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With wikis or note taking applications, I always find it hard to get into a habit of using them. I think this is largely because too much brain space is taken u

With wikis or note taking applications, I always find it hard to get into a habit of using them. I think this is largely because too much brain space is taken up with: 1. When should I write something here? 2. How should I organize it? For this reason, I'm currently trying out more of a "journal" model. The answers to the previous two questions are: 1. Write whenever you have an interesting idea, or you get that feeling that something important is about to get evicted from your brain cache. 2. Every note goes in YYYY-MM-DD.md on the day you make the note. You can add #tags to entries to track your thinking or progress on a particular topic over time. I've just started this, so we'll see how it turns out. But I'm optimistic.

meagher 6y ago
this is a good strategy. i use it too. vimwiki allows for maintaining a "journal" through diary mode: it automatically creates diary entries with whatever file-naming scheme you want, organizes a diary index page (table of contents), etc.
keithnz 6y ago
I started a while ago now with that, I just wrote a bunch of things into a file as a time line, and it slowly got more and more useful. Then I found I had a bunch of info around various topics scattered through the journal, so I started making topic guides. My topic guides are super useful now. I maintain and add them much more than the journal. So, to my point, I think recording things is useful, but it's best done in an organic way, where you just try things and adapt what you do based on how you are finding it. The only other thing I'd say is it is actually much nicer, in my experience, just using files (backed up by your favorite drive syncing software) and no specific tools. I also use markdown, but doesn't really matter.
asdff 6y ago
Gonna start doing this but with a single big text file, synced and linked to everywhere convenient. I figure one file will keep it tidier if I'm going to be doing grep to parse and sometimes appending other things to it.
thevagrant 6y ago
In the past I have done this with Evernote, making a new note each day. Not too different except then I can access/edit the notes on mobile and search them easily. It can be helpful when done daily (even as a reference). Saying that, I enjoy vim so must take a closer look at vim wiki.
ThatGeoGuy 6y ago
Ugh man I love vim but now I have to be the one to bring it up: this is exactly why org-capture is so useful. Jotting down quick notes / tasks / todos and being able to customize exactly how these get filed or templated is exactly why org-capture exists. That said after locking myself into Spacemacs to use org-mode and org-capture, I always wish there was a way to make org a bit more independent of Emacs, or at least a bit more collaborative. We use Asana at work for tasks / issues / todos and syncing that between my TODO.org and back again can be tiresome when trying to preserve information and context. I'm definitely better at maintaining my org files, but Asana preserves context in a more clean way because people can collaborate and add information to tickets, whereas they can't do that with org files.
lervag 6y ago
This is a very relevant comment! I think it is very important to lower the barrier between a thought and a note. I personally do this by having a shortcut on my keyboard that immediately opens my index/"scratchpad", which means I'm always ~0.1 seconds from writing down a thought. If I know exactly in which context it belongs, I'll use an fzf backed shortcut to very quickly find the relevant note (e.g. for Python notes I add it to my WIKIPATH/python.wiki). I actually recommend against putting everything in a diary, because I want my notes regarding a topic to be collected in the same place.

meagher 6y ago

this is a good strategy. i use it too. vimwiki allows for maintaining a "journal" through diary mode: it automatically creates diary entries with whatever file-naming scheme you want, organizes a diary index page (table of contents), etc.

keithnz 6y ago

I started a while ago now with that, I just wrote a bunch of things into a file as a time line, and it slowly got more and more useful. Then I found I had a bunch of info around various topics scattered through the journal, so I started making topic guides. My topic guides are super useful now. I maintain and add them much more than the journal. So, to my point, I think recording things is useful, but it's best done in an organic way, where you just try things and adapt what you do based on how you are finding it. The only other thing I'd say is it is actually much nicer, in my experience, just using files (backed up by your favorite drive syncing software) and no specific tools. I also use markdown, but doesn't really matter.

asdff 6y ago

Gonna start doing this but with a single big text file, synced and linked to everywhere convenient. I figure one file will keep it tidier if I'm going to be doing grep to parse and sometimes appending other things to it.

thevagrant 6y ago

In the past I have done this with Evernote, making a new note each day. Not too different except then I can access/edit the notes on mobile and search them easily. It can be helpful when done daily (even as a reference). Saying that, I enjoy vim so must take a closer look at vim wiki.

ThatGeoGuy 6y ago

Ugh man I love vim but now I have to be the one to bring it up: this is exactly why org-capture is so useful. Jotting down quick notes / tasks / todos and being able to customize exactly how these get filed or templated is exactly why org-capture exists. That said after locking myself into Spacemacs to use org-mode and org-capture, I always wish there was a way to make org a bit more independent of Emacs, or at least a bit more collaborative. We use Asana at work for tasks / issues / todos and syncing that between my TODO.org and back again can be tiresome when trying to preserve information and context. I'm definitely better at maintaining my org files, but Asana preserves context in a more clean way because people can collaborate and add information to tickets, whereas they can't do that with org files.

lervag 6y ago

This is a very relevant comment! I think it is very important to lower the barrier between a thought and a note. I personally do this by having a shortcut on my keyboard that immediately opens my index/"scratchpad", which means I'm always ~0.1 seconds from writing down a thought. If I know exactly in which context it belongs, I'll use an fzf backed shortcut to very quickly find the relevant note (e.g. for Python notes I add it to my WIKIPATH/python.wiki). I actually recommend against putting everything in a diary, because I want my notes regarding a topic to be collected in the same place.