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Great deep dive into core principles of a good note-taking system. There are a few things I'd add. Curious to hear your thoughts. > 1) Captured ideas are bette

Great deep dive into core principles of a good note-taking system. There are a few things I'd add. Curious to hear your thoughts. > 1) Captured ideas are better than missed ones > 2) Adding new ideas is better than updating old ones. Updating notes in-place is inherently lossy, and I think it’s unnecessary. Yes. And, setting the intention to "add," not "update" reduces friction to capturing. When you write something in a "source of truth" - like a wiki - you've now made a commitment to keep it updated. (It's a commitment you probably don't want to keep). So, what do you do? You don't write stuff there. Instead you write it somewhere more ephemeral like Slack or a scratchpad. Setting the expectation that your notes are to be "added to," not "updated" lets you add notes with more ease. > 3) Ideas that can’t be recalled are worse than useless > Regardless of how you recall information back from your notes, a great note-taking system should make it trivial to get ideas out, as well as in. Two things I'd add here are i) It should be easy to deliver ideas to the right location (not just to recall them). This means copy-paste should be fast. Your notes should use integrations with the tools you use to make it easy to get them there in a snap. If there's a lot of friction to getting notes organized or shared, you're less likely to do it. It's also just annoying to have to highlight text, pull it apart with your mouse, open the app you need, and paste it in. ii) Most of what you need to recall is actually very simple to find. It's what you recently wrote. Most of what's most important from personal working notes is stuff that's immediately relevant. Stuff that was probably written in the past week or so. This explains why so many people use Apple Notes. It's messy but it's fast to get things down and you usually can find what you need using the recency filter. > 4) Time is essential to how we remember, and should be a first-class concept in a good note-taking system. YES YES YES. And the stuff that we need the most right now is most likely to be stuff we wrote recently. At https://bytebase.io https://bytebase.io we're building the fastest notepad for engineers. Our focus is on the notes that are most helpful to you as you do your work today.

thesephist 5y ago
Glad the ideas resonated with you! Two things you said stuck out to me: >And, setting the intention to "add," not "update" reduces friction to capturing. This is a subtle point I felt, but failed to capture, that you expressed very succinctly. Having the primary action be adding, rather than "keeping up to date", reduces the cognitive load of capture. As a result, we remember more with adding-based tools than replacement-based ones. >Most of what's most important from personal working notes is stuff that's immediately relevant. Stuff that was probably written in the past week or so. One thing that I've been thinking about, but haven't had a chance to form into a thesis yet, is the idea of our actions / workflows making sort of tacit modifications to our workspace that make the workspace more usable. For example, in a paper-and-pen world, if I had a note on a sticky note that I access a few times every day, it would inevitably end up somewhere very close to where I work, compared to notes I rarely access, which may be stuck inside books or on a far wall somewhere. This isn't necessarily because I brought it closer because it would make me more efficient or something -- it just ended up close by as a direct consequence of how I access the note frequently. I feel like affordances/tacit modifications of our workspaces like this are much rarer in digital tools, where the default state is not to change over time. The behavior to have most recently edited notes "nearby" for example takes explicit design in digital notes. Makes me wonder what other kinds of tacit modifications to our tools/workspaces we are leaving out in software tool design.

thesephist 5y ago

Glad the ideas resonated with you! Two things you said stuck out to me: >And, setting the intention to "add," not "update" reduces friction to capturing. This is a subtle point I felt, but failed to capture, that you expressed very succinctly. Having the primary action be adding, rather than "keeping up to date", reduces the cognitive load of capture. As a result, we remember more with adding-based tools than replacement-based ones. >Most of what's most important from personal working notes is stuff that's immediately relevant. Stuff that was probably written in the past week or so. One thing that I've been thinking about, but haven't had a chance to form into a thesis yet, is the idea of our actions / workflows making sort of tacit modifications to our workspace that make the workspace more usable. For example, in a paper-and-pen world, if I had a note on a sticky note that I access a few times every day, it would inevitably end up somewhere very close to where I work, compared to notes I rarely access, which may be stuck inside books or on a far wall somewhere. This isn't necessarily because I brought it closer because it would make me more efficient or something -- it just ended up close by as a direct consequence of how I access the note frequently. I feel like affordances/tacit modifications of our workspaces like this are much rarer in digital tools, where the default state is not to change over time. The behavior to have most recently edited notes "nearby" for example takes explicit design in digital notes. Makes me wonder what other kinds of tacit modifications to our tools/workspaces we are leaving out in software tool design.