still working on it :V

Home About N1S
←

How to take note like Leonardo Davinci, I guess

tag: essay Leonardo da Vinci study
date: 2025-12-09

The problem with note-taking

when we are students, we most likely are forced to take notes in a very, tradition, booring school way, it have taught us bad habbits about note taking, making it forgetful and rigid.

I hate taking notes, I had always avoid writing because I once saw it as booring and unecessary, but there is a genius, whom work change my mind.

How Leonardo da Vinci take-notes?

Unlike the tradition way of copy whatever the teacher told you to, Leonardo note-taking was base on his curiousity, when he was a young boy, he used to wander in nature with his father's paper and noted down anything that interested him. This create a brilliant habbit, a joy in note-taking, because it was curiosity driven.

Most of his notes are really chaotic, it follow no particular order, the images are placed where he pleased and texts cover every square of the paper. But I think that is actually a good way to note-down, because we literally pouring our mind on to the paper, capturing any ideas or knowledges, freeing up spaces in the brain, this work extremely well with the CODE system by Tiago Forte, because its the most natural way of capturing one thoughts and ideas.

He would also writed down questions, like how a bird fly, how water move, how light interact with the surroundings,... and relentlessly find the answer, he was hunger to know deep and vast about the subject he was learning.

And as you can see, he also draw in his note, we human tend to remember information much better if they comes in both visuals and texts, maybe that is why we forget notes in school so quickly but always remember that meme a friend sent you.

How I take-notes

Aplying the same principles that Leonardo use while taking notes, I took notes base on my level of curiosity, the flow of my mind, and a bit of chaos too. But not field in this era could be noted down on papers, something like Programming required us to copy the whole line of codes somewhere to store and copy it later when its needed, imagine doing that on paper, thats right, you cant! So I divided note-taking in 2 areas.

Currently Im using Obsidian for its many amazing features, I captured anything on a daily basis and sort them at the end of the day into the PARA system I made base on Tiago Forte ideas. Krita for drawing the visuals and making mind maps and MsPaint as alternative to Krita

Stuff like Engineer, Chemistry, Natural Science, To-do lists,... will all be written down on paper, any kind of pen or paper or notebook is fine, but my favorites are the combo black inks + small size unruled notebook.

share this post if you are interested, thx for reading :>