Level Up Your Note-Taking with LLMs

Introduction

Note-taking is a deeply personal process. Whether you’re jotting thoughts in a leather-bound journal, typing in your favorite app, or collecting screenshots, the way you capture information reflects your unique thinking process. Large language models (LLMs) offer powerful ways to enhance these existing habits without forcing you to adopt an entirely new system or use specific tools. Let’s explore how LLMs can supercharge your current note-taking approach, regardless of your preferred method.

Getting Started: Tools and Key Terms

Before we dive into techniques, let's cover the basics. To use an LLM, you need a tool and a basic understanding of a few terms.

Key Terminology

• Large Language Model (LLM): Think of an LLM as a highly knowledgeable assistant you can chat with. You give it information and instructions, and it generates a human-like text response. The "brain" behind the tool is often called the model.
• Prompt: This is simply the question or instruction you give to the LLM. The quality of your prompt directly impacts the quality of the answer you get back.

Examples of LLM Tools You Can Use

You don't need to be a tech expert to use these. Many are as simple as a chat website.

• General Purpose LLMs: These are standalone chatbots you can access through your web browser. Examples include OpenAI's ChatGPT, Antrhopic’s Claude, Google's Gemini, and Microsoft’s Copilot.
• Note-Taking Apps with Built-In AI: Many popular apps are now integrating LLM features directly, making the process seamless. These are available in paid apps like Notion or Evernote.

Here is what a simple interaction might look like in a tool like ChatGPT:

Your Prompt:

LLM's Response:

Key Ways LLMs Can Transform Your Notes

Organizing and Connecting Ideas

One of the greatest challenges with notes is making connections between ideas captured at different times. LLMs excel at identifying relationships across your content.

What to try:

• Feed portions of your notes to an LLM and ask it to identify recurring themes or concepts.
• Request that the LLM create a topic map of your recent notes.
• Ask for connections between a new note and your existing knowledge base.

A Quick Tip: LLMs can be very wordy. To get a shorter response, be specific in your prompt. Instead of just pasting notes, try adding a clear instruction like, "Summarize these notes in 3 bullet points," or "Act as a concise editor and give me the key takeaway in one sentence." This is more effective than looking for a special "concise version" of a model, as it puts you in control of the output.

Extracting Insights and Summaries

Notes often contain valuable insights buried within verbose content. LLMs can highlight the key points to recall or take action on.

What to try:

• Ask an LLM to create a concise summary of lengthy notes.
• Request key takeaways from meeting notes or lecture notes.
• Have the LLM extract actionable items from your notes.

These suggestions also work well grouped into a single prompt. An example prompt might be: “I’ve pasted my notes from today’s conference session. Summarize the session, extract the 3-5 most important insights, and list any actions I should consider.”

Generating Questions from Your Content

LLMs can help you engage more deeply with your own notes by generating thoughtful questions.

What to try:

• Ask the LLM to generate Socratic questions about assumptions in your notes.
• Request questions that challenge your thinking or reveal potential gaps.
• Have it create review questions to reinforce learning from lecture notes.

Try the following prompt: “Based on these project notes, what questions should I be asking that I haven’t addressed yet?”

Practical Implementation

For Digital Note-Takers

If your notes already exist digitally, implementation is straightforward:

• Copy-Paste Approach: Select portions or all of your notes and paste them into your preferred LLM tool with a specific prompt.
• Deeper Integration: Some LLMs allow for “knowledge bases” where they can refer to information you’ve already supplied. You can also connect directly to third-party apps such as Google Drive. If no direct integration exists, you can maintain and upload a living document of your notes for any prompts.

For Handwritten Note-Takers

Physical note-takers can still leverage LLMs effectively:

• Photos: Use the app for your chosen LLM to upload pictures of key pages or slides rather than transcribing everything.
• Voice Dictation: Read important sections aloud to a digital notes app, word processing tool, or directly to an LLM.
• Hybrid Approach: Consider just transcribing topics you wish the LLM to interpret.
• Digital Handwriting: Use a tablet designed for handwriting, such as the Kindle Scribe, Supernote, reMarkable, or Rocketbook. These devices can be pricey, but all have ways to upload your handwritten notes to cloud services for easy use with LLMs.

Prompt Strategies for All

The quality of LLM assistance depends heavily on your prompts. Here are some templates to adapt:

• Analyze these notes and suggest an organizational structure.
• What connections exist between these ideas that I might have missed?
• If you were to add clarifying questions to these notes, what would they be?
• Combine these scattered notes and ideas into a cohesive narrative.
• What assumptions am I making in these notes that I should examine more closely? What are some possible challenges to these assumptions?

Wrap-Up

Keep Your Personal Thinking Process

LLMs should enhance your thinking, not replace it. Consider the following:

• Always review and evaluate LLM suggestions.
• Maintain a clear separation between your original thoughts and LLM contributions.
• Use LLMs mainly for organization, connecting ideas, and generating questions rather than for creating original content.

Privacy Considerations

Notes often contain sensitive information. Protect your privacy by:

• Redacting personal identifiers before processing with LLMs
• Using local or privacy-focused LLM options when available
• Being sensitive about which notes you share with external tools
• Being aware of the privacy policy of specific LLM tools to know how they use the data you provide

Use LLMs as Enhancers, Not Replacements

The goal is to augment your notes, not to delegate your thinking. LLMs work best when they:

• Enhance your note-taking experience
• Help you see patterns you might miss
• Offer alternative perspectives on your existing thoughts
• Provide structure to unorganized ideas
• Challenge your thinking with thoughtful questions

The beauty of an LLM-enhanced note-taking approach is that it works with your existing systems. Begin with a simple task: review a subset of your notes, ask an LLM to extract themes from a recent entry, or use it to generate questions about an important topic. Remember, the goal isn’t to create perfect notes, but to develop a system that helps you think better and increase your productivity. LLMs can be a powerful partner in this process, helping you extract more value from the notes you are already taking.