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Prefer referencing over remembering
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 archiving or creating related notes.
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, enabling 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.
Examples:
- On a Unix-based environment, for example, has the manual pages with
manand you can search throughapropos. This is especially needed if you're using BSD-based operating systems such as FreeBSD and OpenBSD. - Texinfo and tldr pages.
- roam:GNU Emacs has a great built-in help system. (See Using the built-in help system of Emacs for more details.)
If the system has a way of referencing something (other than the internet), use it to your advantage as you may find something valuable.