6 ms·

The commitment to taking good notes has been one of the best decisions of my life -- not just professionally. I use my standard text editor (Textmate 2), and ha

by goo 9y ago

The commitment to taking good notes has been one of the best decisions of my life -- not just professionally. I use my standard text editor (Textmate 2), and have a "notes" project, with all manner of categories organized by folder. I take notes on articles I have read, take notes on any presentations I watch or educational courses I take, or books I read. Moreover, I now take much better in person notes -- I take them into "scratchpads" and then synthesize them later. It's indispensable in meetings because I both take notes about the goals of meetings beforehand, take note of any important parts during them, and am able to succinctly review them afterwards as they relate to the original goals, and easily keep track of any action items. I manage EVERYTHING this way now-- what I am currently working on, notes about what I've done in a day, notes about what I've done on the weekend, notes about books I want to read, movies I want to watch, have watched, fitness routines. It goes on. At first it was a small but useful knowledge base, and a good plan for how to keep track of things better. Now it's a larger, and even more useful knowledge base, where due to review and organization the important concepts in it have mostly made its way into my long term memory. And the process of taking and using the notes has become a smooth and well-honed process. I keep the notes in dropbox so I have easy access to them on mobile also. In short: I treat my personal knowledge base as if it were a coding project: using well organized text files. I am constantly adding to them and maintaining them. It is working very well for me.

djhworld 9y ago
I'm fairly similar to you but not as maybe not as meticulous One thing that wasn't working for me was storing TODO style things and "X I want to watch/read/learn/play/do" items in my notes. Eventually I found Trello and it seems a good fit for that style of task (for me) Everything else is stored in my notes though, or sometimes in paper-based notebooks that I take pictures of occasionally for archiving. Still need to get better at things I've done at the weekend/daily bullet points etc, I often forget or am too lazy
aiisgood 9y ago
Can you explain how you organize them? Been trying to do something similar but haven't gotten it quite right yet.
- Kluny 9y ago
  I've given up on organizing. I find things with ctrl-f and put the date siren every time I start writing, so if I know generally when something happened, I can go back and find it.
Koshkin 9y ago
On the other hand, based on my personal experience, maintaining a constantly growing archive of things, be it notes, bookmarks, emails, etc. turns out to be not very useful. Also, it gradually becomes something that you spend more time on than on other things. I now prefer to be more spontaneous, try to minimize the number of things that drag me into the past, start things as if from scratch, "reset" myself, dismiss the baggage that is often turns out to be nothing more than a dead weight. This "lightweight" approach seems to allow me to move forward faster, learn new things that I might have no plans to learn for a long time, because of a queue of other things on my "TODO list". But again, this may be personal.
- dorian-graph 9y ago
  I just replied to the parent agreeing with their method, because I do something more or less the same, but I also try and keep a balance between this and what you just described. The importance of the 'reset' has helped me a lot too, and calling a lot of recorded things 'baggage' is very true. If everything I had recorded was wiped would I be disappointed? Definitely! But life would go on. :) I'd re-discover things, my tastes and personality would change so those recorded things aren't relevant, etc.
- closeparen 9y ago
  It isn't about having the artifact, but about the reflective activity of creating the artifact.
- dkarl 9y ago
  I like to separate notes from journaling for precisely this reason. I have hundreds of notes in Evernote that I will never see again. They're invisible, as light on me as a feather. Yet they're also searchable, so they're available in seconds if I ever need them. I have system of using "top" tags to define my working view for a project. Say I'm working on project Foo. At any one time I'll have about half a dozen notes tagged "foo-top." I can take any note from my past and bring it front and center by tagging it "foo-top" and then delete the tag when I want the note to disappear again. Say, for example, I want to see if CouchDB will be useful for Foo. I used CouchDB for a personal project several years ago, so I can search for my note of CouchDB concepts and commands, tag it "foo-top", and then remove the tag if I decide it won't be useful. It's a beautiful way of carrying around a lot of baggage without feeling the weight. It's nice that if I want, I can write down notes and thoughts about something without worrying that I'll clutter up my journal and make it unreadable, or worrying that I'm mixing up the wheat and the chaff. It's not like I spend a bunch of time rummaging through a bunch of junk to find what I want, forcing me to think carefully about what I record. I can record anything that seems like it might be useful later. A journal would be nice to have, too, though. One note in each project serves as a journal of sorts, in the form of a quick summary of what I've done each day and a quick summary of what I expect to accomplish next. (For work, I find it more convenient to keep a single note for this instead of breaking it out by project.) Evernote isn't great for keeping chronological notes. I only use it because I haven't seen an alternative that is compelling enough to make up for the convenience of using just one program. One thing I really wish for is a program that could automatically present me with a diary of sorts based on my note-taking. Versioning would be nice, too, so I could see how my notes evolve over time.
dorian-graph 9y ago
Totally agree goo! I do something more or less the same as you, just to not the same extent—but I will be soon when I export my 'to watch' list from IMDB and 'to read' list from Instapaper. Since 2013 I started creating a text file almost every day in a directory structure of '../daily/2017/17-10-14.txt'. I use it as a journal (I put the current time and wrote whatever it is down), a scratchpad, a temporary todo, habit tracker, etc. It's been super useful for me. I've thought about formalising it, using tags, etc. but have found myself getting along fine. I used to use Day One (macOS/iOS) religiously but have found that this daily txt log mostly sufficient. What I would like is to expand my macros from getting the current time to getting my current location and weather. For work, I have a 'log.txt' in which I have a section for each day and copy-forward the previous day's section. While we have our own company tracking tools, etc., this is purely for me and has helped me keep better track of everything I need/want to do without letting anything slip out. I've found that doing each of these things takes up very little time too—partly due to not formalising it or making it fancy. I've thought about using a vimwiki which I'm a big fan of, and gave it a go once, but I stopped. It was no fault of vimwiki itself, but so far have found the text files sufficient. For my phone (iPhone), I use https://ia.net/writer/ https://ia.net/writer/, and I keep all these text files in Dropbox. Another reason why I've stuck to text files is because of the fatigue of different apps and services disappearing due to whatever reasons.
- danilocesar 9y ago
  I'm doing almost the same thing. I have a simple script that opens a ~/Documents/devlog/20171015.txt automatically when I start working. When I need to find something old I use fgrep on that folder. Works like a charm. It's plain text, no defined structure. I dont't use it for TODOs as that info would get easily lost. I use it almost everyday, specially when something different happen: how to release an old piece of software that current setup dont support anymore or how to connect to a service that I only use sporadically. I tried some tools and apps for this, even tried to track that for a few days in Trello. eventually I gave up and went back to the plain txt file.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
amelius 9y ago
What is the read-versus-write ratio of your notes? I.e., how often do you actually read the things you write down? PS: Have you ever thought about using a "lifelogging camera" instead? :)
- Too 9y ago
  Videos reduce the read-vs-write ratio even more for me, they can't be searched or skimmed.
- goo 9y ago
  Great question... some files are very read heavy (e.g traits.txt, which is a collection of about 25 traits phrased as imperatives that I aim to accomplish, such as: " BUILD QUALITY RELATIONSHIPS - improve existing relationships, and seek out new good ones MAINTAIN NEUTRALITY - approach things with a beginners mind PRACTICE SELF-COMPASSION - admit pain, take kind and mindful action ") Some files are just used a lot for both reading and writing. These include a todo.txt, event_planning.txt for planning logistics of whatever fun getaway or event I'm doing next, a shopping_queue.txt (reduce impulse buys by requiring I put things on that list for some amount of time). I find that for taking notes on books or presentations, I will write them once, and then refer back to them infrequently -- maybe once a year. A bigger advantage is gained because it makes it easier to stop reading/watching things, because then I can always pick it up again and review the notes associated with it, so I can have a lot of educational threads going at the same time without fear of losing the context. For journaling, I tend to review my journal and list of activities as a whole a couple of times a year, and typically will review the last week every week or so. Much of this happens naturally due to the fact that the project is open -- it's often easier and more interesting to review my past work week or pick up where I left off on a book (stored as a pdf within the notes) than it is to jump onto facebook or whatever.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
epsolos 9y ago
Would you be willing to talk more about your experience? I too am very interested in this process, but have yet to find one that is successful for me. I would love to hear more about your process.
craftyguy 9y ago
Good god, man/woman. Do you have time to do anything else besides taking notes?
hyperpallium 9y ago
How do you find relevant notes from the past? grep (or a fuzzy-match version) would help, or do you organize them by some system? The organization of notes in an accessible manner is a challenge for me - perhaps I'm doing it wromg.
- goo 9y ago
  Many notes are easily organized -- when I take notes on books I am reading, for example, there is pretty natural connection to where the not should live (e.g. /education/books/design_of_everyday_things.txt) Otherwise, since these notes in the context of a project, I can treat it the same way I treat code. So a mix of multi-file search, and directories that correspond to the knowledge in them (e.g. "finances/investing.txt" or "journal/happiness_project.txt", the latter containing any work I do on http://diurnal.st/2013/05/27/training-your-brain-to-be-and-stay-happy.html http://diurnal.st/2013/05/27/training-your-brain-to-be-and-s... -- which I don't do everyday by any means, but that's an example of the kind of thing that exists in my notes)
fredsted 9y ago
What does the folder structure look like?
- galfarragem 9y ago
  It might be relevant: https://github.com/galfarragem/hamster-gtd https://github.com/galfarragem/hamster-gtd
StrangersAdvice 9y ago
How do you organize your notes? My biggest problem is organizing.
tigershark 9y ago
I have a diametrically opposite experience instead. For me taking notes is most of the time harmful. If I need to document something it is much better to write a confluence page so everyone in the team can access it. While I'm coding taking notes breaks my flow of thoughts and I lose the momentum. Obviously I do write schematics or structures of the components on which I'm working on, but I don't consider that note taking, it is really part of the designing process and at the end the architecture will go in any case in confluence. Last but not least, I noticed that if I can just read some note easily I don't commit that information to my long term memory, so paradoxically, writing notes actually harms my memorisation process.
vram22 9y ago
I had started a simpler version of your approach a while ago, but how do you manage the overhead if you use it for EVERYTHING?

by goo 9y ago

djhworld 9y ago

I'm fairly similar to you but not as maybe not as meticulous One thing that wasn't working for me was storing TODO style things and "X I want to watch/read/learn/play/do" items in my notes. Eventually I found Trello and it seems a good fit for that style of task (for me) Everything else is stored in my notes though, or sometimes in paper-based notebooks that I take pictures of occasionally for archiving. Still need to get better at things I've done at the weekend/daily bullet points etc, I often forget or am too lazy

aiisgood 9y ago

Can you explain how you organize them? Been trying to do something similar but haven't gotten it quite right yet.

Kluny 9y ago
I've given up on organizing. I find things with ctrl-f and put the date siren every time I start writing, so if I know generally when something happened, I can go back and find it.

Koshkin 9y ago

On the other hand, based on my personal experience, maintaining a constantly growing archive of things, be it notes, bookmarks, emails, etc. turns out to be not very useful. Also, it gradually becomes something that you spend more time on than on other things. I now prefer to be more spontaneous, try to minimize the number of things that drag me into the past, start things as if from scratch, "reset" myself, dismiss the baggage that is often turns out to be nothing more than a dead weight. This "lightweight" approach seems to allow me to move forward faster, learn new things that I might have no plans to learn for a long time, because of a queue of other things on my "TODO list". But again, this may be personal.

dorian-graph 9y ago
I just replied to the parent agreeing with their method, because I do something more or less the same, but I also try and keep a balance between this and what you just described. The importance of the 'reset' has helped me a lot too, and calling a lot of recorded things 'baggage' is very true. If everything I had recorded was wiped would I be disappointed? Definitely! But life would go on. :) I'd re-discover things, my tastes and personality would change so those recorded things aren't relevant, etc.
closeparen 9y ago
It isn't about having the artifact, but about the reflective activity of creating the artifact.
dkarl 9y ago
I like to separate notes from journaling for precisely this reason. I have hundreds of notes in Evernote that I will never see again. They're invisible, as light on me as a feather. Yet they're also searchable, so they're available in seconds if I ever need them. I have system of using "top" tags to define my working view for a project. Say I'm working on project Foo. At any one time I'll have about half a dozen notes tagged "foo-top." I can take any note from my past and bring it front and center by tagging it "foo-top" and then delete the tag when I want the note to disappear again. Say, for example, I want to see if CouchDB will be useful for Foo. I used CouchDB for a personal project several years ago, so I can search for my note of CouchDB concepts and commands, tag it "foo-top", and then remove the tag if I decide it won't be useful. It's a beautiful way of carrying around a lot of baggage without feeling the weight. It's nice that if I want, I can write down notes and thoughts about something without worrying that I'll clutter up my journal and make it unreadable, or worrying that I'm mixing up the wheat and the chaff. It's not like I spend a bunch of time rummaging through a bunch of junk to find what I want, forcing me to think carefully about what I record. I can record anything that seems like it might be useful later. A journal would be nice to have, too, though. One note in each project serves as a journal of sorts, in the form of a quick summary of what I've done each day and a quick summary of what I expect to accomplish next. (For work, I find it more convenient to keep a single note for this instead of breaking it out by project.) Evernote isn't great for keeping chronological notes. I only use it because I haven't seen an alternative that is compelling enough to make up for the convenience of using just one program. One thing I really wish for is a program that could automatically present me with a diary of sorts based on my note-taking. Versioning would be nice, too, so I could see how my notes evolve over time.

dorian-graph 9y ago

Totally agree goo! I do something more or less the same as you, just to not the same extent—but I will be soon when I export my 'to watch' list from IMDB and 'to read' list from Instapaper. Since 2013 I started creating a text file almost every day in a directory structure of '../daily/2017/17-10-14.txt'. I use it as a journal (I put the current time and wrote whatever it is down), a scratchpad, a temporary todo, habit tracker, etc. It's been super useful for me. I've thought about formalising it, using tags, etc. but have found myself getting along fine. I used to use Day One (macOS/iOS) religiously but have found that this daily txt log mostly sufficient. What I would like is to expand my macros from getting the current time to getting my current location and weather. For work, I have a 'log.txt' in which I have a section for each day and copy-forward the previous day's section. While we have our own company tracking tools, etc., this is purely for me and has helped me keep better track of everything I need/want to do without letting anything slip out. I've found that doing each of these things takes up very little time too—partly due to not formalising it or making it fancy. I've thought about using a vimwiki which I'm a big fan of, and gave it a go once, but I stopped. It was no fault of vimwiki itself, but so far have found the text files sufficient. For my phone (iPhone), I use https://ia.net/writer/ https://ia.net/writer/, and I keep all these text files in Dropbox. Another reason why I've stuck to text files is because of the fatigue of different apps and services disappearing due to whatever reasons.

danilocesar 9y ago
I'm doing almost the same thing. I have a simple script that opens a ~/Documents/devlog/20171015.txt automatically when I start working. When I need to find something old I use fgrep on that folder. Works like a charm. It's plain text, no defined structure. I dont't use it for TODOs as that info would get easily lost. I use it almost everyday, specially when something different happen: how to release an old piece of software that current setup dont support anymore or how to connect to a service that I only use sporadically. I tried some tools and apps for this, even tried to track that for a few days in Trello. eventually I gave up and went back to the plain txt file.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

amelius 9y ago

What is the read-versus-write ratio of your notes? I.e., how often do you actually read the things you write down? PS: Have you ever thought about using a "lifelogging camera" instead? :)

Too 9y ago
Videos reduce the read-vs-write ratio even more for me, they can't be searched or skimmed.
goo 9y ago
Great question... some files are very read heavy (e.g traits.txt, which is a collection of about 25 traits phrased as imperatives that I aim to accomplish, such as: " BUILD QUALITY RELATIONSHIPS - improve existing relationships, and seek out new good ones MAINTAIN NEUTRALITY - approach things with a beginners mind PRACTICE SELF-COMPASSION - admit pain, take kind and mindful action ") Some files are just used a lot for both reading and writing. These include a todo.txt, event_planning.txt for planning logistics of whatever fun getaway or event I'm doing next, a shopping_queue.txt (reduce impulse buys by requiring I put things on that list for some amount of time). I find that for taking notes on books or presentations, I will write them once, and then refer back to them infrequently -- maybe once a year. A bigger advantage is gained because it makes it easier to stop reading/watching things, because then I can always pick it up again and review the notes associated with it, so I can have a lot of educational threads going at the same time without fear of losing the context. For journaling, I tend to review my journal and list of activities as a whole a couple of times a year, and typically will review the last week every week or so. Much of this happens naturally due to the fact that the project is open -- it's often easier and more interesting to review my past work week or pick up where I left off on a book (stored as a pdf within the notes) than it is to jump onto facebook or whatever.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

epsolos 9y ago

Would you be willing to talk more about your experience? I too am very interested in this process, but have yet to find one that is successful for me. I would love to hear more about your process.

craftyguy 9y ago

Good god, man/woman. Do you have time to do anything else besides taking notes?

hyperpallium 9y ago

How do you find relevant notes from the past? grep (or a fuzzy-match version) would help, or do you organize them by some system? The organization of notes in an accessible manner is a challenge for me - perhaps I'm doing it wromg.

goo 9y ago
Many notes are easily organized -- when I take notes on books I am reading, for example, there is pretty natural connection to where the not should live (e.g. /education/books/design_of_everyday_things.txt) Otherwise, since these notes in the context of a project, I can treat it the same way I treat code. So a mix of multi-file search, and directories that correspond to the knowledge in them (e.g. "finances/investing.txt" or "journal/happiness_project.txt", the latter containing any work I do on http://diurnal.st/2013/05/27/training-your-brain-to-be-and-stay-happy.html http://diurnal.st/2013/05/27/training-your-brain-to-be-and-s... -- which I don't do everyday by any means, but that's an example of the kind of thing that exists in my notes)

fredsted 9y ago

What does the folder structure look like?

galfarragem 9y ago
It might be relevant: https://github.com/galfarragem/hamster-gtd https://github.com/galfarragem/hamster-gtd

StrangersAdvice 9y ago

How do you organize your notes? My biggest problem is organizing.

tigershark 9y ago

I have a diametrically opposite experience instead. For me taking notes is most of the time harmful. If I need to document something it is much better to write a confluence page so everyone in the team can access it. While I'm coding taking notes breaks my flow of thoughts and I lose the momentum. Obviously I do write schematics or structures of the components on which I'm working on, but I don't consider that note taking, it is really part of the designing process and at the end the architecture will go in any case in confluence. Last but not least, I noticed that if I can just read some note easily I don't commit that information to my long term memory, so paradoxically, writing notes actually harms my memorisation process.

vram22 9y ago

I had started a simpler version of your approach a while ago, but how do you manage the overhead if you use it for EVERYTHING?