1. Capture: every interesting idea that I think up or read is immediately stored in Google Keep (on mobile or laptop). It can be very rough at this point, the goal is simply to not forget.
2. Transcribe & Organize: every weekend, I go through the notes I accumulated during the week. It tends to be between 10 and 30 notes. Sometimes the note is "read this article" or "catch up on all newsletters", so understanding a single note can take over an hour. On some tough weekends the process takes an entire day, but that is invariably a day where I feel like I learned a ton. Once the note is cleaned up (transcribed), I feel like I understand it. At this point I rarely forget it - it has been absorbed into my brain. The final step here is "categorizing" the note. I classify it using OneNote with tabs like "Clinical psychology" (nested under "Psychology") or "Investment management" (nested under "Finance") or "Math" or "Physics". This way, in the future, I don't have a million notes scattered around, but one clear place I know where to look. On average, this process takes 2-4 hours per weekend. I never accumulate bookmarks, Google Keep notes or unread emails more than a week to prevent existential dread.
3. Revisit: generally, people recommend you revisit your notes from time to time. I almost never do this. But if I ever am thinking about "Marketing" or "Sociology", I have an immense, high SNR repository of everything I've ever found valuable on the topic. I've done this for software interviews and it's been incredibly helpful.
Overall, I attribute this system to making me much smarter. It has been an invaluable investment.
My files are 'logbook', 'life', 'project-1', 'project-2', etc. At any time I can hit a key and capture an idea/meeting to any of those places, and as I'm taking notes I can mark anything as a todo and schedule/deadline them. In the 'agenda' I can see a single overview of all my todo items, and my schedule, from all my notes.
I've tried a lot of systems (paper, apps, cli notes, etc) and org-mode clicks in a way nothing else has for me.
[0]: https://orgmode.org
I like it especially when it's a single URL as OneNote automatically appends a snapshot/screenshot of the page in the note itself, so even if coming back to it much much later, less risk of the original webpage being 404 not found.
[1] https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/use-email-to-send...
It's neat you simply decided to use it to hold on to things for about a week, prefering instead to store them in OneNote (or anything you want), a more stable product. Thanks for this advice!
I keep my recipes in Keep and on my personal website, because I often amend them. However I discovered that printed recipes are much more pleasant to use.
Likewise, I'd much rather have a dirty notebook to sketch and write on when I'm working in the garage, or anywhere that's not my desk
But I have a notebook and a (fountain!) pen on my desk all day long, right next to my keyboard and mouse.
I use Goodnotes[1] on my iPad for my notes in which you can do all of that. Works great for me.
But i can understand that a digital solution is not always a better solution for every situation/lifestyle...
I have been transitioning to Remarkable 2 to see if there's some benefit to uniting the concepts. So far, though, I seem to be taking fewer notes.
Allows you to concentrate better, the result is much more refined and as an added bonus, fountain pens are nice.
I've even seen a user run offline OCR on it, and we may soon be able to integrate with metadata to make those notes searchable. Credit to https://github.com/utopiah , post here: https://www.reddit.com/r/RemarkableTablet/comments/jj5yt2/of...
Yeah, it was distracting. I spent more time writing my own note-taking tool than I did listening in class. It went poorly.
Establish limits and set boundaries, if you have to. If that means a locked room, desk, trunk, or other means, then do that. Often the best way to establish boundaries is to assert them.
You situation sounds intrinsically toxic. I understand you're married with family --- if that's where the privacy issues are (rather than at work), you might want to consider family counseling. A lack of basic trust or respect is a bad sign.
Meantime, digital encrypted systems may be more appropriate, though personal notations and code can help with paper --- you're not the first person to have nosy neighbours.
Reasonable or not, one difficulty I have with keeping any kind of journal is that I keep thinking of the fact that it may eventually be read and exposed to the cruelest, least charitable interpretation.
Of course, for work we also use shared digital docs, but what goes in there has first been through my ugly scribbles on paper.
How 'bout a pencil and paper?
I hate any _friction_ to writing a note. I just want to get it out of my brain (or find it, if a previous thought) as quickly as possible.
With nvALT you start typing and it is searching immediately, but if there is no match and you hit enter you are now writing a new note.
Each note is stored as a text file, and so is findable via other search methods on your machine, and is easy to sync via your chosen technology.
I have tried a variety of approaches as I love the idea of linking between notes, and adding images, and tagging and all that stuff. But in reality all of that adds friction, and so prevents me from making the note (which is the critical part).
Whenever I copy-paste stuff that might be useful I leave it there. Stuff like stacktraces, class:line_number when I was searching where something happens, links to webpages related to the task.
I was keeping a notepad tab open at all times anyway to keep context when I was doing something (otherwise I forget when I'm back from lunch and have to search again). So this is only making this context permanent and searcheable.
Then when I do something 3 months later and get a stacktrace I vaguely remember or other problem that I can imagine what the keyword would be - I just grep in that directory and find all the context needed, including jira task, commits, all related webpages, etc.
I also write short free-text notes there, but these are usually very short and less important than the copy-pasted stuff.
I also had an idea to make a site where you could take notes and have them be auto-published (like the above, but as a service), to create a community of random knowledge dumps. Think of a Wikipedia, but made of personal sites and not as rigorous, with a very "personal Web 1.0 website" feel, but talking to a few friends it didn't seem like they saw much point in it.
> I also had an idea to make a site where you could take notes and have them be auto-published (like the above, but as a service), to create a community of random knowledge dumps. Think of a Wikipedia, but made of personal sites and not as rigorous, with a very "personal Web 1.0 website" feel, but talking to a few friends it didn't seem like they saw much point in it.
Alongside this idea, would you use a browser plugin that shares your bookmarks as a stream? Almost like a cross of the github "X starred Y" stream and Twitter (with none of the social-y features). I favorite a lot of things from day to day and would love to know what others are favoriting/finding as well.
Also, somewhat unrelated to that, would you pay for encrypted offsite joplin sync target/backups?
I'd love to make it possible to also share-from-joplin for single notes but that feature isn't there yet. The only way to make it happen otherwise would be synchronizing somewhere unencrypted (!) and then asking that somewhere to "publish" your notes. Unfortunately, since joplin doesn't have multiple "profiles" or any way to separate encryption keys or which notes are and aren't encrypted... it's hard to do that as well..
TiddlyWiki has been around for a very long time, and it keeps evolving. My personal file has over 3,000 Tiddlers and it keeps growing. It's unbelievable all you can do in a single file with just HTML and JavaScript. As long as those standards exist in 20-30 years, I can be sure my files, all tags and all relationships are still available and highly usable.
[0] https://akhater.github.io/drift/
In the end, I ended up using Obsidian (https://obsidian.md). While typing (even in an outside editor), I can just go [[random reference]] -- and that will turn into a link, even if that page doesn't exist yet. When I eventually get to creating the page, it will already have back links from all the places it is used (something else I think Joplin doesn't have).
For my Zettelkasten and writing I use Obsidian. They are fantastic in tandem.
Why I won't be using it:
* If I live in Markdown, I want to edit it WYSIWYG. Maybe that's wrong, but I don't want to live in .md code mode (for this reason, I miss Evernote). I author in Typora, but I don't want to keep notes in MD.
* It's sync-ing options don't map to the most used syncing tech on desktops these days. I'd have to pay for Dropbox (given my current ecosystem) just to use it to sync.
* I want folders and sub-folders. Folders and tags don't work for me.
* I wish these systems had a built-in journal mode, like Roam.
- If you talk about google drive, you can use the file system sync and sync from there
- you can create notebooks and sub-notebooks
If you are still on the search, there is a great list: https://old.reddit.com/r/Evernote/comments/j87fb9/please_hel...
=======
Just another opinion on the balanced note taking method:
I think org-mode solves almost all offline note-taking requirements
* org-roam makes it super-easy to link notes
* emacs as an editor is as usable as any other editor
* Rich media is possible and easy to do in org-mode. Attach a snapshot, embed a video file
* Code with documentation is a feature not available in most other note taking methods/apps. It's possible to run code snippets and add comments, documentation about them in the same space
* Latex support is advanced. Inline equations work seamlessly
* Search support is advanced
Drawbacks:
* One of the main drawbacks is that all your notes end up offline. This was a deal-breaker for me. ox-hugo helps in publishing your notes to a (private) static site where it can be searched, viewed but not edited on the fly
* Publishing through ox-hugo is separate from maintaining a backup/sync of your notes in /org/ format. You'll have to do this separately through Dropbox/GDrive/etc
* A backup of your org notes is not usable until you set up your emacs environment and download all your notes
I try to keep some notes.org file and use it regularly, but I'm just faster with unix tools and vim, so it's hard to make the upfront investment in learning emacs and start somewhat from scratch. I think there's also some kind of discoverability issue with org-mode features: I don't really know which features should I look into to improve my setup further and have something really nice instead of a glorified markdown.
One day I'll just read the manual from start to finish and try to start properly from there, one day.
I've not found this to be the case. org mode has an extremely shallow learning curve.
If your note taking flow is simple, it will be correspondingly simple in org mode.
Once you start adding sophistications to your workflow, you may find some tool that is easier to use than going through the trouble of configuring org mode, but only if that tool's author shared a very similar mindset to you. I've not found this to be the case for my workflow. Even worse, if you decide you want to try some other workflow, that tool likely will not be as flexible and you'll have to hunt for another tool. And possibly migrate all your notes to it.
If you use a flexible solution that lets you alter your workflow, you'll find it will compare with org mode in terms of ease of use.
> I think there's also some kind of discoverability issue with org-mode features: I don't really know which features should I look into to improve my setup further and have something really nice instead of a glorified markdown.
I mostly discover these by reading people's blog posts on how they use org mode. Having said that, I tweak it very rarely, often with a few years in between any major tweak/exploration.
> One day I'll just read the manual from start to finish and try to start properly from there, one day.
It's a good idea, but don't expect a massive productivity increase from it. Often you'll read something and say "That sounds cool, but I'm not sure how I'd use it." I usually get more insights from other people posting how they used feature X than from reading about feature X in the manual.
I'm pretty sure there are various other functionalities, but this seems to be enough for me as of now. If I have to search something with it, I just fall back to deadgrep's [0] interface. So, I don't think you need to read the entire manual to be productive! Infact, I would say that starting small and slowing forming the habit is a good way to use this effectively.
I spend lots of time learning the tools I use for work (database systems, departmental protocols, client interactions) and having a better personal productivity tool is at the center of everything I do. It's worth months of heavy investment in the long run.
Define "manual", because I've been using org-mode since (greps .org files) . . . 2010, and I still haven't read the manual cover to cover. I just look things up and tweak as needed, which I think is key. You can go looking for features, but you're usually better off following a YAGNI and "google the stack answer" sort of mindset.
How you insert a video in org file? This is one of the reason I have to move away from org only setup.
I meant it's possible to embed a link/thumbnail that will open the file in the player of choice
I want to browse my notes in chronological order AND in thematic order. i.e. I want to do semantic search and automatic topic grouping.
[edit: The use-case I have in mind is you are learning about a topic, and your chronological "research notebook" is also an automatic zettlekasten.]
Something like:
Todo
====
- Fix Widget
- Extend Screen
- Profit
Todo
====
- Profit
- Fix Widget
- Extend Screen
Todo
====
+ Profit
- Fix Widget
- Extend Screen
Is there a way to manage that in Org mode (linking tasks to further notes would be great to have) while keeping items in relative priority order without explicitly setting due dates or priority "scores"?
Notes can have tags and attributes so you could have attributes per note like: topic=rocketscience, semester=fall2020. Later you could say: "sort all my notes by semester and then group by topic" or if you change your mind, set up a second view for "all notes grouped by topic then by semester".
If you're interested, feel free to contact me through the site (kitestack.com/lnotes). I'd love to learn more about how you currently organize your notes.
Works like a charm and is very low friction when notekeeping.
edit: you proposed zettelkasten-like solution just when I posted
I'd like to make a plug for Standard Notes.
standardnotes.org
I don't work for them. I get nothing from mentioning them.
It's cross-platform, and you have the option of encrypting things. It's my go-to place for notes.
Exporter.app might help you. https://apps.apple.com/nz/app/exporter/id1099120373?mt=12
I never really made notes on my phone, and I like being able to stay in my text editor (acme) on macOS.
For me, the presentation and structure around this workflow is what's too complicated. To adopt do something similar on macOS, I'd just:
> % echo 'notes () { acme-open ~/iCloud\ Drive/notes/$(date +%Y-%m-%d).md }' >> ~/.zshrc
This would give me a function to create a new, dated notes doc and open with my editor anywhere from the terminal. And then I'd just use standard tools for searching, instead of using a script.
(FYI: acme-open is my wrapper to acme, and I keep a link to the actual iCloud Drive directory in my home folder.)
There are iOS shortcuts now which can let you do this programmatically, but you also lose formatting, and its a hack.
For me, I go even simpler. I have a single file in my Dropbox folder that I’ve been using for over a decade. To open it, I just use Alfred (and before that, quicksilver). I pop new stuff at the top. Every now and again I search for something way back when.
Works really well for me.
I really like the paper method for day-to-day stuff, but for research or work-related notes, I simply can't write fast enough to keep up (particularly if I'm trying to capture info from a meeting), and the lack of searchability means I can never fully rely on paper notes as a means of retaining information long-term.
I have daily notes, a small calendar to navigate to dates in the past/future, a tag cloud populated with words I've written the most, and a search bar that I don't know how it works but usually finds what I'm looking for.
It's no fancy system but it's immediate, no dumb nerding and dumb wheel reinvention needed.
$ ls *org | wc -l
87
(Evernote if I find web content that's good.)
I have been thinking of converting from OneNote to markdown. One thing that has been keeping me from making the switch is search, especially from mobile. Any one knows of any solution that is capable of searching through all the markdown notes similar to how OneNote does from mobile? I am thinking of hosting the notes in a RPi with Gitea or Nextcloud and access it using VPN (using Rpi as a trial and later move on to a dedicate mini PC if I end up liking this setup).
GitJournal author over here. If you can provide me with a video of what you mean, and what you would like that would really make implementing this much easier.
(for anyone interested, "Working Copy" iOS app is great for this. It's a git client for iOS, and its contents are even accessible in the Files app. Can't speak to Android use, but looks like parent comment has recs)
It helps me to break things out based on date or by topic, which this supports.
I would so strongly recommended everyone reading this to check out Roam Research (https://roamresearch.com/). At it's core, it's a collection of text notes in the cloud. Just open it up and start typing your thoughts down. No folders or hierarchy. The key enabler is that is that you can link together different pages. Roam Research helps you make so much better sense of your thoughts - I use it personally to plan out goals, projects, brainstorm research, track meetings/dates, and keep a daily log of everything I go through. I can't recommend it enough - even my dad started using it everyday after I showed him.
Just try it out and starting typing a few notes. It'll start off as a simple graph for text notes / documents, but there are so many more powerful features to discover, too.
EDIT: Roam is a cloud-based service, notes are not end-to-end encrypted. It doesn't bother me, but if it bothers you, there are many open source, offline-first alternatives that the community has created (emacs-org, Foam, Obsidian, etc.). I am in no way sponsored by Roam, I don't know anybody at Roam, I don't run any of those bullshit Roam courses, and Roam is expensive as fuck, but let me tell you this: there are so many features and UI optimizations that make Roam have the best user experience. Don't compromise your time and user experience.
That way it'd end up as a branching tree the way an actual zettelkasten would and would probably be more searchable.
I also open sourced a zero dependency Bash script that handles this at: https://github.com/nickjj/notes
It supports adding notes in 3 different ways:
notes hello world appends the text to the YYYY-MM.txt dated file
echo cool | notes same as above except you can pipe in text
notes opens the YYYY-MM.txt file in your configured $EDITOR
It's a script called "d" (for diary) that I keep in my home folder. I try minimise mouse usage, so I've got a keyboard shortcut for opening a terminal, and then in the terminal I run ./d
=== start of script ===
#!/bin/bash
y=`date +%Y`;
ym=`date +%Y-%m`;
ymd=`date +%Y-%m-%d`;
if [ ! -d "Dropbox/diary/$y" ]; then
mkdir Dropbox/diary/$y
if [ ! -d "Dropbox/diary/$y/$ym" ]; then
mkdir Dropbox/diary/$y/$ym
vim Dropbox/diary/$y/$ym/$ymd.txt
=== end script ===
I could probably refactor the hell out of this. But I'm an old beard that prefers explicit readability. For example I don't need to use YYYY-MM for the month sub-folders (I could just use MM), and similarly I don't need the full YYYY-MM-DD.txt for the day files (I could just use DD.txt) - so your preference may vary.
And yeah I use .txt files because I can edit those natively in the Dropbox app on my phone too. Don't need any special apps installed to manage my notes on the go.
In terms of the contents of the files, I've kept the searchability really simple by using hashtags, example:
=== Dropbox/diary/2020/12/04.txt ===
## #keyword1 #keyword2
Here be notes on keyword1 and keyword2.
## #keyword3
Here be notes captured later on the same day on keyword3.
These can span multiple lines if I want.
## #keyword4
Here be notes on keyword4 captured even later in the day.
===
I use the single hashtag keyword system for quick grepping (and future indexing if I want to build a searchable database out of this one day), and the double hashtag ## at the start of each note snippet so that I can parse individual snippets more easily.
Hope that helps! :)
alias note='(date; cat; echo) >> ~/notes.txt'
Overall, taking notes isn't a solved issue for me. I mostly like pen and paper as a thinking tool, but I'm not able to archive and search them, and it' slower when writing pure text.
Maybe a "Remarkable" would be a good tool, but I'm not sure I want even more screens and devices I already have.
I also set it up to auto-create/open my daily-doc in the background when I open a new terminal session, since days that I do that are days that I most want to take notes. It serves as a very good, very minor reminder to actually write something down. And if I don't write anything, I can just delete empty files later with a trivial `find`.
v1 created a templated note in evernote which I eventually enhanced to a more custom solution.
v2 used google cloud print to create a pdf from html and add to my google drive then move it into the Notability folder so I could access it and write on it from the Notability app on my ipad.
I loved this because I could also pull in weather, horoscope, daily calvin and hobbes, news headlines, top gitlab issues for my projects and add them to the html template/pdf. Frequently I'd end up physically printing it.
I use Sublime and I love scrolling. The second makes the system in TFTA not good for me, and given the first, I didn't mind my implementation being editor specific - but the principal is dead simple, as to not really matter.
I have a small custom function stored in Sublimes user package folder which, when called using the [cmd]+[shift]+p command palette will insert a small template in the top of the current file (my `daily.txt`).
This is just a headline with the date, and name of day of week and Two lines called start and end (with datetime filled in in start) let's me keep loose track of my hours.
I also have a sub-heading that says to-do, with two `[ ] ...` txt checkboxes already added, another headline called did and a line that separates it from the previous day.
"To-do" is for things I plan on doing, "did" is for ad-hoc things I ended up doing. This helps me keep track of how much work I actually did, which is nice for days where everything is meetings and firefighting and I don't close issues in the tracker or PRs in git.
I can use go-to symbol to jump to a date, or just search the document for key words. Like I said, I like scrolling, and enjoy being able to just scroll down to see the previous day.
The system is like I said dead simple, easy to operate, easy for anyone to implement and customize to their liking. I've used mine for a few months and it has been great!
Sometimes I add content to existing notes, if they are relevant and include the same family of concepts. I often merge notes; e.g., I save all my tweets to Evernote via IFTTT, and then merge all of them for each given month.
I often add notes with no tagging at all, and I have a shortcut to search for notes with no tags, as a sort of inbox.
The ability to search everything at once is the key: I can search "movies" or "startup" or "medicine" and find everything with those tags, or those words in the title or text, or even in PDFs. (I use a Fuji ScanSnap to scan documents into Evernote, with fully searchable text.)
The biggest feature I wish for is transcription of voice notes or audio files, so the content would be searchable.
Evernote's Mac app is notoriously slow, but it's gotten better over the years. I still don't understand why they can't make it as fast as the web app.
Todoist on my phone for tasks. I like todoist because it's got a nicely polished interface and an excellent API.
I use an AWS Lambda to define and push repeating tasks into Todoist at set times, it also moves tasks from certain lists into my inbox at certain times of the day/week. Basically I don't want to fiddle with setting times or scheduling in todoist except for one off scheduled tasks. I just want to put tasks into the right lists and let the lambda move them into the inbox when I need to do them.
This is effectively a kind of timeboxing so I generally do all my work in the morning till early afternoon and then do research/admin for the next days tasks in the afternoon.
For notes and project management I use Roam Research which I found suited me best.
I think there are a bunch of alternatives out there, just googling roam research alternatives will throw them up, I just don't want to spend a lot of time searching and evaluating different systems when frankly roam is good enough for me.
I’m a fan of the simplicity of your system but I don’t know if it’ll work for me. I really like writing with a pencil, that’s when I feel like I’m learning or reflecting on information.
For most of my job I take physical notes. I don't love it but it's easy for me to grab a pen and paper just about anywhere I am. Where I struggle is doing something with those notes after the fact.
When I am at my computer, I usually just keep a plain text file going for the day and just save it for the date. I also have Teams recordings, screenshots, and other stuff that I have to just put in a folder. I don't have tagging or anything and keeping up this information just isn't working.
Any tips?
I also have one for rapid steam-of-conscious thoughts[2] and organized journaling[3].
Personally, I'm a fan of the "plaintext files in a directory" pattern for notes, thoughts, and writing.
[1]: https://github.com/Pinjasaur/jot
Comparing to author's solution, it gives ability to briefly list notes, use multiple "namespaces", quickly add (without invoking the editor), delete or modify each specified note. Also there is no bashism and it works out of box on *BSD (that lacks bash) and GNU systems.
> The way it works is that every time I run the script, it opens the note for that day in my editor of choice
vimwiki's diary function does that for you under the hood.
The author, as well as most everyone in the comments here, have apparently never heard of org-mode. Yeah, I can understand that for some people emacs is a non-starter, but trust me, if you want to do it, I can just about guarantee it's possible in org-mode. It's just that flexible, and everyone's org-mode setup is different, customized to their needs.
I add tags as relevant if I think about it, and for projects/tasks spanning multiple days i'll create a root item.
I created a local git repo I try and keep everything checked into; I might push it up to a private github/bitbucket repo eventually, but I haven't been careful with scrubbing credentials from shell snippets so leerly on pushing anywhere remote.
$ notes
appends a new line, current date like Mon 05 Oct 2020 10:20:47 AM EDT another new line and a set of === as a separator and moves the editor cursor to the bottom. So I can immediately type.
If I type
$ notes So that was weird
then it will take whatever I typed at the command line and append that as well allowing me to continue to type in the editor.
Finally I use :tag to freetag notes so I can easily search through notes based on the topics.
I figure eventually I might figure out a better system but so far this one worked very well.
Next step will be to automatically move the screenshot from iCloud onto a computer, run OCR on the screenshots, index them, and make it possible to search through their text with near-equal search terms (eg "cute dog" would match "cute puppy" as well)
Anyone has ideas on how to make that possible?
This allows you to throw extra features in the HTML like searching for files and randomly selecting a note for viewing at your leisure.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25300423
I love the idea that I have a place to publish random stuff that I don't have to spend lots of time writing, I can just drop a sentence and maybe someone else will find it useful.
The big problem is that Google will basically never give you that page in a result, no matter how relevant it may be to your query, because it prefers SEO-rich content farms like Wikihow. I was thinking that a service would at least be easier to search/remember to go to.
alias lb='vim ~/logbook/$(date "+%s")'
I dump all my random thoughts into my todoist inbox. Every couple of days I sift through and take action, or categorize as needed between notion notes and todoist projects.
For storing images I use Microsoft OneNote as more often than not, there is a need to document something with text and images. And search is excellent.
You could also try Wekan[1], which is awesome on desktop, but I found the mobile interface unusable.
So they can store all they want while I enjoy their free products.
Has been working for me for years now.
Still the best tree editor I've found. I left emacs for it!
Vim has folding as a basic feature of the editor binary, not some aftermarket script. So editing operations on folded regions always do what you expect.