Time for the daily/weekly/monthly note taking and productivity thread!
On a serious note, I actually like these threads. Earlier in the year I decided to look into better note taking and task management, and it became an entire month of me gradually becoming more and more stressed about it. HN was actually a great source for this, mostly because a lot of the people on here seem a bit less "into it" than dedicated sources, and help bring me back down to earth.
In the end, my solution was simple. Stop trying. Of course, because I get a bit obsessive over this kind of thing (who could have guessed that a man who spent an entire month thinking about note taking can be obsessive), I couldn't just stop. So instead, I set myself a reminder to come back to it in a month, knowing full well that by then I'll be obsessed with the next thing and will keep putting it off.
I write this in case anyone else is going through the same dilemma. Just take a break, get a notebook where you can jot down ideas for how you will jot down ideas, set a reminder, and move on with your life. Unless your enjoy this sort of thing, in which case, have fun :)
I've found the perfect notebooks for me are A5 spiral bound dot grids. Fairly compact size, unintrusive binding. The dot grid forces less structure than lined, but isn't the wild west of blank.
A few months ago I also looked into a bunch of note taking methods, even bought a similar A5, spiral bound, pre-formatted organizer and thought it'd be perfect for organizing my days. It remains unused except for a couple of lines where I began to note the days tasks, then crossed them out and tried to start again the next day.
But a dot grid purchased around the same time is filling up very quickly with odd chicken scratchings of work notes. The only hint of structure are dates scrawled wherever I happened to be starting from that day. Any very important things get circled or marked with an asterisk
I have since improved on a similar setup by using B5 notebooks with margins (to punch holes) and "filing stripes" [1]. It allows me to take notes of different kinds ("odd chicken scratchings of work notes") just by opening a new clean sheet (at a cost of occasionally wasting a clean page on the reverse side of a previous sheet) and then tear the sheets off and file them neatly (I use the stripes upside down so that an append "operation" is less costly).
For long-running projects, I also use A5 notebooks that are pre-partitioned at a given % (I use 60-70%). The idea is that you go over your old notebook with "odd chicken scratchings", count the number of pages spent on each topic, calculate the ratios and multiply them by 70%*NUM_PaGES. Then you allocate this number of pages in the new (clean) notebook and put tab stickers on each section. I also leave around 4 pages for the TOC in the beginning of a notebook. It's just 2 sheets, but the ability to go back and put an extensive TOC later helps a lot when you refer to a finished notebook. With a bit of patience, you can but together a perfectly ordered TOC in a completely messy notebook (by doing one pass over all notes before writing down the TOC and grouping them by project). I also tried keeping notes on paper and writing down the TOC digitally in my Evernote to keep it searchable.
Regarding spiral binding, I find it too flimsy. If you damage the spiral, flipping pages would cause damage to the pages. I prefer hardbound notebooks. I use fountain pens and previously used expensive paper but since the pandemic I tried Idena [2] and it simply blew me away with its high quality and ink resistance (except for some rare inks) at such a low cost (but I had to give up the dot grid).
Ultimately, I am convinced that all of this has a limit and a Zettelkasten method of sorts is needed for a long-running knowledge base project.
I recently experimented a bunch a ended up simply using a set of composition notebooks[0]. These are cheap, classic, and they prevent pages being torn out (which I was prematurely doing when I thought I was done with a thread).
Currently I'm using blank A7 index cards, with a fold-back clip. A bit like the Hipster PDA.
I'm not sure I'll stay with that, but so far it looks good. I like the thick paper, the wide availability and the low price. I can reorder stuff, I can take single index cards out, and I don't regret throwing cards away.
Edit: Apparently not relevant (I still think it is), or someone spends their day doing just this and isn't happy that its being pointed out. Either way, they're not happy
For me it was actually the opposite, I went with a small, bound notebook so I couldnt obsess over how things are arranged and what goes where and what goes in the front and so on. Basically its the most basic, limiting system I could find, short of carving my notes into stone
Obviously that rigidity has its flaws but not to worry, I'll deal with that later. Or at least thats what I tell myself ;)
The only time in my life i've taken substantial quantities of notes was when i was a student. When i've had a job, the learning i do isn't the kind where i'm making copious notes.
Are there a lot of students on HN? Are there a lot of people doing out-of-hours study? Do people make lots of notes at work? Is this productivity LARP?
I would be really glad, if you could try out OrgPad.com and give us some feedback. (Disclaimer: I work for OrgPad if that wasn't obvious.)
We think, OrgPad has a number of strong advantages above OneNote:
- it is generally way simpler and tries to actually help you and not throw sticks under your feet
- OrgPad has well thought out animations that make OrgPad feel more natural
- OrgPad enables you to think a lot more visually, this has a nice property that if you use OrgPad honestly, it is as if you looked onto your mind in a mirror
- it will actually develop further and improve constantly
There is of course a lot more. We use OrgPad for everything, from management of the company, software development planing and progress tracking, note taking/ documentation to personal bureaucracy.
For more information you can look at The Vision of OrgPad: https://www.orgpad.com/s/VjMKIa7bfnN
For pricing information, you can look at: https://orgpad.com/s/pricing you can start to use OrgPad for free, for extensive usage, you might want to upgrade to 6 USD/ month or 60 USD/ year once we go live with the pricing which should be at the end of this month.
You can also get in touch on our social media: https://www.orgpad.com/o/DGdsoOCsdCzolePMNiS1LM
One may embrace and become more dedicated to a note taking practice after realizing how much useful information would've been lost had they not jotted down some notes. It stems from a deeper acknowledgment of the limitations of the mind and the practicality of the pencil.
Taking your question from the reverse perspective, we can say that one does not take notes for at least one of two reasons, either because they think they can afford to forget the information they've already spent time to acquire, or they trust their mind to recall enough of it when they'll need to.
Can only speak for myself of course, but I'm not a student, nor are my notes for work (I do take notes at work, but they really dont need anything resembling a system at all).
These are more so notes for personal projects, ideas I have, things I need to do/todo lists, that kind of thing.
The basic idea is to try not to hold everything in your head, because it limits your ability to think clearly if your stressing about not forgetting stuff. I don't know how true that is, but I can say that for me I'm less stressed about something if I know I have it written down somewhere, even if I never come back to it. Its almost like I make it future-me's problem, rather than something I need to deal with now.
I had this realization after my second attempt at implementing Zettelkasten. Most of my job is managing people. I take notes and to-dos, but nothing on the scale that ZK facilitates. Even when I do IC work, I rarely take in depth structured notes.
To a large extent it probably depends on the nature of your work. I found that once I transitioned to more horizontal roles at work, taking good, organized notes became more essential.
I don't think the specific system matters all that much though. The recent popularity of Zettelkasten is not really about systems per se as much as it is about recognizing that being able to refer to other things, or tell what other things refer to the current thing, is valuable. For people who just sort their e-mails into Outlook folders and have never thought more deeply about any of this, it is often a helpful shift in one's mental model.
If I don't write down everything I need to do, I will forget 1/4 of it, sometimes including crucial or time-sensitive items. Same goes for context, info that needs to be included in X deliverable, etc.
org-roam is kind of a port of this type of tooling to the org ecosystem in emacs, and i’ve found it extraordinarily helpful both for design/architecture on the job and for learning things, both rote and otherwise
Hrm .... Actually, a "perennials" listing might have some value. I'm not entirely sure how to execute that, but listing keywords / topics / posts that occur with 1) some frequency and 2) high levels of engagement, limited to say, the top 30--100 entries, might be of use.
There's the past related threads "past related threads" search:
The focus on technical solutions, Roam vs. Obsidian vs... obscures the fact that regardless of the software - maintaining a useful, up-to-date, well cross referenced corpus of knowledge is a lot of effort. The effort must be constant and ongoing, few will have the stamina to keep it going.
Yes, it requires effort - as anything that is maintenance not speaking of development of new stuff/ new insights into existing knowledge etc.
At OrgPad, we find, having a nice visual and flexible way to work with information in a graph that you yourself create the way you like it but that helps you arrange stuff so that nothing overlaps etc. is very approachable and helps with remembering stuff. It is kind of like the pin boards in the criminal TV shows. :-) You can apply this approach to most stuff as seeing everything at once with the right amount of detail can not only help you find criminals but also just get your work done and perhaps even make personal bureaucracy less tedious. It is also nice for vacation photos, which I certainly wouldn't do in Roam and others.
this is uncomfortable but true. I see these perfectly organised Notion setups with all the bells and whistles and then I realise that it's about the same work as tending to a medium sized garden
Seems like we see this everywhere. Bob is highly productive and comes up with a "system" which he uses to be productive. Bob probably would have been productive with any other system, he's just a productive guy. Joe reads Bob's book and picks up this system thinking he'll be just like Bob. The story ends with Joe giving up on his dreams and taking a day job entering data into spreadsheets.
Bob was smart though, he made his system look like magic and a cult developed around it. Now Bob has many fans, and the top of the ponzi-scheme is the people who have learned to speak the magic. These masters sell courses while the followers work to learn the magic, correcting and debating each other on Twitter.
Seems like an underlying pattern of humanity. It happens with Agile, scientific methodology, even religion. A person reaches a truth through an earnest desire for truth and then everyone else tries to copy him as a shortcut to reach the same truth.
I feel like i have been Joe before and still am to some degree, are you just born as bob or are there actual fundamental things one can do to be more like bob ?
The best I have been able to tell is that productivity is like lifting weights, where you have to be always changing up your routine to "shock" the muscles into growth once you hit your plateau. Productivity is a series of brain hacks to keep yourself from falling asleep at the wheel. Like with a relationship, you have to always be doing new things to keep it interesting (don't stop dating your significant other.)
The value of stan systems is...
1. Take notes (documentation) on things.
2. Refer back to those notes (duh, might come in handy later when you find yourself doing the same thing.
3. Keep these notes in the same place.
Do ONLY the above and you probably get enough benefits to be worth it without dropping out because you failed to find the one true way.
Sounds stupid, but the hours I could have saved myself by writing things down for future reference add up. I can't just simply link to documentation, because the time I save is by documenting the spaces between the documentation. Stuff the writers didn't think to write because they already knew everything. But I'm not doing this simple thing if I have already said f*ck it, I give up, because I found the sword in the stone but it didn't choose me. I can't be king, so I go back to filling out spreadsheets.*
I suspect that you can go from being Joe to being Bob just by thinking. At least, that's what happened to me - I read David Allen's book Getting Thing Done, and then over a few years of trying to figure out why the GTD system wasn't quite working for me, I slowly re-invented the Zettelkasten system.
(I thought that I was on to something big, and then had quite a shock when I saw it hit the front page of HN)
To clarify: by "thinking" I mean "thoughtful analysis and introspection" - that is, if you're not being productive, or if you're not able to organize your thoughts, actually sit down and think really hard about it until you start getting a better understanding of your problems and ideas to fix them.
My personal observations of those around me seem to indicate a pattern where those who aren't productive haven't done any analysis as to why (although I know many productive people who haven't done any analysis either).
So true! This has bugged me enough to create a introduction to Zettelkasten myself - just one page - https://binnyva.com/zettelkasten/ (wanted to keep it under 500 - but it went to 700 words).
Too many my friends are getting the idea Zettelkasten is complicated. When anyone express interest, I make it a point to tell them its a very simple concept. The complication is more in creating the behavior of taking notes rather than in using the system.
Try reading the GTD book. What could have been a flowchart, maybe bundled with some potential downsides/gotchas-and-how-to-avoid-them, somehow became this nonsense 300-page sleeping pill.
People like creating systems more than they like implementing them. Hence the popularity of military strategy books as compared to the number of real generals.
I tried hard to like this, i still have my “second brain” collection in onenote (which worked surprisingly well across linux, Windows & mac) but i don’t add to it anymore.
1. I don’t waste time trying to eek out atomic thoughts, PARA is a more pragmatic idea - if some bit of knowledge proves useful it will get incrementally refined
2. It works exceedingly well if your productivity system is based on GTD
3. I don’t waste time trying to link things sufficiently, instead i dump the folder of reference material in the active project using it. So simple, and quite a satisfying “cheat”
All this said, it’s like time management. I’m less convinced that there’s a “right” answer than i am that there is a wrong answer and the wrong answer is not to have a strategy and just let the tidal wave of digital artifacts wash over you.
There is some obscenely expensive program for that (I have tried to search for traces of it online). I should do an advanced search again, using key words from the YouTube video below. The course is here: https://www.buildingasecondbrain.com/
He was also #1 student in psychology at Cambridge as an undergrad.
Anyways, chances are the course is ideas plagiarized from somewhere else. That's why I have searched for the source. I found a good written source for finding key words to do advanced search queries to find the original source: https://www.rylncoaching.com/post/why-i-have-a-second-brain-...
I found high quality illustrated notes on it, too, which will be really helpful for locating wherever the course material is originally from: https://maggieappleton.com/basb
For searching text of books with advanced queries, the best place is here (world's biggest online library): https://www.bookshare.org/search
The real productivity experts are the ones who make their revenue optimizing their actual day job and not hocking productivity advice online for views.
The best productivity tool is interviewing successful people.
But, I don't think that this is what is being copied. But, it could be.
I would not be surprised if mosaic plagiarism is going on, where there is copying going on from a different book for each section. We shall see. I will keep searching.
Absolutely not. But, I am really good at catching other people's plagiarism, including people who make entire livings off of such grifts. This course has a lot of obvious red flags of that, and I am curious where the original material came from in Creating a Second Brain.
Basically, the entire basis of her course is that above guide, but she creates video lessons for each section of the above linked guide with worksheets for each section (which you fill out to the videos). The only content that she adds that is substantiative in terms of work is language learning resources for X Y and Z languages, in terms of inputs/outputs.
Tiago Forte has been working on these ideas for many years in the open on his blog (Fortelabs, the one OP posted) and Building a Second Brain is the course he built atop that. From what I have seen of it, its original work and some synthesis of past ideas, just like most things.
It's weird to see you do these quick Google searches and speculate its plagiarized without any substance to back your argument or awareness of the work he's been doing for years now.
This sounds very similar to a paper version of what I do with LaTeX PDF books. I constantly am typing and pasting stuff into a notes .txt file–every idea I have, anything I don't want to forget, anything I learn, URLS, names of books/movies etc. Then every few weeks I move stuff from the notes file to a place in a LaTeX PDF book, mainly the current year's book, then others split off as they get big enough, e.g. programming languages, mathematics, my programs, my essays etc. I put lots of pictures, and the books look lovely. (I find links between stuff isn't often necessary, as the hierarchical structure is so clear, and so easy to change around. But hyperlinking any 2 things is easy.)
It did take me about 3 months to master LaTeX and the common packages enough that I don't have to give it a thought these days.
Before that, I spent 25 years filling notebooks with ideas, notes, diagrams, drawings, maths, etc and never looking in them again, because there was no way of organizing them. Everything was just lost and forgotten.
This sounds right up my alley - one question: do you use this books are reference in the future to help cement your learning? I feel like I would also end up never looking in them again just like you mentioned with the physical notebooks.
Hi. Well..for me, it's more like reminding/relearning than cementing! Like am currently into Forth for the third time within a few years. I forgot just about everything. Rereading that chapter was the best refresher course I could imagine. And I'll add the stuff I'm learning now to the chapter.
But the answer is different for each book. I guess the ones I look in least are the past year books, as I'm still adding to the other specific topic books, but still I sometimes search in them for something. Anyway, they're like gold for me, like the diary I kept 1992-recently – without it I wouldn't have a clue what I was doing or thinking in a particular year. They only increase in value, the longer you don't look in them!
I've been into so many different things, and am only capable of 1 or 2 at a time, so I cycle back to them (a)periodically. Before I had to rely on my memory. (I do have a filing cabinet full of photocopied books and academic papers that I very rarely look into) I did always keep a paper diary, but I didn't put the kind of stuff that would go in notebooks in there.
In the front of each book is a short contents with just chapter names, then detailed contents (thanks to shorttoc package), everything clickable. Or sometimes scrolling through looking at the pictures is faster. So, I can find stuff very quickly.
Hi! Thanks for your response. I greatly appreciate the detail. I very much like this way of thinking - "they only increase in value, the longer you don't look into them".
One final question, what is the difference between your 2020 book and the books which detail what you were into that year? Is a year book just a copy and paste of what you were into in a chronological order for that year? Thanks so much!
Hmm there's the general "this year" book, and books for particular topics, equally detailed, just some topics grow to a size where they demand their own book! Also they seem topics I keep returning to, not contained within any one year or month.
Hmm looking in my 2020 book, the chapters are January, February etc, plus To do\Done, Books/papers read, talks watched, Subjects/Projects, Writing, Dreams, Quotes, Software.
Tried understanding Zettelkasten for a while, searched the internet, bought one/some books. But it was always too light on examples. I need full beefed out examples (like a 100 pages Zettelkasten) or let's say 10 pages. Of course you can say one doesn't need it, but isn't the value of any method to be benificial if done as designed?
This article seems to be the closest of having good examples.
You might want to check out the Obsidian.md forums. Obviously, focusing on Obsidian as a note taking tool, but they have sections where users demonstrate their workflows: https://forum.obsidian.md
If you are able to read handwritten German, the whole Zettelkasten [1] of Niklas Luhmann [2] is online available. with an additional explanation of the method [3].
I strongly believe one can't understand this method and the sheer amount of effort necessary to consistently tend to this system and keep it alive (like Luhmann) did without the deep explanations and also at least diving into the examples of Luhmann's zettelkasten as it is digitalized.
Nonetheless - I also do not believe, that a lot of people would benefit from the zettelkasten system. It has in my opinion a very narrow target group that would massively benefit from this method, while for others it would only be a lot of work with limited benefit.
Luhmann profited from his lifelong work on the Zettelkasten (he was an avid reader and did extracts long before his university career). But once he started his university career he was able to produce on such a deep level and with such a high frequency, because he had up front invested massive amounts of time into this system.
So if one is looking for a productivity tool, I am not sure that zettelkasten is the right tool in one's belt. It needs massive investment up front and pays interest only later.
I personally look at this method (and others) as means to help keeping track of discoveries and knowledge in general. I believe that it is useful for all knowledge workers, but especially for academics & content creators.
I don't get these methods. So it's a note taking system with hyperlinks between them. OK. So what if we made it digital - then it would be like HTML, right? Now, since more notes is better - what if we also let other people write notes and add them into the same library. Oh look, we just invented the world wide web.
Don't you mean WikiWikiWeb? Because World Wide Web is a bit more than a linked library of notes. Especially today when we have youtube, social networks and webapps.
But what you are missing is the cargo-cult of the youth which strife for a guide to imprison their thoughts. This method is really nothing new, not even innovativ. It originates from the same ideas which created the html and wikis later. But the last hype around hypertext was 20 years ago when wikis were new and hyped, and that didn't last long for technical reasons.
And now we have a new generation who rethinks the same methods again and create new software from them, which can finally fullfill the wishes which where 20 years not possible because of limitations in hard- and software. This is good in it's own, but the hype and ignorance is really funny in it's own. Especially if you are german and know the background better than those people who throw around words which they barly understand correctly, nor know it's history.
There is a big difference between writing meant for public distribution and personal notes. The point of a Zettelkasten (or any notes) is not to build a comprehensive encyclopedia, but to support and augment your work.
I don’t necessarily agree either that “more notes is better” as an absolute statement.
Athens [1] is an even better free and open source alternative, started by someone who was rejected [2] for a Clojure job at Roam! Athens was even accepted to YC [3].
My Zettelkasten and secure note-taking tool is Passfindr.
My sketch book is a Moleskine notebook.
Most of my notes are URLs, micro-notes, ideas, login credentials for online and other accounts, addresses and everything between. Lots of micro documents. Some of the notes are 20+ years old. Finding these notes and finding them fast is crucial. Passfindr does that with ease and I get information faster than anything else. Fast searching/finding matters. Once you get the idea behind the internal about: commands, you can even enhance the searching and finding capabilities and build your own Zettelkasten.
We're developing Saga [0] and we have many users using it for Zettelkasten, although it's not our main value proposition.
Why: Saga automatically links pages one to another, so it builds your wiki/knowledge system automatically for you.
You can also group pages in "Collections", which are smart tags similar to the Zettelkasten tagging method, which allows users to easily recollect and find notes.
I welcome anybody to try Saga for Zettelkasten and give us feedback on how we can make it a better tool for this use case!
Zim is what i use for notetaking, its essentially tree-like notes
allowing expanding ideas and focusing on stuff without
any paper limits, you can also attach images/files to notes.
I wonder how much trouble with notetaking stems from people trying a one size fits all method. Personally, I have three tiers of notes.
A physical notepad for meetings, random ideas, test results, that sort of thing. My goal is to write down items when I suspect I'll forget them in the next 30 seconds.
At the end of the day I'll take 10 minutes review what I've done, with the physical notes as a starting point, and log my activity and open questions per project. My goal at this point is to keep enough context to answer the inevitable "WTF was I thinking?" in a few days. Usually just taking the time to outline things means I can remember the key points.
Finally there is a team wiki where I record details per project. Feature wishlist, customer requests, work with other departments, Q&A. My goal here is to make sure my replacement isn't totally lost after I get hit by a bus.
I write a lot and for most of my career I just used a Notes.md file synced across devices with iCloud.
I forked foam https://github.com/foambubble/foam
A few months ago and have been using it as my note taking system. It works great even if you rarely backlink or tag, just every now and then you should clean out your inbox.
If anyone is interested, I'm currently starting a weekly ZK meetup on Zoom w/ a few founder friends who want to dive into the method.
Format is:
* 15 mins - check in on your workflow
* 30 mins - work on your ZK (write notes, refactor, etc.)
* 15 mins - set ZK goals for upcoming week and discuss tactics
If you're interested in joining, drop me a quick note to the email in my profile with a bit about yourself and experience in the method!
Anyone looking for a good note taking solution, similar to Roam / Obsidian / Notion, but with a much better native macOS experience needs to check out https://www.craft.do/.
It's incredibly well made and is being developed at a crazy pace. A real pleasure to use and they have Mac, iPad, iOS and web version with real-time collaboration.
Edit: I forgot to mention the calendar sync! Really neat way to attach a note to calendar days or events. Especially nice when used with recurring events, as it keeps the note associated with them throughout their lifetime.
When someone says that they used this and that technique to increase their research productivity, I always think about TRIZ and the fact that so few ppl know about it.
TRIZ (/ˈtriːz/; Russian: теория решения изобретательских задач, teoriya resheniya izobretatelskikh zadatch), literally: "theory of inventive problem solving " is “the next evolutionary step in creating an organized and systematic approach to problem solving. The development and improvement of products and technologies according to TRIZ are guided by the objective Laws of Engineering System Evolution. TRIZ Problem Solving Tools and Methods are based on them.”[1] In another description, TRIZ is "a problem-solving, analysis and forecasting tool derived from the study of patterns of invention in the global patent literature".[2] It was developed by the Soviet inventor and science-fiction author Genrich Altshuller (1926-1998) and his colleagues, beginning in 1946. In English the name is typically rendered as the theory of inventive problem solving,[3][4] and occasionally goes by the English acronym TIPS.
On a serious note, I actually like these threads. Earlier in the year I decided to look into better note taking and task management, and it became an entire month of me gradually becoming more and more stressed about it. HN was actually a great source for this, mostly because a lot of the people on here seem a bit less "into it" than dedicated sources, and help bring me back down to earth.
In the end, my solution was simple. Stop trying. Of course, because I get a bit obsessive over this kind of thing (who could have guessed that a man who spent an entire month thinking about note taking can be obsessive), I couldn't just stop. So instead, I set myself a reminder to come back to it in a month, knowing full well that by then I'll be obsessed with the next thing and will keep putting it off.
I write this in case anyone else is going through the same dilemma. Just take a break, get a notebook where you can jot down ideas for how you will jot down ideas, set a reminder, and move on with your life. Unless your enjoy this sort of thing, in which case, have fun :)