As I've mentioned elsewhere, I have a fairly straightforward "personal knowledge management" (PKM) methodology.
1. Capture: every interesting idea that I think up or read is immediately stored in Google Keep (on mobile or laptop). It can be very rough at this point, the goal is simply to not forget.
2. Transcribe & Organize: every weekend, I go through the notes I accumulated during the week. It tends to be between 10 and 30 notes. Sometimes the note is "read this article" or "catch up on all newsletters", so understanding a single note can take over an hour. On some tough weekends the process takes an entire day, but that is invariably a day where I feel like I learned a ton. Once the note is cleaned up (transcribed), I feel like I understand it. At this point I rarely forget it - it has been absorbed into my brain. The final step here is "categorizing" the note. I classify it using OneNote with tabs like "Clinical psychology" (nested under "Psychology") or "Investment management" (nested under "Finance") or "Math" or "Physics". This way, in the future, I don't have a million notes scattered around, but one clear place I know where to look. On average, this process takes 2-4 hours per weekend. I never accumulate bookmarks, Google Keep notes or unread emails more than a week to prevent existential dread.
3. Revisit: generally, people recommend you revisit your notes from time to time. I almost never do this. But if I ever am thinking about "Marketing" or "Sociology", I have an immense, high SNR repository of everything I've ever found valuable on the topic. I've done this for software interviews and it's been incredibly helpful.
Overall, I attribute this system to making me much smarter. It has been an invaluable investment.
I like the idea of daily notes even better when you combine them with your todo lists at the same time. That concept is called interstitial notes [0], and it's used in several software tools like Roam Research [1]. I use Drift [2] which has a interstitial notes plugin which has proven to work very well for me.
Same system, except for step 1 I simply email me@onenote.com [1] from gmail and it goes in the "Quick Notes" section.
I like it especially when it's a single URL as OneNote automatically appends a snapshot/screenshot of the page in the note itself, so even if coming back to it much much later, less risk of the original webpage being 404 not found.
Google Keep has a limit with how large notes can be, and how many unarchived notes can dictate app performance.
It's neat you simply decided to use it to hold on to things for about a week, prefering instead to store them in OneNote (or anything you want), a more stable product. Thanks for this advice!
This sounds like a good idea if you are on top of things. I was going to push back by saying it almost sounds like a chore, but a lot of the reason notes are jotted down is in fact to learn. So this process makes a lot of sense in retrospect.
I use paper. Digital notes are great if you need them to be available everywhere, or edit them time and time again, but paper is still significantly better for me.
I keep my recipes in Keep and on my personal website, because I often amend them. However I discovered that printed recipes are much more pleasant to use.
Likewise, I'd much rather have a dirty notebook to sketch and write on when I'm working in the garage, or anywhere that's not my desk
For most things, paper works best for me for capture, and then the additional step of transcribing / summarizing into my corpus of org files gives me a chance to structure and review.
But I have a notebook and a (fountain!) pen on my desk all day long, right next to my keyboard and mouse.
It's just my opinion, but nothing beats paper. I have tried keeping note files on my computer, and I've tried using tablets to jot things down (I have spent so much money trying to get this option to work). Paper just works better. I found that I like to scribble and underline, and draw. I'm just not an organized thinker. Forcing things to be in a list don't work for my thoughts and even drawing on an iPad etc. seems too constricting. The precision of paper just isn't there.
I graduated college in 1984, so my note taking was entirely pen & paper. What's the norm in college nowadays? Is everyone banging away on laptops? That seems like it would be distracting to me.
If it is laptops, what software do people use? Simple text editor, Word...?
I can’t use pen and paper because I’m surrounded by nosy people who don’t know to respect my privacy. And if I put some kind of lock on a physical diary or something, they complain that I am hiding something.
how do you find anything later? It's a simple capture method, but it doesn't work well for a use case like "oh I talked to that user one time, let me search for them in my notes"
I am very surprised nobody has yet mentioned Notational Velocity, or better yet the fork nvALT [1].
I hate any _friction_ to writing a note. I just want to get it out of my brain (or find it, if a previous thought) as quickly as possible.
With nvALT you start typing and it is searching immediately, but if there is no match and you hit enter you are now writing a new note.
Each note is stored as a text file, and so is findable via other search methods on your machine, and is easy to sync via your chosen technology.
I have tried a variety of approaches as I love the idea of linking between notes, and adding images, and tagging and all that stuff. But in reality all of that adds friction, and so prevents me from making the note (which is the critical part).
I create "notes" directory on my desktop at work, and each day I start a new text file named $DATE_$JIRATASKNO_$DECRIPTION.txt
Whenever I copy-paste stuff that might be useful I leave it there. Stuff like stacktraces, class:line_number when I was searching where something happens, links to webpages related to the task.
I was keeping a notepad tab open at all times anyway to keep context when I was doing something (otherwise I forget when I'm back from lunch and have to search again). So this is only making this context permanent and searcheable.
Then when I do something 3 months later and get a stacktrace I vaguely remember or other problem that I can imagine what the keyword would be - I just grep in that directory and find all the context needed, including jira task, commits, all related webpages, etc.
I also write short free-text notes there, but these are usually very short and less important than the copy-pasted stuff.
I feel like Joplin (https://joplinapp.org/) should also get mentioned: storing notes in plain Markdown files, optionally synced via e.g. Dropbox. Bonus points for also having mobile apps that sync with the same backend.
I looked for many alternatives to taking notes and Joplin ended up being what I went with, it's fantastic. I wrote a small script to export my notes to a static website because I figured someone could use the knowledge, even if it's just a brain dump:
I also had an idea to make a site where you could take notes and have them be auto-published (like the above, but as a service), to create a community of random knowledge dumps. Think of a Wikipedia, but made of personal sites and not as rigorous, with a very "personal Web 1.0 website" feel, but talking to a few friends it didn't seem like they saw much point in it.
What turned me off about Joplin was how awkward it was to link to other pages. I might have missed something, but by default I think that takes creating the other page first, then manually copying its id -- way too much clicking, and breaks the focus on what you're writing.
In the end, I ended up using Obsidian (https://obsidian.md). While typing (even in an outside editor), I can just go [[random reference]] -- and that will turn into a link, even if that page doesn't exist yet. When I eventually get to creating the page, it will already have back links from all the places it is used (something else I think Joplin doesn't have).
* If I live in Markdown, I want to edit it WYSIWYG. Maybe that's wrong, but I don't want to live in .md code mode (for this reason, I miss Evernote). I author in Typora, but I don't want to keep notes in MD.
* It's sync-ing options don't map to the most used syncing tech on desktops these days. I'd have to pay for Dropbox (given my current ecosystem) just to use it to sync.
* I want folders and sub-folders. Folders and tags don't work for me.
* I wish these systems had a built-in journal mode, like Roam.
Reposting my setup here. It's not the best setup but it's based on trying different things. Might be useful for those who are trying to figure out their own setup:
=======
Just another opinion on the balanced note taking method:
I think org-mode solves almost all offline note-taking requirements
* org-roam makes it super-easy to link notes
* emacs as an editor is as usable as any other editor
* Rich media is possible and easy to do in org-mode. Attach a snapshot, embed a video file
* Code with documentation is a feature not available in most other note taking methods/apps. It's possible to run code snippets and add comments, documentation about them in the same space
* Latex support is advanced. Inline equations work seamlessly
* Search support is advanced
Drawbacks:
* One of the main drawbacks is that all your notes end up offline. This was a deal-breaker for me. ox-hugo helps in publishing your notes to a (private) static site where it can be searched, viewed but not edited on the fly
* Publishing through ox-hugo is separate from maintaining a backup/sync of your notes in /org/ format. You'll have to do this separately through Dropbox/GDrive/etc
* A backup of your org notes is not usable until you set up your emacs environment and download all your notes
One drawback you omitted is that you have to set it up and learn how to use it before you reach a point where it competes with other less sophisticated solutions.
I try to keep some notes.org file and use it regularly, but I'm just faster with unix tools and vim, so it's hard to make the upfront investment in learning emacs and start somewhat from scratch. I think there's also some kind of discoverability issue with org-mode features: I don't really know which features should I look into to improve my setup further and have something really nice instead of a glorified markdown.
One day I'll just read the manual from start to finish and try to start properly from there, one day.
I'm still figuring out my own ways. Right now, lots of text/markdown files. I really like "My productivity app for the past 12 years has been a single .txt file"[1].
I'm working on something like this (macOS/iOS), although it is not quite ready yet.
Notes can have tags and attributes so you could have attributes per note like: topic=rocketscience, semester=fall2020. Later you could say: "sort all my notes by semester and then group by topic" or if you change your mind, set up a second view for "all notes grouped by topic then by semester".
If you're interested, feel free to contact me through the site (kitestack.com/lnotes). I'd love to learn more about how you currently organize your notes.
Do you mean browsing the notes in chronological order AND in thematic order (something like an outline?) in the SAME TIME?
I'm currently doing a re-designing of my DocxManager (outliner based on Word) and you did inspire me!
you can do this all in bash. you could set up a function that takes the text of your note as input along with your metadata and makes a timestamp. then you just index your notes however you'd like.
I get why folks like paper, but I'd lose it, it'd get spilled on (because kids). That, and it's just so easy to get buried in piles of paper… so I do everything digital. I even work to stay as paperless as possible.
I'd like to make a plug for Standard Notes.
standardnotes.org
I don't work for them. I get nothing from mentioning them.
It's cross-platform, and you have the option of encrypting things. It's my go-to place for notes.
Does anybody have a counter argument for just using macOS notes if you exclusively use Apple products? They sync nicely with my devices and make note taking pretty simple for me.
I’ve been using macOS notes for a couple of years for daily note taking, because it is just so convenient with cloud sync. I have been planning to transcribe everything I want to keep into a git repo of .md files, for exactly the lockin reasons the other replies have mentioned. I hope to settle on macOS notes for daily stuff and transcribing to a repo for long term.
This would give me a function to create a new, dated notes doc and open with my editor anywhere from the terminal. And then I'd just use standard tools for searching, instead of using a script.
(FYI: acme-open is my wrapper to acme, and I keep a link to the actual iCloud Drive directory in my home folder.)
It's a proprietary note ecosystem, so if you ever try to leave (or not use iCloud, which iOS/macOS note syncing depends on), it will be very difficult to regain control of your notes. I did this and it took a lot of effort, involved parsing out some protocol buffers, and losing a lot of formatting. I now just use markdown text files, never going back to that.
There are iOS shortcuts now which can let you do this programmatically, but you also lose formatting, and its a hack.
For me, I go even simpler. I have a single file in my Dropbox folder that I’ve been using for over a decade. To open it, I just use Alfred (and before that, quicksilver). I pop new stuff at the top. Every now and again I search for something way back when.
I went from paper to a tablet for a year (as a challenge), ended up back on paper. My boss got me into using nicer notebooks, and I've been doing it for years (about 6).
I then switched to MD files, eventually ending up using Stackedit extensively for a while similar to the tablet effort.
Now, between work, hobbies, being a DM; I've given up and spent some time in One Note... and now that's where I've
migrated everything. I'm always interested in how others do this in case they've figured something out.
I still use a paper notebook as a personal journal, important notes, etc. I also still use a notepad for those daily notes / thinking on paper that you can throw away at the end of the day.
I personally use a combination of Notion for collaborative notes/tasks/whatever, bullet journal for daily notes/tasks, and a markdown based zettelkasten for knowledgebase-type stuff. There's a fair amount of duplicated information, but both Notion and the Zettelkasten or easily searchable, and it's trivial to copy-paste between them.
I really like the paper method for day-to-day stuff, but for research or work-related notes, I simply can't write fast enough to keep up (particularly if I'm trying to capture info from a meeting), and the lack of searchability means I can never fully rely on paper notes as a means of retaining information long-term.
I just use rednotebook on Linux and it's very good.
I have daily notes, a small calendar to navigate to dates in the past/future, a tag cloud populated with words I've written the most, and a search bar that I don't know how it works but usually finds what I'm looking for.
It's no fancy system but it's immediate, no dumb nerding and dumb wheel reinvention needed.
For the past couple of months I have been using org-roam [0] for this and I find it quite effective. Just found out that I have 87 different notes lying around:
I use markdown + git as the core note components (organization methodologies layered on top, dealer's choice), wanted to share this Android neat app for those who do the same: https://github.com/GitJournal/GitJournal
I have been thinking of converting from OneNote to markdown. One thing that has been keeping me from making the switch is search, especially from mobile. Any one knows of any solution that is capable of searching through all the markdown notes similar to how OneNote does from mobile? I am thinking of hosting the notes in a RPi with Gitea or Nextcloud and access it using VPN (using Rpi as a trial and later move on to a dedicate mini PC if I end up liking this setup).
also a markdown + git user here. I just open it up like it's a code repo in VSCode.
(for anyone interested, "Working Copy" iOS app is great for this. It's a git client for iOS, and its contents are even accessible in the Files app. Can't speak to Android use, but looks like parent comment has recs)
For years, I experimented with paper, org-mode, text notes (Sublime Text, TextEdit) to manage my thoughts and life. What I ended up with was folder after folder of disorganized notes, files like daily.txt, todo.txt, log.rtf that ended up disgusting me.
I would so strongly recommended everyone reading this to check out Roam Research (https://roamresearch.com/). At it's core, it's a collection of text notes in the cloud. Just open it up and start typing your thoughts down. No folders or hierarchy. The key enabler is that is that you can link together different pages. Roam Research helps you make so much better sense of your thoughts - I use it personally to plan out goals, projects, brainstorm research, track meetings/dates, and keep a daily log of everything I go through. I can't recommend it enough - even my dad started using it everyday after I showed him.
Just try it out and starting typing a few notes. It'll start off as a simple graph for text notes / documents, but there are so many more powerful features to discover, too.
EDIT: Roam is a cloud-based service, notes are not end-to-end encrypted. It doesn't bother me, but if it bothers you, there are many open source, offline-first alternatives that the community has created (emacs-org, Foam, Obsidian, etc.). I am in no way sponsored by Roam, I don't know anybody at Roam, I don't run any of those bullshit Roam courses, and Roam is expensive as fuck, but let me tell you this: there are so many features and UI optimizations that make Roam have the best user experience. Don't compromise your time and user experience.
After exactly year of using it, I moved back to Notion, even though I have Roam for free. Thanks to Roam's hype they have backlinks now (+ it's possible now to create new page in another page/db with "[[", that will leave only link/mention to that new page), which means both structured and flat zettelkasten-style notes (done in some master notes DB) are possible, plus regular DBs and all of the other cool stuff. This is a complete solution for me, all of my notes are much better organised now. And yes, I know, Roam has much more features than backlinks, I was using all of them, queries and block references, and sidebar, and ..., but for real work I'm not missing anything else than a sidebar. Sidebar is the best part of Roam IMO, even Obsidian with their multipane can't compete with that. With Notion I can open new tab in browser or new window in desktop app and keep it side-by-side and it's ok too, not as good and fast experience as with Roam, but good enough.
I've built a similar system from scratch - also using this Dropbox daily notes file technique - except my script generates folders and sub folders for each year (YYYY) and each month within each year (YYY-MM) whenever I instantiate a file on a certain day. Makes long term management much easier than having thousands of files in one folder. Same grep principles apply (and I use hashtags within my notes to track keywords).
notes hello world appends the text to the YYYY-MM.txt dated file
echo cool | notes same as above except you can pipe in text
notes opens the YYYY-MM.txt file in your configured $EDITOR
I use all 3 methods of input on a regular basis depending on what I want to jot down.
Honestly, I'm surprised at the amount of different answers here. It shows how personal note taking is to the user. I currently love notion. I switched over from Evernote, and it has been a game changer. The only downside is I'm tied to notion (the company), in a way I wouldn't be if I used something like markdown and git. That said, I think it's worth it to have the features in notion.
I like to think of it as a positive bike shedding session - instead of arguing about the color of the bike shed, we all share and compliment each other on how interesting and cool our bike shed designs are.
I like to use the tools available on my system, so I simply use Apple Notes. It's simple, good for synchronization, backing and searching, good for regular text with minimal formatting, but not good for code snippets unfortunately. I'm open to alternatives (but don't want to bother with versioning).
Overall, taking notes isn't a solved issue for me. I mostly like pen and paper as a thinking tool, but I'm not able to archive and search them, and it' slower when writing pure text.
Maybe a "Remarkable" would be a good tool, but I'm not sure I want even more screens and devices I already have.
It lets you interleave pictures. Really useful feature. It also does the URL expansion thing, what's that called?, where they expand a url into a mini snippet of the corresponding website. That's sometimes useful. However, there's no clean way to control it.
Worth noting, exporting Apple Notes in bulk loses any hyperlinked URLS. It also doesn't copy hyperlinks when copy-pasting out of Notes. Terrible for portability.
I can recommend the Remarkable. The nice thing about it is that I don’t even see it as a screen. It just exists as a more organised and versatile version of the paper notes I normally keep. But it’s a lot closer to paper than to a digital device (good for me, maybe limiting for some).
Ha! I recently started to do the same thing, except just a timestamp every time I run the script. If I want a blank page in the middle of the day I get one. `vn` opens a new one, `vl` opens the most recent one.
I also set it up to auto-create/open my daily-doc in the background when I open a new terminal session, since days that I do that are days that I most want to take notes. It serves as a very good, very minor reminder to actually write something down. And if I don't write anything, I can just delete empty files later with a trivial `find`.
For a long time I had a Zapier setup that did something similar.
v1 created a templated note in evernote which I eventually enhanced to a more custom solution.
v2 used google cloud print to create a pdf from html and add to my google drive then move it into the Notability folder so I could access it and write on it from the Notability app on my ipad.
I loved this because I could also pull in weather, horoscope, daily calvin and hobbes, news headlines, top gitlab issues for my projects and add them to the html template/pdf. Frequently I'd end up physically printing it.
Inspired by similar plaintext to-do discussions on HN I also built my own system.
I use Sublime and I love scrolling. The second makes the system in TFTA not good for me, and given the first, I didn't mind my implementation being editor specific - but the principal is dead simple, as to not really matter.
I have a small custom function stored in Sublimes user package folder which, when called using the [cmd]+[shift]+p command palette will insert a small template in the top of the current file (my `daily.txt`).
This is just a headline with the date, and name of day of week and
Two lines called start and end (with datetime filled in in start) let's me keep loose track of my hours.
I also have a sub-heading that says to-do, with two `[ ] ...` txt checkboxes already added, another headline called did and a line that separates it from the previous day.
"To-do" is for things I plan on doing, "did" is for ad-hoc things I ended up doing. This helps me keep track of how much work I actually did, which is nice for days where everything is meetings and firefighting and I don't close issues in the tracker or PRs in git.
I can use go-to symbol to jump to a date, or just search the document for key words. Like I said, I like scrolling, and enjoy being able to just scroll down to see the previous day.
The system is like I said dead simple, easy to operate, easy for anyone to implement and customize to their liking. I've used mine for a few months and it has been great!
I tend to have a notes.txt in different folders. One for each project, one for each bug investigation, etc. I'll admit I need to work on a better backup story
I'm a dedicated Evernote user. I add just about everything I generate or want to record to Evernote, in one big "notebook", and then I extensively use tagging to make sure everything is findable. I try to use every tag I might ever search for, for which this note would be relevant.
Sometimes I add content to existing notes, if they are relevant and include the same family of concepts. I often merge notes; e.g., I save all my tweets to Evernote via IFTTT, and then merge all of them for each given month.
I often add notes with no tagging at all, and I have a shortcut to search for notes with no tags, as a sort of inbox.
The ability to search everything at once is the key: I can search "movies" or "startup" or "medicine" and find everything with those tags, or those words in the title or text, or even in PDFs. (I use a Fuji ScanSnap to scan documents into Evernote, with fully searchable text.)
The biggest feature I wish for is transcription of voice notes or audio files, so the content would be searchable.
Evernote's Mac app is notoriously slow, but it's gotten better over the years. I still don't understand why they can't make it as fast as the web app.
Todoist on my phone for tasks. I like todoist because it's got a nicely polished interface and an excellent API.
I use an AWS Lambda to define and push repeating tasks into Todoist at set times, it also moves tasks from certain lists into my inbox at certain times of the day/week. Basically I don't want to fiddle with setting times or scheduling in todoist except for one off scheduled tasks. I just want to put tasks into the right lists and let the lambda move them into the inbox when I need to do them.
This is effectively a kind of timeboxing so I generally do all my work in the morning till early afternoon and then do research/admin for the next days tasks in the afternoon.
For notes and project management I use Roam Research which I found suited me best.
After years of using tons of notebooks I decided to move to Notability on my iPad. The Apple Pencil + Paperlike experience really do it for me.
Notability is nice and when I write feature designs I don’t have to transcribe my handwriting to the computer. I simply select the handwriting, convert it to text and move it over my computer.
Another great thing about this is that I can run searches on my handwriting, I really enjoy that because looking for that one page in a notebook is never practical, specially when you have many notebooks.
I’m a fan of the simplicity of your system but I don’t know if it’ll work for me. I really like writing with a pencil, that’s when I feel like I’m learning or reflecting on information.
I have been struggling to keep notes effectively. A lot of my notes "expire" a few days after taking them, but others I will need years later.
For most of my job I take physical notes. I don't love it but it's easy for me to grab a pen and paper just about anywhere I am. Where I struggle is doing something with those notes after the fact.
When I am at my computer, I usually just keep a plain text file going for the day and just save it for the date. I also have Teams recordings, screenshots, and other stuff that I have to just put in a folder. I don't have tagging or anything and keeping up this information just isn't working.
Physical notes are great for the reasons you mention - I tend to transcribe my physical notes into e.g. Google Docs/Dropbox which seems to make it easier to refer back to them. Of course you run into potential privacy issues for sensitive notes; on that front, pen and paper notes (or an offline machine) are hard to beat.
Personally I used Python's tnote program, but, because of Python, it worked pretty slowly. So I rewrite on pure POSIX shell and it serves me for nearly ten years:
http://www.git.stargrave.org/?p=t.git;a=blob;f=t
Comparing to author's solution, it gives ability to briefly list notes, use multiple "namespaces", quickly add (without invoking the editor), delete or modify each specified note. Also there is no bashism and it works out of box on *BSD (that lacks bash) and GNU systems.
The author, as well as most everyone in the comments here, have apparently never heard of org-mode. Yeah, I can understand that for some people emacs is a non-starter, but trust me, if you want to do it, I can just about guarantee it's possible in org-mode. It's just that flexible, and everyone's org-mode setup is different, customized to their needs.
I add tags as relevant if I think about it, and for projects/tasks spanning multiple days i'll create a root item.
I created a local git repo I try and keep everything checked into; I might push it up to a private github/bitbucket repo eventually, but I haven't been careful with scrubbing credentials from shell snippets so leerly on pushing anywhere remote.
I go for a low-fi approach: it is a single text file.
$ notes
appends a new line, current date like Mon 05 Oct 2020 10:20:47 AM EDT another new line and a set of === as a separator and moves the editor cursor to the bottom. So I can immediately type.
If I type
$ notes So that was weird
then it will take whatever I typed at the command line and append that as well allowing me to continue to type in the editor.
Finally I use :tag to freetag notes so I can easily search through notes based on the topics.
I figure eventually I might figure out a better system but so far this one worked very well.
For me, I'm an avid browser, lurker, reader of HN, Reddit, and when I come through an interesting paragraph in an article, or a comment in a thread, I screenshot it.
Next step will be to automatically move the screenshot from iCloud onto a computer, run OCR on the screenshots, index them, and make it possible to search through their text with near-equal search terms (eg "cute dog" would match "cute puppy" as well)
Screenshot + OCR seems tough, but sounds like it could be your preferred workflow. More robust will always be 1. a link to the article/thread and 2. a transcription of the content (esp. tailored to you [1]) imo. Your search term idea is interesting, I know Google is/has been doing this.
For the past few months I’ve been taking markdown notes which are then transformed into HTML and pushed to an s3 bucket for public viewing. Probably not the best solution within this thread but it costs approximately nothing is a great way to get access to a web-based version of your notes anywhere.
This allows you to throw extra features in the HTML like searching for files and randomly selecting a note for viewing at your leisure.
I love the idea that I have a place to publish random stuff that I don't have to spend lots of time writing, I can just drop a sentence and maybe someone else will find it useful.
The big problem is that Google will basically never give you that page in a result, no matter how relevant it may be to your query, because it prefers SEO-rich content farms like Wikihow. I was thinking that a service would at least be easier to search/remember to go to.
Having a generally positive experience with Dendron: (https://github.com/dendronhq/dendron ) currently, having recently migrated several thousand markdown-format notes captured over the past few years.
A suitable addition to your system for managing notes is the open source tool TagSpaces (https://www.tagspaces.org). With it you can tag, preview and edit your markdown files in one application, without any vendor locking.
Random data point: OneNote, Microsoft sticky notes, moleskine books, emails to myself, github issues; depending on the context. In some future utopia there would be a unified solution. Small hunch I'd have to create that myself in order to be content with it.
Gonna go against the grain here: I use proprietary software!
I dump all my random thoughts into my todoist inbox. Every couple of days I sift through and take action, or categorize as needed between notion notes and todoist projects.
A nice solution for those that can get by with text-only notes.
For storing images I use Microsoft OneNote as more often than not, there is a need to document something with text and images. And search is excellent.
One way to work images in text-only notes is to bake in the path names to the image files on your local drive rather than paste an image into the note. If I'm in terminal I can copy that text with the path, hit cmd n "open" cmd v enter and view the image with the system viewer (preview in this case). If I'm looking at the text file in textedit on mac os, I can actually do this from the right click menu under services after highlighting the path name. Could be a good solution if you are tired of onenote's bloat.
alexpetralia|5 years ago
1. Capture: every interesting idea that I think up or read is immediately stored in Google Keep (on mobile or laptop). It can be very rough at this point, the goal is simply to not forget.
2. Transcribe & Organize: every weekend, I go through the notes I accumulated during the week. It tends to be between 10 and 30 notes. Sometimes the note is "read this article" or "catch up on all newsletters", so understanding a single note can take over an hour. On some tough weekends the process takes an entire day, but that is invariably a day where I feel like I learned a ton. Once the note is cleaned up (transcribed), I feel like I understand it. At this point I rarely forget it - it has been absorbed into my brain. The final step here is "categorizing" the note. I classify it using OneNote with tabs like "Clinical psychology" (nested under "Psychology") or "Investment management" (nested under "Finance") or "Math" or "Physics". This way, in the future, I don't have a million notes scattered around, but one clear place I know where to look. On average, this process takes 2-4 hours per weekend. I never accumulate bookmarks, Google Keep notes or unread emails more than a week to prevent existential dread.
3. Revisit: generally, people recommend you revisit your notes from time to time. I almost never do this. But if I ever am thinking about "Marketing" or "Sociology", I have an immense, high SNR repository of everything I've ever found valuable on the topic. I've done this for software interviews and it's been incredibly helpful.
Overall, I attribute this system to making me much smarter. It has been an invaluable investment.
Natales|5 years ago
[0] https://nesslabs.com/interstitial-journaling
[1] https://roamresearch.com/
[2] https://akhater.github.io/drift/
vmarsy|5 years ago
I like it especially when it's a single URL as OneNote automatically appends a snapshot/screenshot of the page in the note itself, so even if coming back to it much much later, less risk of the original webpage being 404 not found.
[1] https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/use-email-to-send...
nosmokewhereiam|5 years ago
It's neat you simply decided to use it to hold on to things for about a week, prefering instead to store them in OneNote (or anything you want), a more stable product. Thanks for this advice!
varrock|5 years ago
chuckSu|5 years ago
[deleted]
nicbou|5 years ago
I keep my recipes in Keep and on my personal website, because I often amend them. However I discovered that printed recipes are much more pleasant to use.
Likewise, I'd much rather have a dirty notebook to sketch and write on when I'm working in the garage, or anywhere that's not my desk
ubermonkey|5 years ago
But I have a notebook and a (fountain!) pen on my desk all day long, right next to my keyboard and mouse.
kemiller2002|5 years ago
bayindirh|5 years ago
Allows you to concentrate better, the result is much more refined and as an added bonus, fountain pens are nice.
aidos|5 years ago
ralphc|5 years ago
unknown|5 years ago
[deleted]
k_sze|5 years ago
nottorp|5 years ago
Of course, for work we also use shared digital docs, but what goes in there has first been through my ugly scribbles on paper.
dboreham|5 years ago
chadlavi|5 years ago
TomAnthony|5 years ago
I hate any _friction_ to writing a note. I just want to get it out of my brain (or find it, if a previous thought) as quickly as possible.
With nvALT you start typing and it is searching immediately, but if there is no match and you hit enter you are now writing a new note.
Each note is stored as a text file, and so is findable via other search methods on your machine, and is easy to sync via your chosen technology.
I have tried a variety of approaches as I love the idea of linking between notes, and adding images, and tagging and all that stuff. But in reality all of that adds friction, and so prevents me from making the note (which is the critical part).
[1] https://brettterpstra.com/projects/nvalt/
timtyrrell|5 years ago
ajuc|5 years ago
Whenever I copy-paste stuff that might be useful I leave it there. Stuff like stacktraces, class:line_number when I was searching where something happens, links to webpages related to the task.
I was keeping a notepad tab open at all times anyway to keep context when I was doing something (otherwise I forget when I'm back from lunch and have to search again). So this is only making this context permanent and searcheable.
Then when I do something 3 months later and get a stacktrace I vaguely remember or other problem that I can imagine what the keyword would be - I just grep in that directory and find all the context needed, including jira task, commits, all related webpages, etc.
I also write short free-text notes there, but these are usually very short and less important than the copy-pasted stuff.
jareware|5 years ago
StavrosK|5 years ago
https://notes.stavros.io/
I also had an idea to make a site where you could take notes and have them be auto-published (like the above, but as a service), to create a community of random knowledge dumps. Think of a Wikipedia, but made of personal sites and not as rigorous, with a very "personal Web 1.0 website" feel, but talking to a few friends it didn't seem like they saw much point in it.
tga|5 years ago
In the end, I ended up using Obsidian (https://obsidian.md). While typing (even in an outside editor), I can just go [[random reference]] -- and that will turn into a link, even if that page doesn't exist yet. When I eventually get to creating the page, it will already have back links from all the places it is used (something else I think Joplin doesn't have).
jasonv|5 years ago
Why I won't be using it:
* If I live in Markdown, I want to edit it WYSIWYG. Maybe that's wrong, but I don't want to live in .md code mode (for this reason, I miss Evernote). I author in Typora, but I don't want to keep notes in MD.
* It's sync-ing options don't map to the most used syncing tech on desktops these days. I'd have to pay for Dropbox (given my current ecosystem) just to use it to sync.
* I want folders and sub-folders. Folders and tags don't work for me.
* I wish these systems had a built-in journal mode, like Roam.
hardwaresofton|5 years ago
grtehy|5 years ago
=======
Just another opinion on the balanced note taking method:
I think org-mode solves almost all offline note-taking requirements
* org-roam makes it super-easy to link notes
* emacs as an editor is as usable as any other editor
* Rich media is possible and easy to do in org-mode. Attach a snapshot, embed a video file
* Code with documentation is a feature not available in most other note taking methods/apps. It's possible to run code snippets and add comments, documentation about them in the same space
* Latex support is advanced. Inline equations work seamlessly
* Search support is advanced
Drawbacks:
* One of the main drawbacks is that all your notes end up offline. This was a deal-breaker for me. ox-hugo helps in publishing your notes to a (private) static site where it can be searched, viewed but not edited on the fly
* Publishing through ox-hugo is separate from maintaining a backup/sync of your notes in /org/ format. You'll have to do this separately through Dropbox/GDrive/etc
* A backup of your org notes is not usable until you set up your emacs environment and download all your notes
hiq|5 years ago
I try to keep some notes.org file and use it regularly, but I'm just faster with unix tools and vim, so it's hard to make the upfront investment in learning emacs and start somewhat from scratch. I think there's also some kind of discoverability issue with org-mode features: I don't really know which features should I look into to improve my setup further and have something really nice instead of a glorified markdown.
One day I'll just read the manual from start to finish and try to start properly from there, one day.
5cents|5 years ago
[0] https://logseq.com/
drieddust|5 years ago
How you insert a video in org file? This is one of the reason I have to move away from org only setup.
Brajeshwar|5 years ago
1. https://jeffhuang.com/productivity_text_file/
bravura|5 years ago
I want to browse my notes in chronological order AND in thematic order. i.e. I want to do semantic search and automatic topic grouping.
[edit: The use-case I have in mind is you are learning about a topic, and your chronological "research notebook" is also an automatic zettlekasten.]
blackbear_|5 years ago
ricg|5 years ago
Notes can have tags and attributes so you could have attributes per note like: topic=rocketscience, semester=fall2020. Later you could say: "sort all my notes by semester and then group by topic" or if you change your mind, set up a second view for "all notes grouped by topic then by semester".
If you're interested, feel free to contact me through the site (kitestack.com/lnotes). I'd love to learn more about how you currently organize your notes.
edwinyzh|5 years ago
asdff|5 years ago
ajuc|5 years ago
Works like a charm and is very low friction when notekeeping.
bayindirh|5 years ago
zaplin|5 years ago
edit: you proposed zettelkasten-like solution just when I posted
akulbe|5 years ago
I'd like to make a plug for Standard Notes.
standardnotes.org
I don't work for them. I get nothing from mentioning them.
It's cross-platform, and you have the option of encrypting things. It's my go-to place for notes.
varrock|5 years ago
donaldihunter|5 years ago
jxy|5 years ago
colinhb|5 years ago
I never really made notes on my phone, and I like being able to stay in my text editor (acme) on macOS.
For me, the presentation and structure around this workflow is what's too complicated. To adopt do something similar on macOS, I'd just:
> % echo 'notes () { acme-open ~/iCloud\ Drive/notes/$(date +%Y-%m-%d).md }' >> ~/.zshrc
This would give me a function to create a new, dated notes doc and open with my editor anywhere from the terminal. And then I'd just use standard tools for searching, instead of using a script.
(FYI: acme-open is my wrapper to acme, and I keep a link to the actual iCloud Drive directory in my home folder.)
jdillaaa|5 years ago
There are iOS shortcuts now which can let you do this programmatically, but you also lose formatting, and its a hack.
aidos|5 years ago
For me, I go even simpler. I have a single file in my Dropbox folder that I’ve been using for over a decade. To open it, I just use Alfred (and before that, quicksilver). I pop new stuff at the top. Every now and again I search for something way back when.
Works really well for me.
georgefrick|5 years ago
packetlost|5 years ago
I really like the paper method for day-to-day stuff, but for research or work-related notes, I simply can't write fast enough to keep up (particularly if I'm trying to capture info from a meeting), and the lack of searchability means I can never fully rely on paper notes as a means of retaining information long-term.
znpy|5 years ago
I have daily notes, a small calendar to navigate to dates in the past/future, a tag cloud populated with words I've written the most, and a search bar that I don't know how it works but usually finds what I'm looking for.
It's no fancy system but it's immediate, no dumb nerding and dumb wheel reinvention needed.
psibi|5 years ago
$ ls *org | wc -l
87
[0] https://www.orgroam.com/
JohnL4|5 years ago
(Evernote if I find web content that's good.)
gravitas|5 years ago
notetaker|5 years ago
I have been thinking of converting from OneNote to markdown. One thing that has been keeping me from making the switch is search, especially from mobile. Any one knows of any solution that is capable of searching through all the markdown notes similar to how OneNote does from mobile? I am thinking of hosting the notes in a RPi with Gitea or Nextcloud and access it using VPN (using Rpi as a trial and later move on to a dedicate mini PC if I end up liking this setup).
chadlavi|5 years ago
(for anyone interested, "Working Copy" iOS app is great for this. It's a git client for iOS, and its contents are even accessible in the Files app. Can't speak to Android use, but looks like parent comment has recs)
danmur|5 years ago
m0ngr31|5 years ago
It helps me to break things out based on date or by topic, which this supports.
ito|5 years ago
I would so strongly recommended everyone reading this to check out Roam Research (https://roamresearch.com/). At it's core, it's a collection of text notes in the cloud. Just open it up and start typing your thoughts down. No folders or hierarchy. The key enabler is that is that you can link together different pages. Roam Research helps you make so much better sense of your thoughts - I use it personally to plan out goals, projects, brainstorm research, track meetings/dates, and keep a daily log of everything I go through. I can't recommend it enough - even my dad started using it everyday after I showed him.
Just try it out and starting typing a few notes. It'll start off as a simple graph for text notes / documents, but there are so many more powerful features to discover, too.
EDIT: Roam is a cloud-based service, notes are not end-to-end encrypted. It doesn't bother me, but if it bothers you, there are many open source, offline-first alternatives that the community has created (emacs-org, Foam, Obsidian, etc.). I am in no way sponsored by Roam, I don't know anybody at Roam, I don't run any of those bullshit Roam courses, and Roam is expensive as fuck, but let me tell you this: there are so many features and UI optimizations that make Roam have the best user experience. Don't compromise your time and user experience.
pps|5 years ago
0x008|5 years ago
EduardMe|5 years ago
https://noteplan.co
herodoturtle|5 years ago
nickjj|5 years ago
I also open sourced a zero dependency Bash script that handles this at: https://github.com/nickjj/notes
It supports adding notes in 3 different ways:
I use all 3 methods of input on a regular basis depending on what I want to jot down.asdff|5 years ago
jdshaffer|5 years ago
hachibu|5 years ago
davidn20|5 years ago
bauerd|5 years ago
asdff|5 years ago
alias note='(date; cat; echo) >> ~/notes.txt'
sshb|5 years ago
0x008|5 years ago
mssundaram|5 years ago
yodsanklai|5 years ago
Overall, taking notes isn't a solved issue for me. I mostly like pen and paper as a thinking tool, but I'm not able to archive and search them, and it' slower when writing pure text.
Maybe a "Remarkable" would be a good tool, but I'm not sure I want even more screens and devices I already have.
mhdhn|5 years ago
sails|5 years ago
aidos|5 years ago
ninetax|5 years ago
Groxx|5 years ago
I also set it up to auto-create/open my daily-doc in the background when I open a new terminal session, since days that I do that are days that I most want to take notes. It serves as a very good, very minor reminder to actually write something down. And if I don't write anything, I can just delete empty files later with a trivial `find`.
harrisonjackson|5 years ago
v1 created a templated note in evernote which I eventually enhanced to a more custom solution.
v2 used google cloud print to create a pdf from html and add to my google drive then move it into the Notability folder so I could access it and write on it from the Notability app on my ipad.
I loved this because I could also pull in weather, horoscope, daily calvin and hobbes, news headlines, top gitlab issues for my projects and add them to the html template/pdf. Frequently I'd end up physically printing it.
olsgaarddk|5 years ago
I use Sublime and I love scrolling. The second makes the system in TFTA not good for me, and given the first, I didn't mind my implementation being editor specific - but the principal is dead simple, as to not really matter.
I have a small custom function stored in Sublimes user package folder which, when called using the [cmd]+[shift]+p command palette will insert a small template in the top of the current file (my `daily.txt`).
This is just a headline with the date, and name of day of week and Two lines called start and end (with datetime filled in in start) let's me keep loose track of my hours.
I also have a sub-heading that says to-do, with two `[ ] ...` txt checkboxes already added, another headline called did and a line that separates it from the previous day.
"To-do" is for things I plan on doing, "did" is for ad-hoc things I ended up doing. This helps me keep track of how much work I actually did, which is nice for days where everything is meetings and firefighting and I don't close issues in the tracker or PRs in git.
I can use go-to symbol to jump to a date, or just search the document for key words. Like I said, I like scrolling, and enjoy being able to just scroll down to see the previous day.
The system is like I said dead simple, easy to operate, easy for anyone to implement and customize to their liking. I've used mine for a few months and it has been great!
pitterpatter|5 years ago
brw12|5 years ago
Sometimes I add content to existing notes, if they are relevant and include the same family of concepts. I often merge notes; e.g., I save all my tweets to Evernote via IFTTT, and then merge all of them for each given month.
I often add notes with no tagging at all, and I have a shortcut to search for notes with no tags, as a sort of inbox.
The ability to search everything at once is the key: I can search "movies" or "startup" or "medicine" and find everything with those tags, or those words in the title or text, or even in PDFs. (I use a Fuji ScanSnap to scan documents into Evernote, with fully searchable text.)
The biggest feature I wish for is transcription of voice notes or audio files, so the content would be searchable.
Evernote's Mac app is notoriously slow, but it's gotten better over the years. I still don't understand why they can't make it as fast as the web app.
dageshi|5 years ago
Todoist on my phone for tasks. I like todoist because it's got a nicely polished interface and an excellent API.
I use an AWS Lambda to define and push repeating tasks into Todoist at set times, it also moves tasks from certain lists into my inbox at certain times of the day/week. Basically I don't want to fiddle with setting times or scheduling in todoist except for one off scheduled tasks. I just want to put tasks into the right lists and let the lambda move them into the inbox when I need to do them.
This is effectively a kind of timeboxing so I generally do all my work in the morning till early afternoon and then do research/admin for the next days tasks in the afternoon.
For notes and project management I use Roam Research which I found suited me best.
feteru|5 years ago
unknown|5 years ago
[deleted]
marinhero|5 years ago
I’m a fan of the simplicity of your system but I don’t know if it’ll work for me. I really like writing with a pencil, that’s when I feel like I’m learning or reflecting on information.
pdx_flyer|5 years ago
For most of my job I take physical notes. I don't love it but it's easy for me to grab a pen and paper just about anywhere I am. Where I struggle is doing something with those notes after the fact.
When I am at my computer, I usually just keep a plain text file going for the day and just save it for the date. I also have Teams recordings, screenshots, and other stuff that I have to just put in a folder. I don't have tagging or anything and keeping up this information just isn't working.
Any tips?
richardliutl|5 years ago
pinjasaur|5 years ago
I also have one for rapid steam-of-conscious thoughts[2] and organized journaling[3].
Personally, I'm a fan of the "plaintext files in a directory" pattern for notes, thoughts, and writing.
[1]: https://github.com/Pinjasaur/jot
[2]: https://github.com/Pinjasaur/jt
[3]: https://github.com/Pinjasaur/jrnl
stargrave|5 years ago
Comparing to author's solution, it gives ability to briefly list notes, use multiple "namespaces", quickly add (without invoking the editor), delete or modify each specified note. Also there is no bashism and it works out of box on *BSD (that lacks bash) and GNU systems.
ekianjo|5 years ago
> The way it works is that every time I run the script, it opens the note for that day in my editor of choice
vimwiki's diary function does that for you under the hood.
npsimons|5 years ago
The author, as well as most everyone in the comments here, have apparently never heard of org-mode. Yeah, I can understand that for some people emacs is a non-starter, but trust me, if you want to do it, I can just about guarantee it's possible in org-mode. It's just that flexible, and everyone's org-mode setup is different, customized to their needs.
w0m|5 years ago
I add tags as relevant if I think about it, and for projects/tasks spanning multiple days i'll create a root item.
I created a local git repo I try and keep everything checked into; I might push it up to a private github/bitbucket repo eventually, but I haven't been careful with scrubbing credentials from shell snippets so leerly on pushing anywhere remote.
tasuki|5 years ago
unknown|5 years ago
[deleted]
notyourday|5 years ago
$ notes
appends a new line, current date like Mon 05 Oct 2020 10:20:47 AM EDT another new line and a set of === as a separator and moves the editor cursor to the bottom. So I can immediately type.
If I type
$ notes So that was weird
then it will take whatever I typed at the command line and append that as well allowing me to continue to type in the editor.
Finally I use :tag to freetag notes so I can easily search through notes based on the topics.
I figure eventually I might figure out a better system but so far this one worked very well.
kovek|5 years ago
Next step will be to automatically move the screenshot from iCloud onto a computer, run OCR on the screenshots, index them, and make it possible to search through their text with near-equal search terms (eg "cute dog" would match "cute puppy" as well)
Anyone has ideas on how to make that possible?
richardliutl|5 years ago
[1] https://zettelkasten.de/posts/collectors-fallacy/
blandflakes|5 years ago
srich36|5 years ago
This allows you to throw extra features in the HTML like searching for files and randomly selecting a note for viewing at your leisure.
StavrosK|5 years ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25300423
I love the idea that I have a place to publish random stuff that I don't have to spend lots of time writing, I can just drop a sentence and maybe someone else will find it useful.
The big problem is that Google will basically never give you that page in a result, no matter how relevant it may be to your query, because it prefers SEO-rich content farms like Wikihow. I was thinking that a service would at least be easier to search/remember to go to.
darkr|5 years ago
ilian|5 years ago
dboreham|5 years ago
dna_polymerase|5 years ago
tomlockwood|5 years ago
https://github.com/tomlockwood/dn
syas|5 years ago
SamBorick|5 years ago
I dump all my random thoughts into my todoist inbox. Every couple of days I sift through and take action, or categorize as needed between notion notes and todoist projects.
sharken|5 years ago
For storing images I use Microsoft OneNote as more often than not, there is a need to document something with text and images. And search is excellent.
asdff|5 years ago
makeworld|5 years ago
https://github.com/xwmx/nb
hyb|5 years ago
nickthemagicman|5 years ago
unknown|5 years ago
[deleted]
avinassh|5 years ago
mssundaram|5 years ago
jlgaddis|5 years ago
inatreecrown2|5 years ago
octoberfranklin|5 years ago
Still the best tree editor I've found. I left emacs for it!
blackbear_|5 years ago
npsimons|5 years ago