This kind of links to Alan Kay's insights on remembering content: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11809285 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11809285 S

This kind of links to Alan Kay's insights on remembering content: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11809285 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11809285 Same thread, on not taking notes, but capturing ideas: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11852959 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11852959 I'm a long time Luhmannian Zettelkasten fan, but thus far all my efforts on keeping one myself have failed. I still admire this method, though; maybe it's just optimized for a different brain than mine. I have had better success with Lion Kimbro's latest (2004-ish, I think) method for indexing paper notebooks. Thanks to a short correspondence with him (really nice guy!), I even dug up his blog posts on that: https://web.archive.org/web/20130304042318/http://lion.posterous.com/email-sent-to-a-notebooks-reader https://web.archive.org/web/20130304042318/http://lion.poste... https://web.archive.org/web/20130304042836/http://lion.posterous.com/revisiting-computerized-notekeeping https://web.archive.org/web/20130304042836/http://lion.poste... He outlines his "new" method more thoroughly and with images in the book "Mindhacker" by Ron & Marty Hale-Evans (Hack no 17 - Write Magnificient Notes). Kimbro's eralier book "How to Make a Complete Map of Every Thought You Think" has been on HN earlier, eg: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8078819 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8078819 All in all, I suppose it is just a matter of whether someone is a "free-form guy" or tends to prefer more complex, e.g. hierarchical notes. I would like to be more systematic, but I guess in reality I am not. I want to think that for me the perfect note taking technique is a well built-up "memory palace" + guilt-free forgetting. In other words, taking as little written notes as possible and retaining important things in my head as visual (often metaphorical) images. There is a world where that would keep all relevant ideas and connections always floating on top. And everything irrelevant would magically sink to the bottom of my brain. How easy. Unfortunately I have yet to visit that world.