tl;dr Stream-of-Thought Note Taking is an opinionated approach to brain-dumping thoughts on paper to aid the process of clarifying your own ideas.
Table of Contents
The Power of Deletion
One of my favourite Yuval Noah Harari quotes from his interview with Lex Fridman is on the power of the delete button:
I trust myself that I have, to some extent, the ability to press the delete button. The most important button on the keyboard is delete.
In fact, the sentence you’re reading right now is a result of having pressed the delete button more times than I’d like to admit.
Deletion is very powerful, and necessary, but it can hinder the process of writing and clarifying your own thoughts if introduced too early in the process.
I don’t know much about sculpting, but can appreciate a good Greek sculpture when I see one, so will use that to draw an analogy:
Before a sculpture is polished or textured, it needs to be blocked, modeled, and carved.
Writing is no different.
Tools for Modeling Thoughts
There is an abundance of tools and options for modeling our ideas, thoughts and words.
I don’t recall where I first heard this quote but I remind myself of it as I work with different people under different circumstances:
Introverts think to talk. Extroverts talk to think.
Throughout the last couple of decades, you could talk to those around you, yourself, or even a rubber duck. You could write your ideas down on paper or a digital device. You could also speak into an audio recorder and play it back later.
Today, I find myself regularly using tools that weren’t available just a few years ago. I go on walks talking to OpenAI’s advanced voice mode. I use a reMarkable tablet as a replacement for paper. I’ve also, on a few occasions, brain-dumped 30+ minute monologues into a AI-enabled note taker so I can play it back, get a transcript and review the key takeaways without any extra work. I use fireflies.ai, but there are a handful of tools providing a similar service.
Can you get to the point?
If you’ve made it this far, you’re probably tired of the philosophical life lessons and want me to get to the point. Hopefully you enjoyed the long-winded introduction though :)
The process I’m about to describe is something I’ve been introducing more regularly in the following situations:
The early stages of thinking through a problem
Learning a new subject, domain or tool
Aimlessly wondering around on a topic I’m unfamiliar with
Managing a mind full of overwhelming thoughts & ideas that I need to organize
Reviewing something that I’ll need to organize and provie concise feedback on
Stream-of-Thought Note Taking
Stream-of-Thought (SoT) note-taking aims to model ideas that can later be crafted and polished. The goal is just to get the raw ingredients on paper.
It biases towards fast, concise, deliberate written bullet points. It prevents run-on long-winded sentences, limits double-takes and does not allow deletion.
I decided to turn this into a game. Here are the rules:
Enabled controls:
Everything must be a bullet point
Bullet points must be 100 characters or less
Enter: Start a new thought or idea (i.e. a bullet point)
Indent (push): Provide additional details related to the previous idea
Unindent (pop): Start a new idea unrelated to the previous point
Disabled controls:
Up: You cannot go back and edit a previous bullet point
Backspace/delete: You cannot edit or delete anything that was written down
Thinking a thought that’s not written down
Over-thinking before writing something down
Grammar or spell-check
At first glance, this might seem like making a bullet point list. The difference lies in the mindset shift when you understand who the target audience is.
🫵 You 🫵
These bullet points aren’t meant for anyone else. They don’t need to be presented or grammatically correct. No one other than you will ever read them.
The goal is to exhaust everything you might be thinking until you’ve achieved a clear mind. Once it’s all on paper, you can move on. You could:
Organize it: Turn the rough ideas into real content.
Summarize it: Get an LLM to summarize to organize it for you.
Leave it: Move on and let your brain do any of the necessary post-processing.
The following is a simple and contrived example where I re-enacted some of the notes I put together before writing this blogpost. When I cover more complex topics (e.g. researching Auth0 and Envoy proxy last week), the final result looks different.
The beauty of this method is its broad applicability to anything you need to think through.
Extending to Chain-of-Thought & LLMs
I admit that the name for this method was inspired by the Chain of Thought methodology implemented in OpenAI’s o1 model. In every other way, it’s unrelated.
Stream-of-Thought is meant for brain dumping, not reasoning. It aims to support thinking through problems and learning, not finding solutions. The target user is a human, not an LLM or AI agent.
Could it be extended to LLMs? Probably. I’ll make sure to post about it here if I ever look into it. You should subscribe if you don’t want to miss out ;)