7 ms·

What finally got this to stick for me was abandoning all notion of structure and organization (and formal concepts like “logging” and “journaling”) and optimizi

What finally got this to stick for me was abandoning all notion of structure and organization (and formal concepts like “logging” and “journaling”) and optimizing fully for capture over retrieval, then relying on search tools and proximity for the latter. I have the OneNote icon in the notification area configured to create a new quick note and use it liberally. Occasionally I look through all the pages, especially the recent ones, aggregate and reorganize some, move others to an “archive” tab, and that’s it. The faintest - and most disorganized - ink is more powerful than the strongest memory.

mkoubaa 2y ago
It took me a couple years to realize this too. For the past five years I abandoned all structure. I use a literal log file. Chronological from top to bottom, with paragraph breaks for each workday. Higher than necessary verbosity, no points taken away for spelling or grammar mistakes.
- thfuran 2y ago
  It's hard to grep for misspelled words though.
  - tomrod 2y ago
    Maybe something like fzf? https://www.redhat.com/sysadmin/fzf-linux-fuzzy-finder https://www.redhat.com/sysadmin/fzf-linux-fuzzy-finder
- james_marks 2y ago
  I basically do this, too. One big text file. My twist that makes it work for me is a slightly modified text editor that I only use to edit this file. That way I’ve got a dedicated dock icon and context just for writing notes, but no other overhead. It’s important to me that it not feel like a product, and search works effortlessly (although subject to typo misses). My only tweak on the text editor is a shortcut to insert a timestamp and a chunk of new lines, which I do periodically so I can separate moments in time and see what I was working on when, how I fixed something, etc. I used obsidian for a while, but for my purposes it felt like work to organize and get “right”. I ended up writing a script to join all the files into one.
  - eagleseye 2y ago
    What editor did you modify?
    - james_marks 2y ago
      https://github.com/brunophilipe/Noto https://github.com/brunophilipe/Noto Looks like you can download from the App Store now, too. It’s dead simple and I’ve never found a bug in 6 years of daily use. It’s pretty awesome and shows a lot of restraint and skill on the author’s part.
- linsomniac 2y ago
  I've also been doing this for ~30 years. My current job's journal is 17,581 lines long. It's just a file I edit in screen (so I can attach to it from multiple machines) with a line with the date on it and then a sentence for every thing I've done that day. It is super helpful when we notice something strange has been going on since a specific date. I give my coworkers access to it and we will regularly refer back to it to try to figure out what was going on on a particular date. I also use it monthly to summarize for my 1:1 meeting with my boss. I also have a Kindle Scribe e-notebook that I use for my daily todo list. The writing experience with the Kindle is very good, in that it's very paper like, but the access and retrieval is pretty meh. I described it to my coworkers as: It's exactly like paper, only more expensive. I'm basically doing bullet journaling of my tasks, things I need to circle back with coworkers about, and stuff to chat about over lunch or shows people have recommended.
- xypage 2y ago
  I use something like this too, I will say it's helpful to have some simple command to append text to it so you can do it automatically, and then an extra little bit so if it's your first append of the day it adds the date. Sometimes I know something happened on a date and if you're just using paragraph breaks to separate it's harder to find but if you know it was related to this meeting on that date a few months ago you can go straight to it.
p5a0u9l 2y ago
This is the way. I’ve used zettelkasten, which is similar philosophy. Dump a thought and tag it for retrieval later. I prefer making this work with simple files and markdown. I have a colleague who uses email drafts well. My problem with OneNote and similar is the bloat of it. But, having images alongside text, when needed, is super nice.
- kingo55 2y ago
  You can have images alongside text in VS Code extensions too. Yes there's still bloat but you may already have VS Code open.
pizzathyme 2y ago
I’ve found a lot of success going one step further giving up on retrieval all together. I use either a new text file every time (which I never open again) or a physical notebook page (which I never refer back to). I get so much value from the act of writing itself.
- 8n4vidtmkvmk 2y ago
  Same. I just bought a scanner which I intend to use to scan and OCR my notes so that I can finally shred the mountain of paper I have. But I know I won't read the digital copy either so I'm not sure why I'm bothering. I guess it's the next step to putting it completely out of mind.
  - kingo55 2y ago
    Would you have an LLM summarise it for you instead?
    - 8n4vidtmkvmk 2y ago
      That's not a terrible idea. The OCR is struggling with my chicken scratch, but maybe ChatGPT can read the image directly. Might try one day. I was reading some of my notes...and it's mostly garbage, not sure it's even worth doing.
  - jcul 2y ago
    Same here too. It's the act of writing that's important to me. Keeps my thoughts in order while I'm switching tasks etc. I do use a rocketbook which is a little reusable notebook with a companion app you can use to quickly scan and upload the pages. I only scan the things I think I might refer back to, but it is seldom I actually do refer back.
- nashadelic 2y ago
  Essentially "working memory", gets discarded with the task
bongodongobob 2y ago
It's the exact same thing as a messy desk pre computers. I'm a big subscriber of that idea.
- deskamess 2y ago
  No surprise that I am a very strong proponent of messy desk. Organized chaos.
uNople 2y ago
> abandoning all notion of structure and organization ... optimizing fully for capture over retrieval, then relying on search tools and proximity I did this too - obsidian's daily note feature is fantastic, and you can extract out pages from it if you want/need to dedicate a document for a specific thing. Since it's just markdown, search is quick - and being able to use regex if I need to is awesome. The graph view, showing connections between notes is great if you create notes on specific subjects, and link them together, or pull sections out to explain more in depth - but it's not really that necessary unless you're building your own knowledgebase, which like all documentation suffers from rot over time. As long as your note-ing tool supports a good enough search that you can find things again, then I think it doesn't really matter what you use - as you said, writing it down is the important part.
- garbthetill 2y ago
  i never read the change logs, so just found out the concept of daily notes it looks pretty cool and might be what i need. Do you use any other templates?
- guardiang 2y ago
  I decided to use ChatGPT as my journal when they made it so they wouldn't be training on my data. Was talking to it all the time anyway, now I can pull the export whenever and just vectorize the whole thing... timestamps and all.
sublinear 2y ago
> The faintest - and most disorganized - ink is more powerful than the strongest memory. Very true words. Thank you.
Ezhik 2y ago
That was my trick for Obsidian. No organization or fancy plugins, just interlinked notes. Backlinks alone work amazingly well for me for retrieval.
zdc1 2y ago
This is what I do too. I use the Obsidian TimeStamper plugin with a nice shortcut (Ctrl + .), and then just have an append-only log of thoughts that each start with a timestamp on its own line. I'll throw in a tag or two if I'm motivated (#tickets/DEV-1234) and create a new file every month (e.g. 2024-07). It makes it very easy and fast to just switch to Obsidian and do a brain dump before lunch / end of day, or any time a thought hits me.

mkoubaa 2y ago

It took me a couple years to realize this too. For the past five years I abandoned all structure. I use a literal log file. Chronological from top to bottom, with paragraph breaks for each workday. Higher than necessary verbosity, no points taken away for spelling or grammar mistakes.

thfuran 2y ago
It's hard to grep for misspelled words though.
- tomrod 2y ago
  Maybe something like fzf? https://www.redhat.com/sysadmin/fzf-linux-fuzzy-finder https://www.redhat.com/sysadmin/fzf-linux-fuzzy-finder
james_marks 2y ago
I basically do this, too. One big text file. My twist that makes it work for me is a slightly modified text editor that I only use to edit this file. That way I’ve got a dedicated dock icon and context just for writing notes, but no other overhead. It’s important to me that it not feel like a product, and search works effortlessly (although subject to typo misses). My only tweak on the text editor is a shortcut to insert a timestamp and a chunk of new lines, which I do periodically so I can separate moments in time and see what I was working on when, how I fixed something, etc. I used obsidian for a while, but for my purposes it felt like work to organize and get “right”. I ended up writing a script to join all the files into one.
- eagleseye 2y ago
  What editor did you modify?
  - james_marks 2y ago
    https://github.com/brunophilipe/Noto https://github.com/brunophilipe/Noto Looks like you can download from the App Store now, too. It’s dead simple and I’ve never found a bug in 6 years of daily use. It’s pretty awesome and shows a lot of restraint and skill on the author’s part.
linsomniac 2y ago
I've also been doing this for ~30 years. My current job's journal is 17,581 lines long. It's just a file I edit in screen (so I can attach to it from multiple machines) with a line with the date on it and then a sentence for every thing I've done that day. It is super helpful when we notice something strange has been going on since a specific date. I give my coworkers access to it and we will regularly refer back to it to try to figure out what was going on on a particular date. I also use it monthly to summarize for my 1:1 meeting with my boss. I also have a Kindle Scribe e-notebook that I use for my daily todo list. The writing experience with the Kindle is very good, in that it's very paper like, but the access and retrieval is pretty meh. I described it to my coworkers as: It's exactly like paper, only more expensive. I'm basically doing bullet journaling of my tasks, things I need to circle back with coworkers about, and stuff to chat about over lunch or shows people have recommended.
xypage 2y ago
I use something like this too, I will say it's helpful to have some simple command to append text to it so you can do it automatically, and then an extra little bit so if it's your first append of the day it adds the date. Sometimes I know something happened on a date and if you're just using paragraph breaks to separate it's harder to find but if you know it was related to this meeting on that date a few months ago you can go straight to it.

p5a0u9l 2y ago

This is the way. I’ve used zettelkasten, which is similar philosophy. Dump a thought and tag it for retrieval later. I prefer making this work with simple files and markdown. I have a colleague who uses email drafts well. My problem with OneNote and similar is the bloat of it. But, having images alongside text, when needed, is super nice.

kingo55 2y ago
You can have images alongside text in VS Code extensions too. Yes there's still bloat but you may already have VS Code open.

pizzathyme 2y ago

I’ve found a lot of success going one step further giving up on retrieval all together. I use either a new text file every time (which I never open again) or a physical notebook page (which I never refer back to). I get so much value from the act of writing itself.

8n4vidtmkvmk 2y ago
Same. I just bought a scanner which I intend to use to scan and OCR my notes so that I can finally shred the mountain of paper I have. But I know I won't read the digital copy either so I'm not sure why I'm bothering. I guess it's the next step to putting it completely out of mind.
- kingo55 2y ago
  Would you have an LLM summarise it for you instead?
  - 8n4vidtmkvmk 2y ago
    That's not a terrible idea. The OCR is struggling with my chicken scratch, but maybe ChatGPT can read the image directly. Might try one day. I was reading some of my notes...and it's mostly garbage, not sure it's even worth doing.
- jcul 2y ago
  Same here too. It's the act of writing that's important to me. Keeps my thoughts in order while I'm switching tasks etc. I do use a rocketbook which is a little reusable notebook with a companion app you can use to quickly scan and upload the pages. I only scan the things I think I might refer back to, but it is seldom I actually do refer back.
nashadelic 2y ago
Essentially "working memory", gets discarded with the task

bongodongobob 2y ago

It's the exact same thing as a messy desk pre computers. I'm a big subscriber of that idea.

deskamess 2y ago
No surprise that I am a very strong proponent of messy desk. Organized chaos.

uNople 2y ago

> abandoning all notion of structure and organization ... optimizing fully for capture over retrieval, then relying on search tools and proximity I did this too - obsidian's daily note feature is fantastic, and you can extract out pages from it if you want/need to dedicate a document for a specific thing. Since it's just markdown, search is quick - and being able to use regex if I need to is awesome. The graph view, showing connections between notes is great if you create notes on specific subjects, and link them together, or pull sections out to explain more in depth - but it's not really that necessary unless you're building your own knowledgebase, which like all documentation suffers from rot over time. As long as your note-ing tool supports a good enough search that you can find things again, then I think it doesn't really matter what you use - as you said, writing it down is the important part.

garbthetill 2y ago
i never read the change logs, so just found out the concept of daily notes it looks pretty cool and might be what i need. Do you use any other templates?
guardiang 2y ago
I decided to use ChatGPT as my journal when they made it so they wouldn't be training on my data. Was talking to it all the time anyway, now I can pull the export whenever and just vectorize the whole thing... timestamps and all.

sublinear 2y ago

> The faintest - and most disorganized - ink is more powerful than the strongest memory. Very true words. Thank you.

Ezhik 2y ago

That was my trick for Obsidian. No organization or fancy plugins, just interlinked notes. Backlinks alone work amazingly well for me for retrieval.

zdc1 2y ago

This is what I do too. I use the Obsidian TimeStamper plugin with a nice shortcut (Ctrl + .), and then just have an append-only log of thoughts that each start with a timestamp on its own line. I'll throw in a tag or two if I'm motivated (#tickets/DEV-1234) and create a new file every month (e.g. 2024-07). It makes it very easy and fast to just switch to Obsidian and do a brain dump before lunch / end of day, or any time a thought hits me.