What is note taking system?

Note taking system is a concept in personal epistemology: Every distinct idea needs a unique, stable address — without one, you cannot reference it, link to it, or build on it reliably.

Example: Your team has three Confluence pages titled 'Architecture Decision.' One is about migrating to microservices (2023), one is about the event-driven rewrite (2024), and one is about the AI integration layer (2025). Someone links to 'Architecture Decision' in a Slack thread. Which one? Nobody knows. The conversation derails into ten minutes of 'which doc do you mean?' If each had a unique identifier — ADR-001, ADR-002, ADR-003 — the link is unambiguous, the reference is instant, and the conversation stays on substance.

This concept is part of Phase 2 (Atomicity and Decomposition) in the How to Think curriculum, which builds the epistemic infrastructure for atomicity and decomposition.