[j0hnml]

The biggest issue I have with note taking is not the medium or app, it’s the fact that I would often write something and never look at the note again. This essentially made the act of note writing, at least for me, futile since I rarely remember my notes as I’m writing them.

The best solution for this, I’ve found, is to still take notes on the bigger picture but then to add the smaller details, definitions, concepts to Anki [1], which literally forces me to review those smaller details again and again until they “stick”. Doing so then makes me want to revisit the notes to get the full picture. As a result, my memorization of all kinds of things has greatly improved, which makes future research and documentation all the more better. It’s a very good positive reinforcing learning method and I recommend it to anyone who may have similar issues.

[1] https://apps.ankiweb.net/

[kaliszad]

For me, if I have some more long-running projects or ideas I might return to and e.g. give a presentation about them at some point, I find using https://orgpad.com an alternative. It tries to be a general tool that helps you connect the dots in a graph and that helps structuring information more like your brain does instead of forcing the linear approach of lists or longer texts. It doesn't force a scheme or anything like that on you and it can quite easily be turned into presentations e.g. like this conference talk on Graph isomorphism: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gu8P7UwHhAA Btw. Orgpad is also a project, that is completely written in Clojure/ ClojureScript. (Full disclosure I have consulted and still consult the developers on orgpad.com infrastructure.)

I the end, if you have the wrong tool or the wrong method for anything you are going to have a bad time even if the tool or method is useful in a different setting. An analogy: You can hardly unscrew something using a hammer unless you want to have more problems then before.

[GekkePrutser]

Orgpad looks really good.

I always find this kind of mindmap stuff to go beyond my screen size too quickly though.. I'd love to have something like this in VR so I can walk around and write stuff everywhere, move things etc, just like I have my walls covered in stuff like those stalkers in horror movies :D

VR would be great for this I think. I might even make an app like that.

[barrenko]

For me the biggest point of writing is to remember and then safely forget about stuff.

[GekkePrutser]

Me too!!!

I find since I moved from Tomboy to OneNote that my memory is significantly worse.

Tomboy didn't support pics so I was more tuned in to meetings as I was actively processing info in order to note it down in my own words.

Now in Outlook I often tune out when I feel something is less relevant, and I lazily take screenshots "in case I need to look at it later". Then, when something comes up that is more relevant to me I'm tuned out and need to catch up. I also remember information much less long because it never really entered my brain at all.

So yeah it definitely helps for that purpose, at least for me.

[codpiece]

...write something and never look at it again...

I recently started working with a new client. 7 years ago and many companies past, the now-CEO asked me to set up a system for her and I took ample, random meeting notes. I still have those notes as plain text in a folder, organized by year.

When the new client asked for a design proposal and said they're getting resistance from the C-suite, I could pull up those notes and make some seemingly omniscient recommendations quite quickly.

I tried too many of the note taking services, but really, a plain text note with a YYYY-MM-DD title and stored in a backed up directory is near-perfect and ultra-portable.

[Cthulhu_]

Same; some exceptions are when I write things down to turn into a presentation or blog post, or if it's like notes / actions from a meeting.

That said, for me writing things down does help me organize my thought process.

Another thing that I do think is beneficial but directly work-related is writing ADR's (https://github.com/joelparkerhenderson/architecture_decision... basically technical documentation, one file per decision (architectural, language, library, etc); I can start those as a stream-of-consciousness ramble, then add some research / alternatives, and finally do some formatting and commit it into my project's repository.

From there it'll take on a life of its own, I'll reconsider things down the line (most recently, replacing Reach with React Router because the former is end-of-life and in retrospect had some quirks I ran into). My hope is that when more people join my project or take over, they'll be able to read it and understand where things have come from, and then add their own ideas to it.

Of course, they'll likely opt to just ignore it entirely because tl;dr show me the code.