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Personally I find indexing all my notes by time completely useless. What does it matter to me if I learned a software concept on Apr. 2 2017 or Sep. 8 2020? Wha

Personally I find indexing all my notes by time completely useless. What does it matter to me if I learned a software concept on Apr. 2 2017 or Sep. 8 2020? What is important for me is the ontology - the hierarchal structure of knowledge. If I have a sociology note (or question), I know where to look. Same with biology or physics or software. Knowledge in my head is not indexed by time; neither should my notes.

deepdmistry 5y ago
Author is not talking about indexing with time, rather they are talking about just writing with time.. viz you write forward as time flows forward.. You should definitely index by topic/content. Eg Cats: 1,5,7,8,22,23,55 Dogs: 2,3,9,10 ...
azinman2 5y ago
Except your learnings on the subject and in general are chronological. I rarely refer to notes older than the past 2 weeks… it’s largely an exercise in helping memorization by writing. Do you randomly go through old notes indexed by subject?
- alexpetralia 5y ago
  If I am adding a note to what I've taken notes on before (say antifragility or mimesis), I'll definitely review what I wrote previously just so I don't duplicate the same content. I don't broadly review my notes, only specifically sometimes if I want to consult my previous thoughts on a topic. Agreed that the main benefit is in writing down the note to begin with - this forces me to reflect on it, structure it, categorize it and formalize it.
dredmorbius 5y ago
Working in a bound codex format, it's very difficult to allocate specific space to specific projects. The simplest authoring or capturing mechanism is to simply move forward with time. There are a few variations on this. Alternate (or no) bindings give alternative organisational concepts. Loose-leaf (or insertion bindings), and index cards (no bindings, though these may also be ringed or otherwise organised, e.g., in pockets or sleeves), are two of the major ones. You can work a book both forward and back. I discuss this briefly in another comment to this thread. You can creat an index (or indices), or "spreads" dedicated to a specific topic. I use this on occasion in a bullet journal context, and one option is to have a spread of 2, 4, 6, 8, etc., pages on a topic (say, books to read, some concept, a specific activity log). If you run out of space, you create a new spread later in the book, and effectively have both index and linked-list chains that connect related blocks forward and back ("continued on page +xx", "continued from page -xx"). There are some fairly elaborate concepts for organising commonplace books, I ran across one such at the Internet Archive a while ago. I've hit on the idea of effectively creating a round-robin type file in a bound form, where I note specific ideas, references, or projects, and advance the best of these periodically. So best 5 ideas of the week (or month), best 5 of the quarter, best 5 of the year, etc. (You can choose different counts or concepts, the essence is that over a given period you capture of interest a finite set of items Over time that selection should proceed to a high-quality curation. This gets around the tendency of such lists to grow without limit.) And in the event all of this sounds terrifically or meticulously organised, it's not. I follow most of this in the breech, and am very far short of where I'd like to be. But that itself is one of the best aspects of this (or these) system(s): they're resilient. Follow them assiduously for weeks or months on end, then abandon them, then pick them up again. I'd never managed any previous journaling practice for more than a few months, maybe a year or so. This one's survivied several years, and expanded, with utility. I also make extensive use of index cards (excellent non-temporal data capture), and of course, various online systems, though my inclination has been to rely less on these if possible.

deepdmistry 5y ago

Author is not talking about indexing with time, rather they are talking about just writing with time.. viz you write forward as time flows forward.. You should definitely index by topic/content. Eg Cats: 1,5,7,8,22,23,55 Dogs: 2,3,9,10 ...

azinman2 5y ago

Except your learnings on the subject and in general are chronological. I rarely refer to notes older than the past 2 weeks… it’s largely an exercise in helping memorization by writing. Do you randomly go through old notes indexed by subject?

alexpetralia 5y ago
If I am adding a note to what I've taken notes on before (say antifragility or mimesis), I'll definitely review what I wrote previously just so I don't duplicate the same content. I don't broadly review my notes, only specifically sometimes if I want to consult my previous thoughts on a topic. Agreed that the main benefit is in writing down the note to begin with - this forces me to reflect on it, structure it, categorize it and formalize it.

dredmorbius 5y ago

Working in a bound codex format, it's very difficult to allocate specific space to specific projects. The simplest authoring or capturing mechanism is to simply move forward with time. There are a few variations on this. Alternate (or no) bindings give alternative organisational concepts. Loose-leaf (or insertion bindings), and index cards (no bindings, though these may also be ringed or otherwise organised, e.g., in pockets or sleeves), are two of the major ones. You can work a book both forward and back. I discuss this briefly in another comment to this thread. You can creat an index (or indices), or "spreads" dedicated to a specific topic. I use this on occasion in a bullet journal context, and one option is to have a spread of 2, 4, 6, 8, etc., pages on a topic (say, books to read, some concept, a specific activity log). If you run out of space, you create a new spread later in the book, and effectively have both index and linked-list chains that connect related blocks forward and back ("continued on page +xx", "continued from page -xx"). There are some fairly elaborate concepts for organising commonplace books, I ran across one such at the Internet Archive a while ago. I've hit on the idea of effectively creating a round-robin type file in a bound form, where I note specific ideas, references, or projects, and advance the best of these periodically. So best 5 ideas of the week (or month), best 5 of the quarter, best 5 of the year, etc. (You can choose different counts or concepts, the essence is that over a given period you capture of interest a finite set of items Over time that selection should proceed to a high-quality curation. This gets around the tendency of such lists to grow without limit.) And in the event all of this sounds terrifically or meticulously organised, it's not. I follow most of this in the breech, and am very far short of where I'd like to be. But that itself is one of the best aspects of this (or these) system(s): they're resilient. Follow them assiduously for weeks or months on end, then abandon them, then pick them up again. I'd never managed any previous journaling practice for more than a few months, maybe a year or so. This one's survivied several years, and expanded, with utility. I also make extensive use of index cards (excellent non-temporal data capture), and of course, various online systems, though my inclination has been to rely less on these if possible.