I use Logseq.<p>I don't take notes on articles I find boring. If I can't find value within the first few minutes of skimming, I don't take notes on it.<p>You see a lot of productivity gurus take an exorbitant amount of notes on articles that can be summarized in one paragraph at most.<p>A lot of my notes are for things I find very interesting and exciting. Whenever I am having a conversation about them, the link to those notes is immediately made and I can resurface information in conversation.<p>I touch on them every once in a while, but it's not something I do frequently.<p>Most importantly, I make sure that I can find my way back to the notes I've taken. I use lots of tags and backlinks that do not "look" right with the page, but make it easy to find using adjacent concepts and ideas.
The best thing I have done for making my notes usable is to have a simple grep script that runs anywhere and searches all the notes files I have. My script is case insensitive and matches lines that contains all the strings you searched on.
From Peter Drucker's "Managing Oneself", a 28-page pamphlet that any productivity person may find interesting:<p>>There are people, like Churchill, who learn by writing. Some people learn by taking copious notes. Beethoven, for example, left behind an enormous number of sketchbooks, yet he said he never actually looked at them when he composed. Asked why he kept them, he is reported to have replied, “If I don’t write it down immediately, I forget it right away. If I put it into a sketchbook, I never forget it and I never have to look it up again.”
I really want to explore this topic. Been taking daily work journal notes for over 3 years.<p>I don’t use specific note taking software; tried them all, settled on markdown files in VS Code + VS Code Tasks.<p>Tasks are bada$$.
I find that advice about note taking is always unclear about what "note" means. It's also important to identify what problem you're trying to solve.<p>If you're recording information that you want to find later, then the overruling principle is whether you're able to find it and use it later. This is obviously very personal and even varies based on your progress through life.<p>If there is one piece of universal advice, it would be this. When you're writing a note, envision a future situation where you will want to find the note, and write the note such that the note can be easily found and understood in that situation.<p>Then, whenever you experience a situation where you would like to find a note but can't (or the note does not contain the information you need), update the note according to your expectations, and remember the incident for the next time you need to predict how to write a note.<p>People who get too into productivity or notetaking expect some kind of nebulous value from their notetaking, that it will somehow make them more organized as a person or grant them a higher frequency of inspiration leading to personal success.<p>If you're looking for organization in your life, I recommend the Getting Thing Done meta-method, which tells you what your personal organization system needs, but not specifically what fancy tools you need to implement it.<p>If you're looking for creative inspiration, unfortunately, both creativity and inspiration are fickle beasts. I have heard praise for the Zettelkasten method, but you'll probably have to try different things.
I’m a prodigious note-taker with pen and paper, and have made peace with the idea that I’ll never reference 99% of the notes I write. Same with webpages I bookmark for later. But for me, just the act of writing helps me to stay more focused on whatever or whoever I’m reading/watching/listening to. If it’s something that I may actually need again (usually a code snippet or command flags) then it goes in a Markdown file.
I have not used properties yet in Obsidian.<p>But this is a very interesting article. I take a lot of notes in Obsidian.<p>One of the things I try to do it link right away if I remember a connection.<p>If I am going to save a link from online, I write one or two sentences of context as to why I am saving it.<p>I still have not found a good routine for reviewing notes.
#1 (processing notes) got me through a big chunk of college. After classes, I'd go through and rewrite, organize, and otherwise reprocess the notes to make them more readable, understandable, studyable, etc.
I’ve been working on a note taking app specifically for literature where the idea is that small groups of writers will come across one another’s notes while they’re reading the same work. By responding to another user’s notes the original note taker then has the opportunity to revisit the note and also a book that they may have finished days, weeks, or months ago. It works alright, and I use it extensively, but as you might imagine taking notes on books is a pretty high hurdle for your average user to get over. I’m still hopeful I can find a small market.
The article doesn’t really explain anything of substance, regarding “how to actually use the notes” - but rather, lists a whole bunch of busywork, and dogma, one should follow, to achieve an amorphous goal, i’ve yet to decipher.<p>Index cards, in a real card catalogue; or in software, like Scrivener, seem to be a decent compromise - if one can’t construct, and use a graph database, for home use!
Ditch tags, organize in folders, or don't organize at all. Use search either way. Take your time to give your notes distinct and meaningful names. The rest will be a huge mess no matter what you do. You don't know what you don't know. That's why we're taking notes in the first place, isn't it? Formatting is evil for the same reason. A wise person once said: If you make everything bold, nothing stands out. Headings and code blocks do just fine.<p>And for the love of God, don't read or write articles or posts such as this one of mine on how to take notes :D I'm sort of joking, but not really. What a waste of time... Everybody's different. It takes many years of trying to figure out what works for one and what doesn't.
One thing that's worked for me is jotting down stray thoughts in a tiny pocket notebook or in a note app. I just finished writing a full post about that process.<p><a href="https://notes.joeldare.com/stray-thoughts-notebook" rel="nofollow">https://notes.joeldare.com/stray-thoughts-notebook</a>
Interesting. I hand write notes in a notebook and I'm unhappy with how difficult it is to find things later. But I can't install an app like Obsidian on my work computer, so I think I will use a simple text editor for now.
Is there a way to do the random note button but for a random tag? I keep ideas in one note but tag each idea either gamedev, writing, zine, or webdev. Would be nice to bring up random ideas for a potential spark of motivation.