are typed and stored digitally so I can search them later.
5. At any point in this process I might stop everything and put the material I’m learning into some practical use, either in a demo somewhere or fixing a real problem.

This is a slow way to go.

LLMs could “help” me at certain points along the way. It could take notes for me while I watch the video, it could summarize the transcripts, it could write a blog post from each group of notes. It would be much faster.

I would also have become a passive participant. Listening, reading, hand-writing, and rephrasing are all activities that engage my senses and my brain in ways that make it more likely to remember the material. The LLMs can produce similar artifacts, but they can’t have the same effects.

I take many notes I never look at again. LLMs could do that for me, of course. But the difference is when I take a note I am more likely to remember it. The need for the note evaporates; I have already realized its value. An LLM taking a note produces a similar artifact, but it does not produce the same effect.

LLMs tempt us into thinking the entire value of work is in the production of an artifact. But for many kinds of work it is the process has meaning. In the case of note-taking, most of the benefit comes from the doing. Not the having.