29 ms·

Notes apps are where ideas go to die, and that’s good

301 points by maguay 5y ago

kiba 5y ago
A primary feature of my note app resurface 10 random notes I made. I don't write them to forget, and I often use it to revise and expand upon my original notes, or more often these days: Linking them up and creating my own internal wiki.
dragonelite 5y ago
I jumped on the emacs org-roam bandwagon so far so good.
- dv35z 5y ago
  About to jump onto the wagon. Zero emacs experience. Hoping to achieve emacs -> org-mode, org-roam, automatically publish as a Hugo site as a knowledge base. Any essential, tips, advice or "I wish I had known earlier", lay it on me. This looks to be a trek.
  - Jtsummers 5y ago
    Go through the emacs tutorial (built-in) to learn how to navigate buffers and the system correctly. Learn incrementally. When you start with org-mode, start by treating it as a fancy outliner. Pick one or two new features to integrate into your toolkit every couple of weeks (maybe more or more often, everyone's pace is different) to use. Abuse the hell out of them to make it muscle memory, and then scale back to a more reasonable use. Install and use helm (others may suggest something different, but I like it). With it set up, when you start typing M-x and typing out a name, it will show you all the current possible matches and their keyboard shortcuts. Makes discovery much easier than without. It can be hooked into other parts of the system as well, but that's my #1 reason to recommend it to a new emacs user. Emacs discovery is pretty good, but this makes it even better. Use the "apropos" commands and the built-in help capabilities. C-h <various things> will tell you all about emacs, in general, and your current configuration. C-h b, for instance, tells you all the current key bindings (which can be different depending on the currently active modes). Use daemon mode and emacsclient. The key thing here, if you close all your open windows your emacs session doesn't terminate. You can reopen it and all your buffers will be accessible. You can force kill it (M-x server-force-delete) and restart the daemon later if you get into a weird state (possible early on when playing with your configuration). Read the manuals. The emacs manual and org-mode manual (I don't use org-roam so can't comment on it) are fantastic. Just browse through them, see if a table of contents item catches your attention, go to that section and read it. See if you can apply it, otherwise "forget" it and maybe later you'll think, "I want to do X, oh, wait, I think I saw that in the manual...". You learn it like any other thing in life. You probably didn't learn to use your OS of choice all in one go. You maybe started with a graphical interface or the shell. Learned a few key things, and only later learned more options that you were able to use to enhance your experience. "Oh, C-r lets me search backward through my shell history. That's cool, I'll use that a lot." But you probably didn't know it when you started learning (or forgot because you were inundated with information).
  - dragonelite 5y ago
    I followed the system crafters Emacs from scratch series to get some coding going, just to get a feel for emacs with evil(vim emulation). This weekend I started writing some notes in ORG and ORG-ROAM. But i was already used using links etc because i used obsidian note taking. Im not that comfortable yet to start customising my keybindings or rewrite my init/config file to really personalise emacs. System crafters playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLEoMzSkcN8oPH1au7H6B7bBJ4ZO7BXjSZ https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLEoMzSkcN8oPH1au7H6B7...
DonBarredora 5y ago
Offtopic: I can barely read this website, there's almost no contrast.
tmaly 5y ago
I have lost many good notes. Came across this book How to take smart notes last year. Now I am working on making a digital slip-box
- xydinesh 5y ago
  I feel like almost everyone is working on some variant of digital garden/zettlekasten/digital slip box since the pandemic started. At least that's when I found out about it.
genewitch 5y ago
Inb4 notebooks tambien It's okay to waste ideas.
deleted 5y ago
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brnt 5y ago
Most notes I take I never read again. That's OK, that's what archives are for. Same with mail, bills, etc. It's still useful to collect them, and in case of notes write them. Sometimes I chuck out a whole bunch of Todos just to free my mind and it never turned into regret. I think that is why all these new note taking tools and ideas are not that important; the most important bit in note taking is taking the damn note.
dodgerdan 5y ago
Joplin has changed my life. I now keep notes on everything and frequently reorganize and edit them. I’ve no idea what the author is suggesting as an alternative, not making notes?
- diarrhea 5y ago
  I regularly use Joplin and like it very much. But I guess note taking isn't for me. It's very far from having changed my life. Joplin is amazing for taking media-rich notes, combining PDFs attachments, images, bulleted lists, URLs, code snippets etc. into a single document. No other tool I know provides such richness. Whenever I need this unique combination, Joplin is a good bet. Regularly, I have files that fit nowhere, like a stray PDF that neither fits in my personal DMS (paperless-ng) nor into literature management software (Zotero); Joplin often is a good place for it. Allows to delete the file locally but still have confidence it's kept (with Joplin backed by Nextcloud, which is in turn backed up). On the other hand, I recently flattened (that is: deleted a bunch of superfluous, deep hierarchy) my Joplin notebooks. Flat is better than nested in this case, it was a good change to make. I wonder if "frequently reorganizing" notes is not an anti-pattern. Who wants to do that? It's a waste of time.
- ReleaseCandidat 5y ago
  > I’ve no idea what the author is suggesting as an alternative, not making notes? It doesn't matter where or how you write down your notes. It's just so you get the security of having that somewhere and not needing to think about it any more.
- playpause 5y ago
  If you actually get some value from re-reading and reorganising your old notes, that's great. It sounds like you don't have the problem the author is addressing. But many people write tons of notes and save them but almost never look at them again, and subsequently worry they're wasting time writing and saving all these notes. This author is saying this worrying is misplaced, it's not a waste of time. The act of writing a note is valuable for tidying up the ideas in your head, even if you never look at them again. And that while you don't really need to save them (as you've already had the value from writing them), it can be easier and quicker to just save all your random notes, as a general policy, because trying to determine which notes have potential future utility is fairly pointless and stressful activity. Notes don't really cost anything to store. This policy doesn't work so well for physical possessions.
Rygian 5y ago
Reminds me of one of the writing tips by Neil Gaiman [1]: "Start a compost heap" The act of entering information into a Notes app feeds the compost heap in a more or less indirect way, which then acts as subconscious nurture for later creativity. If you of the creative kind, that is. [1] https://writingcooperative.com/neil-gaimans-top-13-writing-tips-d78848fd85f0?gi=b5884cec9d49 https://writingcooperative.com/neil-gaimans-top-13-writing-t...
- ms4720 5y ago
  Zettelkasten comes to mind, look at logseq if interested
  - michaelbarton 5y ago
    This looks interesting. It sort of reminds me of an open source obsidian. I tried obsidian for a while but ended up switching to a dropbox directory full of markdown files. Felt likely slightly less friction to start a new page in vim, and also be able use ripgrep to find old ideas.
fluder 5y ago
Even if one note out of a hundred turns out to be useful, this is already a victory. I use and recommend https://fsnot.es https://fsnot.es
Tempest1981 5y ago
> Then you try to relocate a note, only to find > that your favorite app’s search doesn’t seem > to be as good as you thought it was at first. > Now we don’t feel safe forgetting anymore I guess I'm lucky that this rarely happens. Search works great, and is instant. I kept waiting for deeper insight, like a system of prioritzation, or culling tricks. But the article seemed to just repeat itself: writing things down frees our brain, and forgetting is ok. We feel value in doing so, ok.
jb1991 5y ago
This author's ideas are hardly original, Stephen King has said for a long time that keeping notes is a great way for a bad idea to stick around. relevant: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30098219 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30098219
- JohnJamesRambo 5y ago
  What human ideas are truly original?
  - Litost 5y ago
    Your comment and a comment below about "frequently reorganizing" notes is not an anti-pattern reminded me of this. "All truly wise thoughts have been thought already thousands of times; but to make them truly ours, we must think them over again honestly, till they take root in our personal experience." – Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Amusingly, also tying in with what someone above said about starting a compost heap, that quote has stuck with me after reading "Just Enough is Plenty" by Samuel Alexander [1] (an introduction to Henry Thoreau's economic ideas) whose first preface is entitled "Compost Capitalism". [1] Available as a post-consumerist 'pay what you want basis' here - https://simplicitycollective.com/just-enough-is-plenty-thoreaus-alternative-economics https://simplicitycollective.com/just-enough-is-plenty-thore...
    - parksy 5y ago
      "What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun. Is there anything of which one can say, 'Look! This is something new'? It was here already, long ago; it was here before our time." I mean ~2000+ years ago people understood this. Day to day relatable ideas generally come to anyone involved in the cutting edge of any era of humanity, and such ideas will generally resonate with one's contemporaries who are likely thinking similar things. Billions of us can't really claim to have found something new. We didn't invent countability, or factoring, or primes. But it's also a bit of a cynical lie that may comfort some of us, that being ordinary is okay, because ordinary is normal. Over the millennia we managed to turn philosophy into science, mathematics into machines, and miniaturise them into our hands, generate energy and resources unthinkable to our ancestors, and create networks of algorithms complex enough we offload a significant portion of day to day thinking and planning. These are new things. Is it true wisdom? Define true wisdom - my understanding is there is no objectivity in such matters. There is only the balance and friction between forces of imagination wrought out by human minds and hands, always building on knowledge that came before. Take away all knowledge, and the cycle will continue, it's just what people do. We think, we imagine, we create. I ramble but it probably feels day to day like nothing is ever new, and everything is always being recycled, but it's in this compost heap that new ideas ferment and take root, so that is an analogy I'll be adopting henceforth (not in the least as it makes me less disappointed in my own unpursued ideas).
ljm 5y ago
One of the reasons I have a nice notebook and pen to write with is because I can enjoy getting stuff out of my head and then, probably, never returning to it again. Just a simple thing so I enjoy the act of offloading in whatever way I feel like doing (scribbling, thoughtful stuff, drawing, whatever) and then I've freed up some space in my head so I can relax. I could try the same with a notekeeping app but I feel like I have to actually maintain them, or work with their system. Not to mention, it requires screen time that I might not want. A pen and some paper has no such system so it's liberating.
gjvc 5y ago
Never underestimate the creative power of shredding your old notebooks. Makes space (both physically and mentally) for new ideas.
- barrenko 5y ago
  Yup, love doing this, one of the best feelings in the world. Recommend actual fire.
  - gjvc 5y ago
    or compost
- playpause 5y ago
  Interesting, can you expand on how this creates mental space for new ideas?
surrTurr 5y ago
For me, it‘s the process of taking notes that provides value. The notes are mere byproducts.
screwgoth 5y ago
Love it. Write ideas to forget 'em. Reminded me of a blog I wrote a few years ago: https://medium.com/hackernoon/the-life-cycle-of-a-to-do-list-83b2a23e29fd https://medium.com/hackernoon/the-life-cycle-of-a-to-do-list...
inferense 5y ago
some of them get to live another day if their context is executable and searchable. Works well in https://acreom.com https://acreom.com
pxtail 5y ago
Is this GPT-3 generated? This looks like affiliate links content farm designed specifically to nerdsnipe HN visitors: topic which are popular here:writing and organizing knowledge, plenty of affiliate links to most popular books frequently mentioned over here, some quotes sprinkled with truisms here and there, unknown author
- bowwoden 5y ago
  interesting theory. gpt is good at writing about writing.
pydry 5y ago
IME when the note is intended to be dropped off and picked up at a particular time it's useful (e.g. remember to pack insect repellent -> add to packing list -> wait 4 weeks -> check packing list). I'm increasingly convinced of the value of checklists for small items - especially repeated tasks. If it's a cool idea for, like, a new business or the start of essay without any predefined time to pick it up and work on it it ends up being kind of pointless and just creates a mess. For those things, if it's a good idea it'll pop up in your head again, probably in a better form. Note taking has to act like a pipeline to be useful.
- nikanj 5y ago
  I have a checklist for "what to bring to the gym". It's saved my bacon numerous times. Same for "what to pack for a job-related day trip" etc
  - KineticLensman 5y ago
    Ditto for camping. After one trip, I inventoried everything I took out of the car and added items that I wished I'd had. And then typed it up and left copies in my gear bin.
  - cillian64 5y ago
    I also do this! A bonus benefit is you can go back through the list when packing up to come home so you don’t leave your charger/toothbrush/… in a hotel. I always feel a little obsessive or over-careful making lists for this sort of thing but it’s amazing how much easier and less stressful it makes packing for me.
em-bee 5y ago
i write stuff down so i can stop memorizing it. sometimes i get back to that, sometimes i don't. it doesn't matter. if it is important i will remember it, or remember that i wrote a note about it (and then hopefully find that note). if it is not important then it will stay there left ignored. the problem is i seem to treat browsertabs the same way. i open tabs intending to look at them later. then forget about them, and so they accumulate. i could close all the tabs, but some actually are important. and so i have to go through them, and clean them out once in a while.
- vidarh 5y ago
  For open browser tabs, have a look at Onetab (browser extension). It'll close the tabs but keep them in a list however long you want. It lets you reopen things from the list with a click and optionally remove the ones you reopen from the list. In practice I find I very rarely go back to one of them, but for the rare occasions I do it matters, and knowing the urls are all preserved makes me much more likely to actually click that button now and again.
  - sk0g 5y ago
    Not to sound obtuse, but that just sounds like browser history at that point. What sets it apart, aside from only storing the "fatal pages" - the pages that tabs were killed at?
    - orlp 5y ago
      The browser history has been destroyed in my experience. No one seems to care for its usability. One-page applications, pushState/replaceState, non-descript title pages and a horrible UI for it in the browsers, it goes on.
      - alan-hn 5y ago
        I actually use my browser history, but I forget how much utility I actually get out of it until I clear it :S
    - 5y ago
kpt 5y ago
Bookmarked this for reading again in 2 weeks, thank you for sharing this was very relatable.
- tartoran 5y ago
  It will come back on HN again.
nickwarren 5y ago
I get what the author is saying, but I write down ideas to delegate to myself for later exploration. I find search is often good enough to get to what I'm looking for within a couple of queries, and a general read through of the collection makes for a great diving board when it comes to getting started on brainstorming
fuadnafiz98 5y ago
too long to read right now. Bookmarking this to read in the weekend
ttiurani 5y ago
This is quite extreme: you absolutely can and will lose amazing ideas unless you can find them later written down. This comes up in interviews with great creative people all the time. Just listen to David Lynch: "I write [ideas] down so I don't commit suicide later having forgotten the idea. I've forgotten probably two or three major ideas, and it'll make you sick, just horrible. Write the idea down. You'll say: I'll never forget this idea. Ah-uh: you can forget them." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uHhf76z6BkM&t=197s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uHhf76z6BkM&t=197s
- Retric 5y ago
  Seeming like a good idea is easy, actually being a good idea is much harder.
  - hannasanarion 5y ago
    The first step to discovering whether an idea that seems good is actually good is to review it at another date, which necessitates writing it down.
    - Retric 5y ago
      I was writing them down for a while until I realized the ones I forgot about tended to have obvious flaws almost like my subconscious was filtering things.
      - angusiasty 5y ago
        It actually does :)
      - throw10920 5y ago
        Most of my ideas that I've almost-forgot (passed from easy remembrance, only regained with much mental agony) and forgot-but-wrote-down don't have obvious flaws in them. Maybe you have a good mental filter, but for many of us we just have bad memory.
  - 5y ago
Cypher 5y ago
a note app is like a toy box
gexla 5y ago
These articles are as bad as the notes people they are bagging on. The trouble is that people try to fit the kitchen sink into the note app and that doesn't work. As a programmer, I have specific workflows for each note that I take. Example. I want to try stand-up one day. Each snippet that I think of as a joke, I write down in a note. All snippets go into the same space. Sometimes I think of a snippet which could extend an existing bit (a joke which is larger than a one liner.) Once this page got to a certain length, I didn't even have to think about new snippets anymore. All I would have to do is open this page and they would jump out at me. One approach is that if I feel like I got nothing, I can simply scan the list and find something which hits me. Like, I'll see a line and immediately think of something which could extend it. Or I'll see multiple lines which hit me and I can come up with something which mixes the two together. This may start a new branch of a joke. Apply this to every reason I might add a note. Yes, I have what's basically a trash bin where notes go to die. But anything else is sort of like these jokes, they go into a place where I have a specific way to use them. Within my notes app, I have a system of navigation and discovery, which is basically like a website where you follow links and use metadata to place things in certain spots (unless you're adding to an existing note.) I use a template which fills in most of what I need and then the remaining is a quick add. I can then query that metadata as if it's a real DB. I use Obsidian for this. I used Roam at one point, but it didn't have a way to hide things which weren't in my navigation path. Everything leaks, because, NETWORK! Nah, I look at it is like building spreadsheets. Each spreadsheet has a certain usage. I don't cram all the data into one spreadsheet. I use multiple spreadsheets. Then the app I use (Obsidian) has the above mentioned tools for nice navigation.
- chrisweekly 5y ago
  Thanks for sharing; I'm also an ex-Roam, daily Obsidian user, with similar (or at least overlapping) reasons for switching to obsdmd, and have a comparable workflow.
  - gexla 5y ago
    I love Roam, it would be on a short list of things to take with me to the after life. It's just that at the end of the day, all I really wanted was something to manage MD files and run queries on the key-value data in the front-matter.
polote 5y ago
What's funny with people like OP is that they forget that most people never take notes and are still able to achieve as much as people who take notes. It is like developers who use vim, they deliver as much as people who use VS code. But instead of saying 'yeah whatever' they try to prove that their way is the right way
- aprescott 5y ago
  I'm struggling to tie your comment to what the author is getting at. The advice to write thoughts down so you can stop thinking about them isn't offered as a way to achieve more efficient performance, it's to let yourself stop worrying.
ds89 5y ago
This is exactly what I love about Git. I don't have to worry about throwing away code and can go back in history whenever I want to (even though I rarely need to).
- cillian64 5y ago
  Yep, it’s very freeing being able to just delete things even if you think you might need them later. I just recently resurrected a test which was deleted 6 months ago because it wasn’t useful at the time but is now. Version control also saves a lot of commented-out code sitting around - delete it, and if something needs doing to it then make a ticket/task.
thenerdhead 5y ago
While the stuff we write down is not valuable, the process of doing so is very valuable. Most people don't even take notes or use a shoebox/second brain to store these things. What most lifelong notetakers know is that the notes themselves aren't important, but rather the process of physically writing the notes, internalizing the information, and building new connections in your head is quite important. The remnants of this process are mostly throw away from the author's perspective, but may be novel to a random person. This reminds me of someone uncovering a journal of nonsensical information saying "What's this about?" to then the author says "That's how I figured it out". The beauty of it all is that it's meaningful to the author and not necessarily anyone else.
- jakub_g 5y ago
  I noticed "I think through writing". Whenever I need to implement a new feature I first explore status quo and write it down on confluence, jira etc. Then write down that I'm gonna do, alternatives etc. It takes time but makes it way clearer how to move forward on fuzzy things.
- petra 5y ago
  It's not the stuff we write down is useless. let's assume that without a good note-taking app, we reuse 1% of our notes. And with a good note-taking app we reuse 2% of our notes. Our feeling will stay the same:those notes are a trash heap. But we doubled the number of the "ideas" we can access, which seems like a good ROI. And definetly, the process is useful.
  - thenerdhead 5y ago
    I have a high barrier of entry to my shoebox personally. Totally agreed that 99% of notes are throw-away, but the 1% are absolute gems.
  - Noumenon72 5y ago
    Yeah, but why not reuse like... 99% of your notes? Why not just write things down only if you're going to need them again, and in a way that you will be able to find them when you need them? I'm more likely to reread a note many, many times than to take one I never reuse, because every time I need to use a cardinality aggregation or invert a conditional, I go back to the notes for that.
lycopodiopsida 5y ago
I think that author has a point - most of the time I also save pages just to have it saved, and never look at it. But, on the other side, if you need something again, you need it badly in my experience. DevonThink solved this problem for me years ago. I just pull in all the documents/pdf/web pages/text, let it auto-categorize them && forget. The only difference is that it has quit powerful and fast search, so that I can find them again in seconds. Bookmarks never worked for me and I don't have time and dedication for Zettelkasten-like systems.
- 1123581321 5y ago
  How did you get to where you could trust DEVONthink auto-categorization? It seems powerful, but I would be afraid of forgetting where I put something. And there's no auto-wikilinking based on classification, right?
  - lycopodiopsida 5y ago
    I try to keep a simple tree (no more than 2 levels) in all DBs and for many things I just keep a kitchensink-style groups, like „General“. DT struggles with categorization if the amount of items in a group is small - the categorization is based on statistics and keywords. For bigger groups it makes a solid guess most of the time. I would als not be afraid of losing something: the search is very solid and there is also a custom search with filters and boolean logic if you need it. The only thing I need is to remember that I have it and the topic for keywords, then I can find it with search.
thesaintlives 5y ago
Notes apps? Never found a good one that really worked for me. Rhodia notebooks - simple, effective and permanent. I write stuff down to remember, the ideas never die...
- civilized 5y ago
  I just buy the $0.89 notebooks from the grocery store to be honest. And my kids have scribbled over half the pages.
Semiapies 5y ago
Just to get it out of the way: 300 weight #6b7280 on white. Someone hates eyes. As for the content...meh. The file(s) or book(s) you put your ideas in are like compost piles. You throw things in them, and every once in a while you get out the pitchfork and turn them over. You see if some half-baked concept has become fertilizer for your current thoughts. You admire how some old brainstorm has rotted down to goo after you've learned more on a subject. You fish out some weirdly undecayed thing and go, "Oh, I was looking for that."
- dsr_ 5y ago
  Reader mode: don't use browsers without it.
  - Semiapies 5y ago
    Reader mode is no excuse for bad design.
deleted 5y ago
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Mountain_Skies 5y ago
Article headlines are increasingly telling you how you should interpret the story before you even read it. And that's bad.
- alecbz 5y ago
  I'm not a fan of this headline style but it's not really telling you how to interpret the story any more than "It's fine that ideas get forgotten in notes apps" or any other normative sentence would be. It's just kind of a cheesey way of making a surprising normative claim.
ridewinter 5y ago
It's the same mechanism as Morning Pages - write exactly 3 pages right when you wake up, whatever is on your mind. It's tremendously helpful to move you past whatever you're stuck on in life. You can write "I don't want to be writing this" over and over if you like. But it turns out that you usually have good things to say.
auggierose 5y ago
Since I started note-taking a few years ago, my productivity has increased dramatically. The biggest benefit is that you can stop working on an idea for a bit, then come back later and read it back from disk to main memory, often now seeing issues with what you have written down that are apparent now, but were not back then. Writing a paper about your idea is the ultimate form of this, but of course most of the time overkill. But it is good to bundle everything up in a paper once enough stuff has accumulated.
sebastianconcpt 5y ago
We need to forget, but we first must feel safe forgetting. Reminds me of some years ago when I finally burnt all sketches and notes, many actually quite pleasant to watch, of a startup I've shutdown in 2015. I think for me, that it was kind of a rite of passage of what it wasn't meant to be. And I certainly needed the feeling of moving on.
vmoore 5y ago
Erm, no, I execute on all my bookmarks and put them to use. Because I said I would. I don't use an app for bookmarking, just a massive 10000+ list of URLs in a boring text file that I revisit constantly to GTD. As for exobrains, yeah I'm an externalist[0] through and through, and not ashamed of that. For journaling and note-taking I use Standard Notes. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Externalism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Externalism
egypturnash 5y ago
For a while Evernote was where my ideas went, and where they got developed into full-blown scripts for comics by me and my creative partner. A lot of ideas went there to die, some went there to hibernate, some went there to be nurtured and grow. Then Evernote got rewritten as a bunch of sluggish Electron garbage that got in the way and now I never touch the fucking thing. I really wish I could find a replacement. (Criteria, before someone suggests their favorite: allows collaboration, works on Macs, iOS, Windows, and Android, with native apps.)
quanticle 5y ago
Flipping through your old notes suddenly “feels like sifting through stale garbage,” as Dan Shipper found, disillusioned after building a galaxy of notes in Roam Research. I don't have that experience with my notes at all. I regularly refer to old notes. A sample of the queries my notebook (really a folder full of text files) has answered: - How did I sort those things in bash? - What were the setup steps for that software? - Where did I get this fact that I'm quoting? - I have a bad impression of this movie, why is that? - Why did I choose to architect this code this way; what pitfalls was I avoiding? - What was that brand of tea that I like? - What voltage RAM does that old laptop use? Sure, I can reconstruct all of this information with a combination of Google, experimentation, and physical examination of the relevant items. But it takes time. Having this information compiled in an easily grep-able format is like having information in RAM, versus having to fetch it from the hard drive.
alexpotato 5y ago
Couple stories I would share here: LOSING AN ENTIRE INBOX Once while doing a work rotation in Hong Kong, I was RDP'ing back into my NYC machine and I accidentally deleted ALL of the email in my inbox. At first, I was crushed and felt awful. I quickly moved past this thinking that if anyone really needed me for something, they would reach out again. If I lost anything crucial, I could probably go ask someone else. This was very freeing! Tim Ferriss has a similar exercise where he recommends acting as if you have $0 cash/credit card access etc every so often. This helps you a. move that state from "unknown" to "known" b. help you see that many situations seem bad only b/c you've never lived through them. IDEAS IN THE ROLODEX I was watching a documentary about the early days of Mad Magazine. They mentioned that one of the writers had a Rolodex of notecards with random ideas he had stored and organized. If they were stuck coming up with an idea, he would spin through the rolodex till he found one that worked. I've always liked this story as it's a form of decoupling (asynchronous?) idea inception from idea need. It requires more "caching" than trying to have ideas on demand with the trade off that you are not coming up with the ideas under pressure. While ideas sometimes get generated faster in the immediate need timeframe, I would imagine that also sometimes cuts the scope of those ideas. The decoupled model allows your idea generation boundaries to be much larger.
Arainach 5y ago
Since it looks like the author posted this article: Please use better color selection. Slightly darker gray on light gray has almost no contrast and is impossible for many to read (and causes strain in those who can). You can automatically check against web accessibility with tools such as WAVE: https://wave.webaim.org/ https://wave.webaim.org/ In your case, #6B7280 on #F2F2F2 is a contrast ratio of 4.31 which is below all standards for normal sized text. Even for large fonts it would only be valid at lower compliance levels and not at AAA.
dSebastien 5y ago
(Shameless plug) For those interested in essays about note-taking, thinking, writing & PKM, note that Matthew's article is also part of the PKM journal [1], an online publication that I've recently launched. [1]: https://pkmjournal.com/ https://pkmjournal.com/
hashtones 5y ago
Not to mention, it's not so much because we forget them, but by writing them down they can be later cued and synchronized to other ideas for fruitful promulgation.
the__alchemist 5y ago
Notes are what let me carry transient thoughts from places where I can't execute them to places where I can. My memory isn't that good, so it's a sort of Sci-Fi augmentation!
kerrsclyde 5y ago
I've conditioned myself to think if something is worth saving then it is worth spending time to give it a meaningful title, tag it and put it in the right notebook. Without these added details I agree it is pointless.
Jernik 5y ago
It looks like the poster is the author here, so hopefully he sees this feedback. Please, please, please pick a better contrast ratio for your text. Grey on slightly-lighter-grey is a terrible color combination for reading. I read the first paragraph and gave up on it because it wasn't worth the eye strain.
jeffrogers 5y ago
Also worth noting that almost no effort has been made by the folks making note taking apps to help people make better use of their entries. Sure, they've implemented things like gallery views, filters, and tagging, but these are all passive and require the user to seek out the information. Why not active features like an API that makes code snippets available in my IDE, a feature that surfaces recipe recommendations from my collection, or how about automatically organizing my receipts by month and offering an expense summary report? There are a ton of features that could be made to help people better access and use the notes they make.
Spivakov 5y ago
Op's logic in one sentence - "writing notes without going back to them is useless => writing notes is useless"
eatonphil 5y ago
The biggest benefit for me of note taking apps are tracking whiskeys and blog post ideas. Everything else I try to use the note tacking apps for (parks near me I'd like to check out, movies to watch) it ends up a write-only log. But for whiskeys and blog posts, it is very useful and I depend on it weekly at least.
for_i_in_range 5y ago
This addresses the problems with the hype related to digital note tools but does not apply to the effectiveness of a real analog zettelkasten: https://youtube.com/user/scottscheper https://youtube.com/user/scottscheper
socialdemocrat 5y ago
I think this story is both right and wrong. I take a lot of notes. But mine are a bit more like descriptions to myself. To me they are invaluable because I forget too easily. As a software developer there are too many technologies, libraries and tools to master. I cannot keep it all in my head. But I find that that writing articles around what I have learned is most effective. I put those online and I can later use Google to relocate them. I actually do this quite a lot. I also found Ulysses and iA writer very useful as they let you categorize notes in a hierarchy and store in markdown. I have most so much notes from using obscure formates. Sticking to markdown has been my best choice for note taking for many years. Another habit I have found useful is to begin highlighting and scribbling in the margins of books. It allows me to reopen a book later and more easily recall important stuff. I avoided this most of my life as I wanted to keep books in pristine conditions, but all you get is this perfectly nice looking book which you read at some point but which no longer hold value because you will never bother reading the whole thing over again.
xaleb 5y ago
I agree with the part where taking notes lets us structure our ideas and helps us remember. However, here's one principle that I found very useful: note-taking should be structured in such a way that you _encounter_ notes that you took previously. This is part of the idea behind Roam's backlinks, but I think no technology by itself will help here. The problem is having the correct approach: it should be possible to list notes on a topic, and they should be reviewed from time to time to see if they are relevant or not. This way, ideas which were noted down can be reviewed, kept track of, and pruned -- just seeing the title of a note is more than enough for this. I've been doing that for more than half a year on various topics -- world locations, news, films and books I've seen/read, CS papers, research ideas -- and the results are great: I can remember more and I call recall and describe my memories more fluidly. What's important is that note-taking isn't the only way that "old" ideas can be re-encountered. If you want to remember information about the world, just take a look at the world map from time to time, point to places and think about what you want to remember.
CRConrad 5y ago
The start-of-sentence capitalisation threw me off for a while there: So they meant just ordinary notes apps after all; and here I thought they meant Notes apps... As in Lotus Notes. At least the first half of the sentence would have made just as much sense my way.

301 points by maguay 5y ago

kiba 5y ago

A primary feature of my note app resurface 10 random notes I made. I don't write them to forget, and I often use it to revise and expand upon my original notes, or more often these days: Linking them up and creating my own internal wiki.

dragonelite 5y ago

I jumped on the emacs org-roam bandwagon so far so good.

dv35z 5y ago
About to jump onto the wagon. Zero emacs experience. Hoping to achieve emacs -> org-mode, org-roam, automatically publish as a Hugo site as a knowledge base. Any essential, tips, advice or "I wish I had known earlier", lay it on me. This looks to be a trek.
- Jtsummers 5y ago
  Go through the emacs tutorial (built-in) to learn how to navigate buffers and the system correctly. Learn incrementally. When you start with org-mode, start by treating it as a fancy outliner. Pick one or two new features to integrate into your toolkit every couple of weeks (maybe more or more often, everyone's pace is different) to use. Abuse the hell out of them to make it muscle memory, and then scale back to a more reasonable use. Install and use helm (others may suggest something different, but I like it). With it set up, when you start typing M-x and typing out a name, it will show you all the current possible matches and their keyboard shortcuts. Makes discovery much easier than without. It can be hooked into other parts of the system as well, but that's my #1 reason to recommend it to a new emacs user. Emacs discovery is pretty good, but this makes it even better. Use the "apropos" commands and the built-in help capabilities. C-h <various things> will tell you all about emacs, in general, and your current configuration. C-h b, for instance, tells you all the current key bindings (which can be different depending on the currently active modes). Use daemon mode and emacsclient. The key thing here, if you close all your open windows your emacs session doesn't terminate. You can reopen it and all your buffers will be accessible. You can force kill it (M-x server-force-delete) and restart the daemon later if you get into a weird state (possible early on when playing with your configuration). Read the manuals. The emacs manual and org-mode manual (I don't use org-roam so can't comment on it) are fantastic. Just browse through them, see if a table of contents item catches your attention, go to that section and read it. See if you can apply it, otherwise "forget" it and maybe later you'll think, "I want to do X, oh, wait, I think I saw that in the manual...". You learn it like any other thing in life. You probably didn't learn to use your OS of choice all in one go. You maybe started with a graphical interface or the shell. Learned a few key things, and only later learned more options that you were able to use to enhance your experience. "Oh, C-r lets me search backward through my shell history. That's cool, I'll use that a lot." But you probably didn't know it when you started learning (or forgot because you were inundated with information).
- dragonelite 5y ago
  I followed the system crafters Emacs from scratch series to get some coding going, just to get a feel for emacs with evil(vim emulation). This weekend I started writing some notes in ORG and ORG-ROAM. But i was already used using links etc because i used obsidian note taking. Im not that comfortable yet to start customising my keybindings or rewrite my init/config file to really personalise emacs. System crafters playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLEoMzSkcN8oPH1au7H6B7bBJ4ZO7BXjSZ https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLEoMzSkcN8oPH1au7H6B7...

DonBarredora 5y ago

Offtopic: I can barely read this website, there's almost no contrast.

tmaly 5y ago

I have lost many good notes. Came across this book How to take smart notes last year. Now I am working on making a digital slip-box

xydinesh 5y ago
I feel like almost everyone is working on some variant of digital garden/zettlekasten/digital slip box since the pandemic started. At least that's when I found out about it.

genewitch 5y ago

Inb4 notebooks tambien It's okay to waste ideas.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

brnt 5y ago

Most notes I take I never read again. That's OK, that's what archives are for. Same with mail, bills, etc. It's still useful to collect them, and in case of notes write them. Sometimes I chuck out a whole bunch of Todos just to free my mind and it never turned into regret. I think that is why all these new note taking tools and ideas are not that important; the most important bit in note taking is taking the damn note.

dodgerdan 5y ago

Joplin has changed my life. I now keep notes on everything and frequently reorganize and edit them. I’ve no idea what the author is suggesting as an alternative, not making notes?

diarrhea 5y ago
I regularly use Joplin and like it very much. But I guess note taking isn't for me. It's very far from having changed my life. Joplin is amazing for taking media-rich notes, combining PDFs attachments, images, bulleted lists, URLs, code snippets etc. into a single document. No other tool I know provides such richness. Whenever I need this unique combination, Joplin is a good bet. Regularly, I have files that fit nowhere, like a stray PDF that neither fits in my personal DMS (paperless-ng) nor into literature management software (Zotero); Joplin often is a good place for it. Allows to delete the file locally but still have confidence it's kept (with Joplin backed by Nextcloud, which is in turn backed up). On the other hand, I recently flattened (that is: deleted a bunch of superfluous, deep hierarchy) my Joplin notebooks. Flat is better than nested in this case, it was a good change to make. I wonder if "frequently reorganizing" notes is not an anti-pattern. Who wants to do that? It's a waste of time.
ReleaseCandidat 5y ago
> I’ve no idea what the author is suggesting as an alternative, not making notes? It doesn't matter where or how you write down your notes. It's just so you get the security of having that somewhere and not needing to think about it any more.
playpause 5y ago
If you actually get some value from re-reading and reorganising your old notes, that's great. It sounds like you don't have the problem the author is addressing. But many people write tons of notes and save them but almost never look at them again, and subsequently worry they're wasting time writing and saving all these notes. This author is saying this worrying is misplaced, it's not a waste of time. The act of writing a note is valuable for tidying up the ideas in your head, even if you never look at them again. And that while you don't really need to save them (as you've already had the value from writing them), it can be easier and quicker to just save all your random notes, as a general policy, because trying to determine which notes have potential future utility is fairly pointless and stressful activity. Notes don't really cost anything to store. This policy doesn't work so well for physical possessions.

Rygian 5y ago

Reminds me of one of the writing tips by Neil Gaiman [1]: "Start a compost heap" The act of entering information into a Notes app feeds the compost heap in a more or less indirect way, which then acts as subconscious nurture for later creativity. If you of the creative kind, that is. [1] https://writingcooperative.com/neil-gaimans-top-13-writing-tips-d78848fd85f0?gi=b5884cec9d49 https://writingcooperative.com/neil-gaimans-top-13-writing-t...

ms4720 5y ago
Zettelkasten comes to mind, look at logseq if interested
- michaelbarton 5y ago
  This looks interesting. It sort of reminds me of an open source obsidian. I tried obsidian for a while but ended up switching to a dropbox directory full of markdown files. Felt likely slightly less friction to start a new page in vim, and also be able use ripgrep to find old ideas.

fluder 5y ago

Even if one note out of a hundred turns out to be useful, this is already a victory. I use and recommend https://fsnot.es https://fsnot.es

Tempest1981 5y ago

> Then you try to relocate a note, only to find > that your favorite app’s search doesn’t seem > to be as good as you thought it was at first. > Now we don’t feel safe forgetting anymore I guess I'm lucky that this rarely happens. Search works great, and is instant. I kept waiting for deeper insight, like a system of prioritzation, or culling tricks. But the article seemed to just repeat itself: writing things down frees our brain, and forgetting is ok. We feel value in doing so, ok.

jb1991 5y ago

This author's ideas are hardly original, Stephen King has said for a long time that keeping notes is a great way for a bad idea to stick around. relevant: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30098219 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30098219

JohnJamesRambo 5y ago
What human ideas are truly original?
- Litost 5y ago
  Your comment and a comment below about "frequently reorganizing" notes is not an anti-pattern reminded me of this. "All truly wise thoughts have been thought already thousands of times; but to make them truly ours, we must think them over again honestly, till they take root in our personal experience." – Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Amusingly, also tying in with what someone above said about starting a compost heap, that quote has stuck with me after reading "Just Enough is Plenty" by Samuel Alexander [1] (an introduction to Henry Thoreau's economic ideas) whose first preface is entitled "Compost Capitalism". [1] Available as a post-consumerist 'pay what you want basis' here - https://simplicitycollective.com/just-enough-is-plenty-thoreaus-alternative-economics https://simplicitycollective.com/just-enough-is-plenty-thore...
  - parksy 5y ago
    "What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun. Is there anything of which one can say, 'Look! This is something new'? It was here already, long ago; it was here before our time." I mean ~2000+ years ago people understood this. Day to day relatable ideas generally come to anyone involved in the cutting edge of any era of humanity, and such ideas will generally resonate with one's contemporaries who are likely thinking similar things. Billions of us can't really claim to have found something new. We didn't invent countability, or factoring, or primes. But it's also a bit of a cynical lie that may comfort some of us, that being ordinary is okay, because ordinary is normal. Over the millennia we managed to turn philosophy into science, mathematics into machines, and miniaturise them into our hands, generate energy and resources unthinkable to our ancestors, and create networks of algorithms complex enough we offload a significant portion of day to day thinking and planning. These are new things. Is it true wisdom? Define true wisdom - my understanding is there is no objectivity in such matters. There is only the balance and friction between forces of imagination wrought out by human minds and hands, always building on knowledge that came before. Take away all knowledge, and the cycle will continue, it's just what people do. We think, we imagine, we create. I ramble but it probably feels day to day like nothing is ever new, and everything is always being recycled, but it's in this compost heap that new ideas ferment and take root, so that is an analogy I'll be adopting henceforth (not in the least as it makes me less disappointed in my own unpursued ideas).

ljm 5y ago

One of the reasons I have a nice notebook and pen to write with is because I can enjoy getting stuff out of my head and then, probably, never returning to it again. Just a simple thing so I enjoy the act of offloading in whatever way I feel like doing (scribbling, thoughtful stuff, drawing, whatever) and then I've freed up some space in my head so I can relax. I could try the same with a notekeeping app but I feel like I have to actually maintain them, or work with their system. Not to mention, it requires screen time that I might not want. A pen and some paper has no such system so it's liberating.

gjvc 5y ago

Never underestimate the creative power of shredding your old notebooks. Makes space (both physically and mentally) for new ideas.

barrenko 5y ago
Yup, love doing this, one of the best feelings in the world. Recommend actual fire.
- gjvc 5y ago
  or compost
playpause 5y ago
Interesting, can you expand on how this creates mental space for new ideas?

surrTurr 5y ago

For me, it‘s the process of taking notes that provides value. The notes are mere byproducts.

screwgoth 5y ago

Love it. Write ideas to forget 'em. Reminded me of a blog I wrote a few years ago: https://medium.com/hackernoon/the-life-cycle-of-a-to-do-list-83b2a23e29fd https://medium.com/hackernoon/the-life-cycle-of-a-to-do-list...

inferense 5y ago

some of them get to live another day if their context is executable and searchable. Works well in https://acreom.com https://acreom.com

pxtail 5y ago

Is this GPT-3 generated? This looks like affiliate links content farm designed specifically to nerdsnipe HN visitors: topic which are popular here:writing and organizing knowledge, plenty of affiliate links to most popular books frequently mentioned over here, some quotes sprinkled with truisms here and there, unknown author

bowwoden 5y ago
interesting theory. gpt is good at writing about writing.

pydry 5y ago

IME when the note is intended to be dropped off and picked up at a particular time it's useful (e.g. remember to pack insect repellent -> add to packing list -> wait 4 weeks -> check packing list). I'm increasingly convinced of the value of checklists for small items - especially repeated tasks. If it's a cool idea for, like, a new business or the start of essay without any predefined time to pick it up and work on it it ends up being kind of pointless and just creates a mess. For those things, if it's a good idea it'll pop up in your head again, probably in a better form. Note taking has to act like a pipeline to be useful.

nikanj 5y ago
I have a checklist for "what to bring to the gym". It's saved my bacon numerous times. Same for "what to pack for a job-related day trip" etc
- KineticLensman 5y ago
  Ditto for camping. After one trip, I inventoried everything I took out of the car and added items that I wished I'd had. And then typed it up and left copies in my gear bin.
- cillian64 5y ago
  I also do this! A bonus benefit is you can go back through the list when packing up to come home so you don’t leave your charger/toothbrush/… in a hotel. I always feel a little obsessive or over-careful making lists for this sort of thing but it’s amazing how much easier and less stressful it makes packing for me.

em-bee 5y ago

i write stuff down so i can stop memorizing it. sometimes i get back to that, sometimes i don't. it doesn't matter. if it is important i will remember it, or remember that i wrote a note about it (and then hopefully find that note). if it is not important then it will stay there left ignored. the problem is i seem to treat browsertabs the same way. i open tabs intending to look at them later. then forget about them, and so they accumulate. i could close all the tabs, but some actually are important. and so i have to go through them, and clean them out once in a while.

vidarh 5y ago
For open browser tabs, have a look at Onetab (browser extension). It'll close the tabs but keep them in a list however long you want. It lets you reopen things from the list with a click and optionally remove the ones you reopen from the list. In practice I find I very rarely go back to one of them, but for the rare occasions I do it matters, and knowing the urls are all preserved makes me much more likely to actually click that button now and again.
- sk0g 5y ago
  Not to sound obtuse, but that just sounds like browser history at that point. What sets it apart, aside from only storing the "fatal pages" - the pages that tabs were killed at?
  - orlp 5y ago
    The browser history has been destroyed in my experience. No one seems to care for its usability. One-page applications, pushState/replaceState, non-descript title pages and a horrible UI for it in the browsers, it goes on.
    - alan-hn 5y ago
      I actually use my browser history, but I forget how much utility I actually get out of it until I clear it :S
  - 5y ago

kpt 5y ago

Bookmarked this for reading again in 2 weeks, thank you for sharing this was very relatable.

tartoran 5y ago
It will come back on HN again.

nickwarren 5y ago

I get what the author is saying, but I write down ideas to delegate to myself for later exploration. I find search is often good enough to get to what I'm looking for within a couple of queries, and a general read through of the collection makes for a great diving board when it comes to getting started on brainstorming

fuadnafiz98 5y ago

too long to read right now. Bookmarking this to read in the weekend

ttiurani 5y ago

This is quite extreme: you absolutely can and will lose amazing ideas unless you can find them later written down. This comes up in interviews with great creative people all the time. Just listen to David Lynch: "I write [ideas] down so I don't commit suicide later having forgotten the idea. I've forgotten probably two or three major ideas, and it'll make you sick, just horrible. Write the idea down. You'll say: I'll never forget this idea. Ah-uh: you can forget them." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uHhf76z6BkM&t=197s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uHhf76z6BkM&t=197s

Retric 5y ago
Seeming like a good idea is easy, actually being a good idea is much harder.
- hannasanarion 5y ago
  The first step to discovering whether an idea that seems good is actually good is to review it at another date, which necessitates writing it down.
  - Retric 5y ago
    I was writing them down for a while until I realized the ones I forgot about tended to have obvious flaws almost like my subconscious was filtering things.
    - angusiasty 5y ago
      It actually does :)
    - throw10920 5y ago
      Most of my ideas that I've almost-forgot (passed from easy remembrance, only regained with much mental agony) and forgot-but-wrote-down don't have obvious flaws in them. Maybe you have a good mental filter, but for many of us we just have bad memory.
- 5y ago

Cypher 5y ago

a note app is like a toy box

gexla 5y ago

These articles are as bad as the notes people they are bagging on. The trouble is that people try to fit the kitchen sink into the note app and that doesn't work. As a programmer, I have specific workflows for each note that I take. Example. I want to try stand-up one day. Each snippet that I think of as a joke, I write down in a note. All snippets go into the same space. Sometimes I think of a snippet which could extend an existing bit (a joke which is larger than a one liner.) Once this page got to a certain length, I didn't even have to think about new snippets anymore. All I would have to do is open this page and they would jump out at me. One approach is that if I feel like I got nothing, I can simply scan the list and find something which hits me. Like, I'll see a line and immediately think of something which could extend it. Or I'll see multiple lines which hit me and I can come up with something which mixes the two together. This may start a new branch of a joke. Apply this to every reason I might add a note. Yes, I have what's basically a trash bin where notes go to die. But anything else is sort of like these jokes, they go into a place where I have a specific way to use them. Within my notes app, I have a system of navigation and discovery, which is basically like a website where you follow links and use metadata to place things in certain spots (unless you're adding to an existing note.) I use a template which fills in most of what I need and then the remaining is a quick add. I can then query that metadata as if it's a real DB. I use Obsidian for this. I used Roam at one point, but it didn't have a way to hide things which weren't in my navigation path. Everything leaks, because, NETWORK! Nah, I look at it is like building spreadsheets. Each spreadsheet has a certain usage. I don't cram all the data into one spreadsheet. I use multiple spreadsheets. Then the app I use (Obsidian) has the above mentioned tools for nice navigation.

chrisweekly 5y ago
Thanks for sharing; I'm also an ex-Roam, daily Obsidian user, with similar (or at least overlapping) reasons for switching to obsdmd, and have a comparable workflow.
- gexla 5y ago
  I love Roam, it would be on a short list of things to take with me to the after life. It's just that at the end of the day, all I really wanted was something to manage MD files and run queries on the key-value data in the front-matter.

polote 5y ago

What's funny with people like OP is that they forget that most people never take notes and are still able to achieve as much as people who take notes. It is like developers who use vim, they deliver as much as people who use VS code. But instead of saying 'yeah whatever' they try to prove that their way is the right way

aprescott 5y ago
I'm struggling to tie your comment to what the author is getting at. The advice to write thoughts down so you can stop thinking about them isn't offered as a way to achieve more efficient performance, it's to let yourself stop worrying.

ds89 5y ago

This is exactly what I love about Git. I don't have to worry about throwing away code and can go back in history whenever I want to (even though I rarely need to).

cillian64 5y ago
Yep, it’s very freeing being able to just delete things even if you think you might need them later. I just recently resurrected a test which was deleted 6 months ago because it wasn’t useful at the time but is now. Version control also saves a lot of commented-out code sitting around - delete it, and if something needs doing to it then make a ticket/task.

thenerdhead 5y ago

While the stuff we write down is not valuable, the process of doing so is very valuable. Most people don't even take notes or use a shoebox/second brain to store these things. What most lifelong notetakers know is that the notes themselves aren't important, but rather the process of physically writing the notes, internalizing the information, and building new connections in your head is quite important. The remnants of this process are mostly throw away from the author's perspective, but may be novel to a random person. This reminds me of someone uncovering a journal of nonsensical information saying "What's this about?" to then the author says "That's how I figured it out". The beauty of it all is that it's meaningful to the author and not necessarily anyone else.

jakub_g 5y ago
I noticed "I think through writing". Whenever I need to implement a new feature I first explore status quo and write it down on confluence, jira etc. Then write down that I'm gonna do, alternatives etc. It takes time but makes it way clearer how to move forward on fuzzy things.
petra 5y ago
It's not the stuff we write down is useless. let's assume that without a good note-taking app, we reuse 1% of our notes. And with a good note-taking app we reuse 2% of our notes. Our feeling will stay the same:those notes are a trash heap. But we doubled the number of the "ideas" we can access, which seems like a good ROI. And definetly, the process is useful.
- thenerdhead 5y ago
  I have a high barrier of entry to my shoebox personally. Totally agreed that 99% of notes are throw-away, but the 1% are absolute gems.
- Noumenon72 5y ago
  Yeah, but why not reuse like... 99% of your notes? Why not just write things down only if you're going to need them again, and in a way that you will be able to find them when you need them? I'm more likely to reread a note many, many times than to take one I never reuse, because every time I need to use a cardinality aggregation or invert a conditional, I go back to the notes for that.

lycopodiopsida 5y ago

I think that author has a point - most of the time I also save pages just to have it saved, and never look at it. But, on the other side, if you need something again, you need it badly in my experience. DevonThink solved this problem for me years ago. I just pull in all the documents/pdf/web pages/text, let it auto-categorize them && forget. The only difference is that it has quit powerful and fast search, so that I can find them again in seconds. Bookmarks never worked for me and I don't have time and dedication for Zettelkasten-like systems.

1123581321 5y ago
How did you get to where you could trust DEVONthink auto-categorization? It seems powerful, but I would be afraid of forgetting where I put something. And there's no auto-wikilinking based on classification, right?
- lycopodiopsida 5y ago
  I try to keep a simple tree (no more than 2 levels) in all DBs and for many things I just keep a kitchensink-style groups, like „General“. DT struggles with categorization if the amount of items in a group is small - the categorization is based on statistics and keywords. For bigger groups it makes a solid guess most of the time. I would als not be afraid of losing something: the search is very solid and there is also a custom search with filters and boolean logic if you need it. The only thing I need is to remember that I have it and the topic for keywords, then I can find it with search.

thesaintlives 5y ago

Notes apps? Never found a good one that really worked for me. Rhodia notebooks - simple, effective and permanent. I write stuff down to remember, the ideas never die...

civilized 5y ago
I just buy the $0.89 notebooks from the grocery store to be honest. And my kids have scribbled over half the pages.

Semiapies 5y ago

Just to get it out of the way: 300 weight #6b7280 on white. Someone hates eyes. As for the content...meh. The file(s) or book(s) you put your ideas in are like compost piles. You throw things in them, and every once in a while you get out the pitchfork and turn them over. You see if some half-baked concept has become fertilizer for your current thoughts. You admire how some old brainstorm has rotted down to goo after you've learned more on a subject. You fish out some weirdly undecayed thing and go, "Oh, I was looking for that."

dsr_ 5y ago
Reader mode: don't use browsers without it.
- Semiapies 5y ago
  Reader mode is no excuse for bad design.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

Mountain_Skies 5y ago

Article headlines are increasingly telling you how you should interpret the story before you even read it. And that's bad.

alecbz 5y ago
I'm not a fan of this headline style but it's not really telling you how to interpret the story any more than "It's fine that ideas get forgotten in notes apps" or any other normative sentence would be. It's just kind of a cheesey way of making a surprising normative claim.

ridewinter 5y ago

It's the same mechanism as Morning Pages - write exactly 3 pages right when you wake up, whatever is on your mind. It's tremendously helpful to move you past whatever you're stuck on in life. You can write "I don't want to be writing this" over and over if you like. But it turns out that you usually have good things to say.

auggierose 5y ago

Since I started note-taking a few years ago, my productivity has increased dramatically. The biggest benefit is that you can stop working on an idea for a bit, then come back later and read it back from disk to main memory, often now seeing issues with what you have written down that are apparent now, but were not back then. Writing a paper about your idea is the ultimate form of this, but of course most of the time overkill. But it is good to bundle everything up in a paper once enough stuff has accumulated.

sebastianconcpt 5y ago

We need to forget, but we first must feel safe forgetting. Reminds me of some years ago when I finally burnt all sketches and notes, many actually quite pleasant to watch, of a startup I've shutdown in 2015. I think for me, that it was kind of a rite of passage of what it wasn't meant to be. And I certainly needed the feeling of moving on.

vmoore 5y ago

Erm, no, I execute on all my bookmarks and put them to use. Because I said I would. I don't use an app for bookmarking, just a massive 10000+ list of URLs in a boring text file that I revisit constantly to GTD. As for exobrains, yeah I'm an externalist[0] through and through, and not ashamed of that. For journaling and note-taking I use Standard Notes. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Externalism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Externalism

egypturnash 5y ago

For a while Evernote was where my ideas went, and where they got developed into full-blown scripts for comics by me and my creative partner. A lot of ideas went there to die, some went there to hibernate, some went there to be nurtured and grow. Then Evernote got rewritten as a bunch of sluggish Electron garbage that got in the way and now I never touch the fucking thing. I really wish I could find a replacement. (Criteria, before someone suggests their favorite: allows collaboration, works on Macs, iOS, Windows, and Android, with native apps.)

quanticle 5y ago

Flipping through your old notes suddenly “feels like sifting through stale garbage,” as Dan Shipper found, disillusioned after building a galaxy of notes in Roam Research. I don't have that experience with my notes at all. I regularly refer to old notes. A sample of the queries my notebook (really a folder full of text files) has answered: - How did I sort those things in bash? - What were the setup steps for that software? - Where did I get this fact that I'm quoting? - I have a bad impression of this movie, why is that? - Why did I choose to architect this code this way; what pitfalls was I avoiding? - What was that brand of tea that I like? - What voltage RAM does that old laptop use? Sure, I can reconstruct all of this information with a combination of Google, experimentation, and physical examination of the relevant items. But it takes time. Having this information compiled in an easily grep-able format is like having information in RAM, versus having to fetch it from the hard drive.

alexpotato 5y ago

Couple stories I would share here: LOSING AN ENTIRE INBOX Once while doing a work rotation in Hong Kong, I was RDP'ing back into my NYC machine and I accidentally deleted ALL of the email in my inbox. At first, I was crushed and felt awful. I quickly moved past this thinking that if anyone really needed me for something, they would reach out again. If I lost anything crucial, I could probably go ask someone else. This was very freeing! Tim Ferriss has a similar exercise where he recommends acting as if you have $0 cash/credit card access etc every so often. This helps you a. move that state from "unknown" to "known" b. help you see that many situations seem bad only b/c you've never lived through them. IDEAS IN THE ROLODEX I was watching a documentary about the early days of Mad Magazine. They mentioned that one of the writers had a Rolodex of notecards with random ideas he had stored and organized. If they were stuck coming up with an idea, he would spin through the rolodex till he found one that worked. I've always liked this story as it's a form of decoupling (asynchronous?) idea inception from idea need. It requires more "caching" than trying to have ideas on demand with the trade off that you are not coming up with the ideas under pressure. While ideas sometimes get generated faster in the immediate need timeframe, I would imagine that also sometimes cuts the scope of those ideas. The decoupled model allows your idea generation boundaries to be much larger.

Arainach 5y ago

Since it looks like the author posted this article: Please use better color selection. Slightly darker gray on light gray has almost no contrast and is impossible for many to read (and causes strain in those who can). You can automatically check against web accessibility with tools such as WAVE: https://wave.webaim.org/ https://wave.webaim.org/ In your case, #6B7280 on #F2F2F2 is a contrast ratio of 4.31 which is below all standards for normal sized text. Even for large fonts it would only be valid at lower compliance levels and not at AAA.

dSebastien 5y ago

(Shameless plug) For those interested in essays about note-taking, thinking, writing & PKM, note that Matthew's article is also part of the PKM journal [1], an online publication that I've recently launched. [1]: https://pkmjournal.com/ https://pkmjournal.com/

hashtones 5y ago

Not to mention, it's not so much because we forget them, but by writing them down they can be later cued and synchronized to other ideas for fruitful promulgation.

the__alchemist 5y ago

Notes are what let me carry transient thoughts from places where I can't execute them to places where I can. My memory isn't that good, so it's a sort of Sci-Fi augmentation!

kerrsclyde 5y ago

I've conditioned myself to think if something is worth saving then it is worth spending time to give it a meaningful title, tag it and put it in the right notebook. Without these added details I agree it is pointless.

Jernik 5y ago

It looks like the poster is the author here, so hopefully he sees this feedback. Please, please, please pick a better contrast ratio for your text. Grey on slightly-lighter-grey is a terrible color combination for reading. I read the first paragraph and gave up on it because it wasn't worth the eye strain.

jeffrogers 5y ago

Also worth noting that almost no effort has been made by the folks making note taking apps to help people make better use of their entries. Sure, they've implemented things like gallery views, filters, and tagging, but these are all passive and require the user to seek out the information. Why not active features like an API that makes code snippets available in my IDE, a feature that surfaces recipe recommendations from my collection, or how about automatically organizing my receipts by month and offering an expense summary report? There are a ton of features that could be made to help people better access and use the notes they make.

Spivakov 5y ago

Op's logic in one sentence - "writing notes without going back to them is useless => writing notes is useless"

eatonphil 5y ago

The biggest benefit for me of note taking apps are tracking whiskeys and blog post ideas. Everything else I try to use the note tacking apps for (parks near me I'd like to check out, movies to watch) it ends up a write-only log. But for whiskeys and blog posts, it is very useful and I depend on it weekly at least.

for_i_in_range 5y ago

This addresses the problems with the hype related to digital note tools but does not apply to the effectiveness of a real analog zettelkasten: https://youtube.com/user/scottscheper https://youtube.com/user/scottscheper

socialdemocrat 5y ago

I think this story is both right and wrong. I take a lot of notes. But mine are a bit more like descriptions to myself. To me they are invaluable because I forget too easily. As a software developer there are too many technologies, libraries and tools to master. I cannot keep it all in my head. But I find that that writing articles around what I have learned is most effective. I put those online and I can later use Google to relocate them. I actually do this quite a lot. I also found Ulysses and iA writer very useful as they let you categorize notes in a hierarchy and store in markdown. I have most so much notes from using obscure formates. Sticking to markdown has been my best choice for note taking for many years. Another habit I have found useful is to begin highlighting and scribbling in the margins of books. It allows me to reopen a book later and more easily recall important stuff. I avoided this most of my life as I wanted to keep books in pristine conditions, but all you get is this perfectly nice looking book which you read at some point but which no longer hold value because you will never bother reading the whole thing over again.

xaleb 5y ago

I agree with the part where taking notes lets us structure our ideas and helps us remember. However, here's one principle that I found very useful: note-taking should be structured in such a way that you _encounter_ notes that you took previously. This is part of the idea behind Roam's backlinks, but I think no technology by itself will help here. The problem is having the correct approach: it should be possible to list notes on a topic, and they should be reviewed from time to time to see if they are relevant or not. This way, ideas which were noted down can be reviewed, kept track of, and pruned -- just seeing the title of a note is more than enough for this. I've been doing that for more than half a year on various topics -- world locations, news, films and books I've seen/read, CS papers, research ideas -- and the results are great: I can remember more and I call recall and describe my memories more fluidly. What's important is that note-taking isn't the only way that "old" ideas can be re-encountered. If you want to remember information about the world, just take a look at the world map from time to time, point to places and think about what you want to remember.

CRConrad 5y ago

The start-of-sentence capitalisation threw me off for a while there: So they meant just ordinary notes apps after all; and here I thought they meant Notes apps... As in Lotus Notes. At least the first half of the sentence would have made just as much sense my way.