Ask HN: How often do your review notes?

My notes review involves me reading through an entire notebook after filling its pages and then writing a traditional index of important keywords on the last few pages.<p>These are the benefits:<p>1. The act of reading-through and indexing serves as a good and deep review session in itself. Forces you to think about what&#x27;s important.<p>2. The long interval from inception to review helps me discover and filter out what&#x27;s truly important and worthy of review, and also relieves me of the pressure of feeling like I need to constantly review and play with and occupy myself with my notes.<p>3. The index itself continues to serve as a useful lookup tool whenever I need to find something.<p>---<p>As these are physical notebooks with hundreds of pages, my review sessions are few and far between, but rigorous. It may take 1-3 months to fill a notebook and then a few hours to read through and index it.<p>As I&#x27;m doing my read-through, I often encounter things that I either can&#x27;t remember or deem unimportant. These things don&#x27;t get indexed. Only the important bits. What constitutes important is whatever I feel like at the time. If it piqued my interest enough to write it down two months ago and also piques it now, then it&#x27;s worthy to be indexed.<p>Truly important and interesting things don&#x27;t ever vacate your mind. They&#x27;ll likely return to you almost naturally over the course of days, weeks, months, years after you&#x27;ve encountered them, even without deliberate review.<p>So even if I&#x27;ve forgotten many details of something I&#x27;ve notated, I can recall bits of it here and there, and if I want to read the details, that&#x27;s where the index comes in: I just look up in the index of my notebooks the keywords I can recall, then I can easily find the full relevant sections on the appropriate pages.<p>Beware - all the notes &amp; note-taking apps and methodologies and crap are largely just a waste of time. They become anti-productive &quot;tool games&quot; [1], born out of procrastination [2].<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=33135227">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=33135227</a>

Pretty much never, but that&#x27;s okay. Writing the note itself seems beneficial. I figure if I forget about a note it wasn&#x27;t that important in the first place. And if I ever remember it, I&#x27;ll have it to go back to. If it turns out to be something time-sensitive I should&#x27;ve revisited, it should&#x27;ve been a calendar entry with an alert or something instead.

I look at yesterday&#x27;s notes once per day. Sometimes I&#x27;ll look for a specific note if I think it has important details that I have forgotten.<p>I have a to-do list in the MacOS notes app. When I&#x27;m working on a list item I might write down what I did. The next day, I copy all of the remaining to-do items and repeat.

I keep this process as simple as possible -- taking about 10 or 15 minutes at the end of the week to quickly scan my notes. My focus is mainly on anything that&#x27;s 6 weeks old (or older). If I haven&#x27;t touched it in that time, or I don&#x27;t recall why I took the note, then it goes.

I find the act of writing down a note to be more useful than the note itself. It helps me commit something to memory. I use mini yellow legal pads for jotting down interesting ideas I come across. Maybe once a month I&#x27;ll pick up a pad that I&#x27;ve filled with notes and skim through.

I don&#x27;t have a good system put in place yet. I tend to write&amp; rewrite interesting things I find and I keep them in separate notes in the hope that one day I&#x27;ll re-use them somewhere. But it&#x27;s a mess.

Second brain, I have processes to trigger and re-surface notes. Raw notes i &quot;recycle&quot; on a regular basis into my second brain. Anki is great for things i need to constantly remember like key facts.

Every day, but that&#x27;s why I use Anki and spaced repetition instead of pen and paper notes.