Are Long-form Note-taking Tools Better than Outliners?

Do you think in hierarchical or flowing streams of thought? Which one is better? This has often been debated in the Tools for Thought world. But there is no reason to debate, both methods are winners!

There are two types of people in this world, those who love outlines and those who don’t.

I am joking of course. That statement is too narrow, as most of us can take notes using outlines or without them. However, most prefer either one or the other. As a thinker and notetaker, which do you prefer: an outliner or a long-form editor?

In this article, I want to talk about the two types of “note-taking minds,” the advantages of each approach, and some general advice for us in the Tools for Thought community.

Let us Agree on Terminology

First, let us make sure we are using the same terms. In this article, we will refer to outliners and long-form editors.

Outliners

An Outliner is a note-taking tool that uses hierarchy to structure thought into logical groupings. As you notice in the next picture, this hierarchy is represented by indenting thoughts and grouping them together at various levels. You will note that level 1, or text with no indentation, is a primary thought. Under a thought at level 1 is another thought indented, positioned at a second level. This means the level 2 thoughts are related to their parent or level 1.

These levels use bullets and indentation to visually catch our eye, along with vertical lines to show the levels.

This creates a visual structure of thoughts, showing their relationship from one to another. For example, in the picture, We see 20 rules for formulating knowledge. Each rule has thoughts under it, providing more description of its parent thought.

For many note-takers, this way of grouping ideas makes it easier to organize their thoughts and visualize connections.

Popular outliners includes Tana, Logseq, Remnote, Workflowy and Roam Research.

Long-form

However, not everyone likes to think with hierarchical outlines. Actually, a greater number of note-takers prefer to express their thoughts in a long-form way, as depicted in the following image.

You may notice that this picture and the previous are the same content, but the layout differs. Long-form does not often have any indentation, though it can use indented bullets for making lists. Headings such has H1, H2, H3 are used for the logical grouping of thoughts.

Long-form writing is the type of note-taking you would do with Microsoft Word or Google Docs. These tools allow for a free flow of thoughts, with thoughts usually broken into paragraphs and grouped into sections using headers.

Many find this form of note-taking to be more natural, especially if they have for years used these tools.

Popular long-form note-taking tools include Obsidian, Craft, Capacities, Bear, and Evernote.

So the question is, which is better? I have used both note-taking forms, and today, I am pleased to reveal the answer to this question that has plagued thinkers for centuries. Drum roll please …

No victor, everyone is a winner!

Neither outlining nor long-form note-taking is superior. Each approach basically accomplishes the same job, achieving similar results, but takes a different path to get to the desired results.

It comes down to the way your mind works. Some love deep structure, while others like flows of streaming thought. Neither is more effective. It is totally up to you as an individual and how your mind works.

You are likely an outliner if you like:

• to visualize textual structure
• make lists
• group related things
• your notes are mostly your thoughts than they are “writing” for others to consume
• your thoughts are atomic, as blocks (or nodes) in an outline are granular in nature
• you view your notes as a database, as outliners are typically graph databases

You are likely a long-form writer if you like:

• an uninterrupted flow of thought
• don’t want to stop to think about how things relate together; just keep moving forward
• easily mentally visualize the output of what you are writing as something to be printed on paper or published online
• prefer traditional formatting metaphors such as headings and sections
• don’t like to be “bogged down” or slowed down during input, having to deal with indenting and unindenting

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Opinions Vary

Note-taking is very much about externalizing our thoughts onto paper. But since I am personally an outliner, I struggle with creating a mental representation of the thoughts in my brain, and an outline helps me to break it down visually. While I think many long-form writers have a mental picture of what they want and just what to express it.

These, of course, are not scientific conclusions, just observations from working with 100’s note-takers over the years.

Just to show the variety of thinking, notice what some of our fellow note-takers commented:

“Long form content is more for freeform writing. I’ve stopped using outlines because they are too much friction for having to press tab and shift-tab to change bullet structure.” — Omarali Koy

“A good text has a clear structure — and I find building structure easier in a tool built for outlining. The longer I expect the final text to be, the more I benefit from using an outliner first. But outlining — the process — can be done in both a tool dedicated to outlining and in an ordinary text editor. The difference between an outliner and long-form editor is only how you visually represent the hierarchies. Either as indentation or header level in Markdown.” — Anders Thoresson

“As a person with ADHD I find outlining much better for writing and digesting my notes for some reason. I feel like my working memory is very short and I cannot hold a lot of information at once. So having discrete blocks of info is a nice way to help focus on a small bit of info at a time and then drill down on the points I wish. In general, structure is good for adhd folks.” — Johny Deluxe

The Hybrid Thinker

You may be both an outliner and a long-form writer! Yes, while there are two types of minds in my experience, some individuals work equally well in both note-taking environments and like switching between them. For example, an outliner might be a great way to “brainstorm with yourself,” break ideas down into their most fundamental components, organizing your thinking in the process. Then follow that up with a long-form writing tool to write those ideas into something publishable to be usable by a wider audience.

Notice how Kate Wilson Foy approaches this: “I would say from my own experience it depends on the note-taker herself, the source of the note-taking, the intention of the final product from the note-taking. Ultimately neither outlining nor long-form/free-form is better than the other. It just depends. I should add it also depends on the efficacy and design of the tool being used. I like to use and recommend to my students that they outline for essays. With Roam and Tana you can search and drag and drop under your outline template/headings. I then transfer across to Google Docs/WordPress to finish off for publication or submission.”

She is not alone. Bill Petro, a prolific author, has for decades used a hybrid approach, even when working on paper decades ago. He says: “When I was at university, I could not write a paper without outlining. My freshman papers were two pages long, and my thesis was over 20 pages.” As computers became mainstream, he continued right along with that approach but advancing his technique, he states: “I always at least organize my thoughts ahead of time — and that is why I love Tools for Thought. For me, mind mapping is a great first step in visualizing my thoughts. The extent to which a graph/mindmap can easily be converted to an outline is a happy day!”

These experienced writers have learned that both tools can play a role in their research and writing workflows. Outliners are great for collecting, grouping, and summarizing ideas, while long-form writing tools are effective in shaping those ideas into something digestible by others or even to our future selves.

I also found it very interesting what Lasse Pedersen said to me, that he wishes Tools for Thought would support both writing modes, giving us a way to switch between them.

The Two-Week Challenge

My research and personal experimentation with both note-taking forms over the last two years has convinced me that the abovementioned approaches work equally well. Still, it all comes down to the type of mind, or personal preferences, of the person taking the notes.

It’s not important which one you use, but I believe and recommend that it is important that you experiment with both approaches. Why?

First, you can’t judge a book by its cover. In other words, you can’t say you don’t like outliners if you have not tried to use one for a few weeks to give it a shot. Likewise, you can’t say you are not a long-form writer if you have not given it a try.

I recommend experimenting for at least two weeks with each type of tool. Two weeks is an expensive “cost” in the use of time, but it’s just about enough time, in my experience, to really see the pros and cons of each approach. It has to hurt a little for you to know you have given enough time to the experiment.

No pain, no gain!

Another benefit of this experiment is to gain insight into how other minds work. While you may not like outlining in the end, your respect will grow for those who prefer outliners because you will see some advantages. Likewise, those who don’t like long-form writing eventually do need to print or publish something, so a functional knowledge of using long-form writing tools such as Obsidian will eventually pay off.

If this idea of exploring and experimenting with note-taking intrigues you, check out Anders Thoressonarticle “Tinkering with tools is not necessarily procrastination.”

In this article, I focused on what I consider two of the primary methods of note-taking I see in mainstream apps. But other approaches might be less known and show signs of new possibilities for the future; for example, Napkin or Ginko uses a card metaphor for notes or visual tools like Xmind for mind mapping.

Demystifying Obsidian’s Outlining Superpowers

Peace brother, peace!

The one thing I have learned, though, is that we need to respect one another. Get over the thought that your personal preference for note-taking is superior to those of others. Outliners are not better than long-form writing tools. Long-form writing tools are not better than outliners. These tools just reflect the differences in how our minds work.

We need to respect one another

I must admit in the past, I strongly advocated that everyone should use an outliner, as it is my personal preference; my mind works better with outliners. While I still encourage people to try them, I no longer insist that my approach is the best. Instead, it’s the best for me, and that’s what counts.

Thank you for reading this article. Please check out more of my work at https://tfthacker.com