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I'm not an organised note-taker, except for a few circumstances. Most often notes are just actions which get put in email to myself, or my team. Life has chang
by zerkten 7y ago
I'm not an organised note-taker, except for a few circumstances. Most often notes are just actions which get put in email to myself, or my team.
Life has changed recently and I've been thinking about some low-friction options for capturing thoughts. Any solution needs to work from mobile and desktop (macOS, Windows, and Linux for me.)
On desktop I'm imagining something like an Alfred window popping up on a keyboard shortcut. Storing the text note or screenshot with timestamp. Nothing precludes audio, or any other format, but the capture tool needs to load immediately, capture whatever, and disappear into the background. It'd then bug me at specific times to group these notes or add some context.
I'd be able to "zoom" by hour, day, week. It would work out what was during work hours and what was outside of work time, but I'd still be able to indicate personal or work. Tagging would be available, but not required.
I could take some note, or a group of notes "forward" to another tool. It'd store a link to that next system (Trello, work bug tracker, etc.) so I'd know the items were "actioned" in some way.
I'm not aware of any tool which really does this. Note-taking tools are developed for folks who love creating notes and not for people who don't love doing this (or have had excellent memories up to now and skipped development a love for taking a note on everything!)
- whalesalad 7y agoYour thinking is exactly in-line with mine: ultra low friction, but bug me later to fill in missing details if possible. Also, 'zooming' into or out of a time context is spot on as well. I would love to emit tiny little atomic bursts of thought all day and then later in the evening when I am winding down I could enter a mode where I am organizing/enriching/reconciling stuff. This is an action item, this is a bullshit note I can delete, this was my mood, etc... Thanks for taking the time to spill out your thoughts on this.
- bnj 7y agoFor years my go to option was nvAlt[^0] with a hotkey and some expansions set up with typinator to do all the repetitive stuff. Unfortunately that broke down for me when upgrades to macOS started to make it less reliable and I was transitioning more and more toward entry from mobile. I haven’t been able to come up with a solid workflow to replace that and it’s a pain because it worked so well for a long time. [0]: https://brettterpstra.com/projects/nvalt/ https://brettterpstra.com/projects/nvalt/