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Ask HN: How do you organize your notes?
I work as a Senior Developer at a large tech comapny across many different projects. I have also recent started the transition to an SDM role. One thing I'm finding is that I have reached my capacity for remembering all the different items I need to follow up on, tasks that need to get done, notes from 1:1s, and long running project ideas/growth ideas.
I've started taking more notes, but without a good system for organization I am not getting much value out of them.
I'd be curious to hear what works for the rest of you. Specifically:
- What tools have you found useful for note taking (I bounce between vimwiki and OneNote)?
- How do you organize? By project? Tasks?
- How do you structure the notes? Do you have a template?
- How do you deal with "scratchpad" style notes? Do you ever come back to them?
- How often do you revisit your notes?
Any other general good note taking practices or methodologies that you have found success with would be helpful.
- fxfan 8y ago- OneNote hands down beats everything else for me. Foe scratchpad I use the unfiled notes section. This is where all the shares go by default. I do wish they would bring some kind of hash-tagging.
- PaulHoule 8y agoI used to use OneNote. When I found out that I could only export from the OneNote web site, I quit. My current answer is not for everybody, but I write notes in ReStructuredText on GitHub and write my own scripts for analyzing them. An important thing is that I put notes in the same collection for search along with other kinds of documents.
- fxfan 8y agoWhat are you looking to export?
- PaulHoule 8y agothe whole book as a ZIP. I like the ZIP export format, I don't like not being able to get it without logging into the cloud.
- eysquared 8y agoI do tend to prefer to use markdown when I can, which is where OneNote is failing for me. A lot of our internal tools use markdown for things like interview feedback. Do you have any example scripts you can share?
- rman666 8y agoI too recently switched to Microsoft OneNote. I use it on Windows 10, my Macintosh, and my iPhone ... all work really nicely together.