# Prefer referencing over remembering

Date: 2021-04-06 22:25:17 +08:00Date modified: 2022-04-01 16:26:08 +08:00

It makes for less cognitive overhead. This is especially true in the age of internet where information is widely distributed. Even without the internet, however, it is still useful to find ways to refer to things or store them locally whether by roam:Archiving or Note-taking.

This doesn't mean that you should avert remembering, that would be silly as Understanding comes first from memory. You're still trying to understand a concept, after all. The gist of it is knowing the basics of a concept and its relations to others, Most of the work is done from smaller amount of effort. This enables you to come up with a more effective search query. If nothing else, you could take advantage of the help system insisted by the tool.

Here are some examples:

- Leave links to official documentations and guides instead of writing detailed notes for yourself.

- On a Unix-based environment, for example, has the manual pages with `man` and you can search through `apropos`. This is especially needed if you're using BSD-based operating systems such as FreeBSD and OpenBSD.

- Texinfo and tldr pages.

- Remembering to use the help system of the tools if available. For example, Using the built-in help system of Emacs or Neovim help system.

- Add a desktop search engine for your digital library.

- Referring to official documentation and tools (e.g., DevDocs, Zeal).

- Making full use of search tools from programs such as the command palette in roam:Visual Studio Code, help system in Microsoft Word, and dynamic menus in roam:Blender.

## Backlinks

- Note-taking
- Information literacy
- Create examples of ranking complexity when documenting your project
- Make a style guide for consistency
- We know more compared to what we understood
- Examples and stories are more memorable than explanations
- Specific use cases are better than step-by-step tutorials
- Problems with simpler tools
- How I approach note-taking