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Do you look back over these notes and find them useful? Perhaps it's my ADD or the nature of the software products I create, but for the past 20 years of my c

Do you look back over these notes and find them useful? Perhaps it's my ADD or the nature of the software products I create, but for the past 20 years of my career, I've never kept significant notes and never found myself missing them. I'm wondering if there's something I don't know that I don't know here.

progman32 3y ago
Quickly check the last note to remember what I was doing? Often. Search through? Rarely, maybe once a month. The times I do though it's really helpful. I realized I was forgetting lots of semi important things that had no default place to write down. This frequency informed the design, in fact. Easy to write, easy to read the last couple entries, moderate difficulty in finding older entries (in exchange for lower cost of making individual notes). I think for me this is why it's so important for the system to be almost zero effort, else I'll just kinda stop using it. Just having an ubiquitous default place to dump something out of my brain helps. Of note. A very slightly modified version of this runs on an ancient Thinkpad in my bedroom for diary/mental health reasons. I find the separation helpful. Those I almost never ever read, but I think that's the point of those. Edit: at work I didn't really use this system, it's mostly for my own life. At work I used the ticket tracker, wikis, and calendar. I found that taking personal notes at work was best substituted by making actual documents that my team could find and use. There were much fewer uncategorized tasks at work.
simonw 3y ago
I refer to mine constantly. Just one example: I wrote this one a few days ago and I've already referred back to it for four separate projects in the past 48 hours: https://til.simonwillison.net/python/pyproject https://til.simonwillison.net/python/pyproject I use them for cooking. I refer to this one every time I want to make a Pisco Sour cocktail, for example: https://til.simonwillison.net/cocktails/pisco-sour https://til.simonwillison.net/cocktails/pisco-sour I see notes as a way of accumulating micro-skills - things I know how to do, but not well enough to remember off the top of my head.

progman32 3y ago

Quickly check the last note to remember what I was doing? Often. Search through? Rarely, maybe once a month. The times I do though it's really helpful. I realized I was forgetting lots of semi important things that had no default place to write down. This frequency informed the design, in fact. Easy to write, easy to read the last couple entries, moderate difficulty in finding older entries (in exchange for lower cost of making individual notes). I think for me this is why it's so important for the system to be almost zero effort, else I'll just kinda stop using it. Just having an ubiquitous default place to dump something out of my brain helps. Of note. A very slightly modified version of this runs on an ancient Thinkpad in my bedroom for diary/mental health reasons. I find the separation helpful. Those I almost never ever read, but I think that's the point of those. Edit: at work I didn't really use this system, it's mostly for my own life. At work I used the ticket tracker, wikis, and calendar. I found that taking personal notes at work was best substituted by making actual documents that my team could find and use. There were much fewer uncategorized tasks at work.

simonw 3y ago

I refer to mine constantly. Just one example: I wrote this one a few days ago and I've already referred back to it for four separate projects in the past 48 hours: https://til.simonwillison.net/python/pyproject https://til.simonwillison.net/python/pyproject I use them for cooking. I refer to this one every time I want to make a Pisco Sour cocktail, for example: https://til.simonwillison.net/cocktails/pisco-sour https://til.simonwillison.net/cocktails/pisco-sour I see notes as a way of accumulating micro-skills - things I know how to do, but not well enough to remember off the top of my head.