This is quite extreme: you absolutely can and will lose amazing ideas unless you can find them later written down. This comes up in interviews with great creative people all the time.
Just listen to David Lynch:
"I write [ideas] down so I don't commit suicide later having forgotten the idea. I've forgotten probably two or three major ideas, and it'll make you sick, just horrible. Write the idea down. You'll say: I'll never forget this idea. Ah-uh: you can forget them."
Back in the 90s, that feeling when Netscape or Windows used to crash. First, a feeling of utter sadness, having lost whatever work was open (imagine writing a Word document for school and hours lost, that's when you learn to save regularly). Then the feeling of relief: ah, at least I gotta start over. But it keeps gnawing. What did I miss? Back then, there was no term for it (or it wasn't popularized), now there is: FOMO.
With regards to your quote, writing down helps the brain memorizing. It turns out typing it out doesn't help as much. In that sense, a notes app isn't akin to writing a note, the former isn't handwriting and the latter isn't digitized with all the advantages (and disadvantages!) attached. Its why I bought a reMarkable 2 for my mother (before they went all cloudy). She writes down a lot. It became a mess of notes, pure chaos. A digital notebook is the best of both worlds.
Sure, that was a lesson I learned from such (though some software did/does not allow to save). Even auto saved 'lagged' behind back then. Even 5 minutes can be a big difference if you made changes but can't memorize all of them. Nowadays, even fast software such as Sublime Text autosaves somewhere in homedir.
Back in the 1990s, on old Macs, when Netscape crashed, it crashed with a "type 11" error which brought down the whole system. (I remember Word had autosave... I don't know when it first appeared, though.)
I have the same feeling now... Firefox doesn't crash anymore, even with 1000+ (unloaded) tabs... but I will often found that the page (or a youtube video) is now gone/removed after months or even years.
I suspect it still loses data and maybe corrupts profile if there is a disk full.
It deletes history entries once they're too old, and it also only keeps the last timestamp of when a URL was visited, so you can't know how often you visit a URL.
Personally, when I am in idea mode I'm usually incapable of detailed problem solving, and when I'm in details mode I'm incapable of idea generation. It takes many minutes to change modes and on some days I simply can not change.
So, if I don't write notes, I can't do anything complex. Some 20% of the ideas turn out to be useless, and must be discarded, otherwise they add up, but most of them, buy a large margin are stuff that should be executed.
When I work my side project I keep all ideas and tasks scribbled randomly on a page in a notebook. If I try to organize those pages or keep tasks away from ideas on a different page I just crash. I have to be sure not to try to organize any of it. I barely use the lines and just cram in little blocks of text wherever I feel they should go in the monlment. I flip back through the pages and have a record of what needs done, what I have done, and the things I need to do or think I need to do.
This somehow enables me to chew through a tremendous amount of work compared to projects at work that are rigidly organized. Sometimes I will write down a huge list of tasks, never look at them again, work for a few hours, and check my notes to find that I can cross them all off.
I have tried using the tools we typically use at work like Jira or Azure Boards. Total waste of time that stifles the mind.
Sometimes I can come up with great ideas while I’m not working on anything and therefore I’m not equipped to properly store them or efficiently vet them. I’ve been spending my spare time on improving my note taking process and organization.
Knowledge management feels like the western frontier of tech in some ways. Lots of wins can be had if you get it right and it’s often up to the note taker. Tools alone can’t solve the problem for most, at least not yet. Hasn’t stopped many from trying though.
I'm often doing this with my wife when she cooks - trying to write it down so we can recreate it when something turns out great; and it often does and we haven't captured it. But I always remember the story I read about a guy whose side gig was inventing a colored solution for kids to use blowing huge bubbles (harder than you think - it's got to be colored enough to see, but become transparent and nonstaining or their moms will instantly kill the product). Several years in, he found a perfect solution - then discovered the next day he hadn't written it down and couldn't recreaate it. It took him several more years to find one that worked and successfully bring it to market.
So, sure, maybe most of what goes in the notebooks is cruft, but the process is key. And the author DOES have an excellent point that the search & discovery capabilities of your system are key.
I was writing them down for a while until I realized the ones I forgot about tended to have obvious flaws almost like my subconscious was filtering things.
Most of my ideas that I've almost-forgot (passed from easy remembrance, only regained with much mental agony) and forgot-but-wrote-down don't have obvious flaws in them. Maybe you have a good mental filter, but for many of us we just have bad memory.
It doesn't need to be a good idea. It needs to be the next step in the branch; consider being in a conversation when some interruption happens. Interruption resolves, you say "and now back to...what was I saying?" In that moment, the value or proposition might have only been an argument or segue towards a broader point, or a sub-digression, but without that connective node, the entire pattern is lost.
You could counter with "then it wasn't a good idea if you didn't remember it" but it's the structure of how we think rather than the quality of the outputs. Why do we retrace our steps when we misplace something? What does that have to do with anything? It's the scaffolding structure around which we build a mental model. It's so you don't run outside and start looking under rocks. If you believe you wouldn't do that, you have to consider then why, and that is innately tied to the pattern-finding structure of our brain.
Creatives may cling to a lost node as the Rosetta stone, perhaps assigning more weight than is qualified, but then you won't actually know unless you find and explore that branch of thought. Its value lies in its unquantifiability.
> I've forgotten probably two or three major ideas, and it'll make you sick, just horrible.
I wish I could remember ideas well enough to even remember that I've forgotten them. When an idea of mine disappears, it's gone without a trace. I think I need to sleep better.
Not that I can claim David-Lynch levels of ideas, but I've found more than a keyword or phrase is needed to restore the mental state I was in or chain of reasoning I had when the idea came to me. You really need to save context in addition to the idea itself.
The GTD methedology can work well to park ideas in a Someday/maybe pile.
There are plenty of to-do/task managers which can accept tasks via email, and having a sudden idea can be as easy as sending that email address a quick note.
i write stuff down so i can stop memorizing it. sometimes i get back to that, sometimes i don't. it doesn't matter. if it is important i will remember it, or remember that i wrote a note about it (and then hopefully find that note). if it is not important then it will stay there left ignored.
the problem is i seem to treat browsertabs the same way. i open tabs intending to look at them later. then forget about them, and so they accumulate. i could close all the tabs, but some actually are important. and so i have to go through them, and clean them out once in a while.
I used to do the same and that turned in to turning tabs in to bookmarks, then i ended up with soooo many bookmarks.. then I discovered pocket. But within a year I had so many unread items, they even informed I was in the top 3% of users... Fuck.
yep. I've been thinking about this problem for some time now. With Google, and especially Slack, what I've discovered is resurfacing is more important than organization. You have some tiny thread of memory than you want to input into a system and have that system bring back the webpages and context. This is what Slack gets right.
We have Slack, we have Google, but we do not have anything that is personal. A personal search engine. Something like macOS Spotlight, but more contextual. In Slack you can find individual messages which match a pattern, but you can also expand to see the entire context of that message with date and time. The bookmarks in Chrome do not even tell you the date/time you added them. That's such a basic thing that is missing. The ability to create a "view" of your bookmarks organized chronologically would be another useful tool. In addition: what other sites were you looking at around that time? What city were you in? What was the weather in that city at that time? Sounds silly, but this sort of info can jog your memory.
The browser extends into the global but we have not yet discovered that the browser should extend the other way, into the personal. On one side we should have Chrome, on the other end should be Joplin or Obsidian.
I do the same, but then I take an iPad with me for long plane/boat trips with all the articles saved for offline reading.
Between the time spent in waiting rooms and actual travel time you can actually go through quite a lot of material (of course, pandemic didn't help with this strategy).
I save articles that look interesting but aren't critical to Pocket. I have a daily script that clears anything more than 2 weeks old. Either stuff gets read or it gets forgotten.
I do something similar with reminders - I schedule everything instead of keeping lists. That way I get reminded in a more digestible fashion and often by the time the reminder comes up, it's no longer relevant anyway. Makes clearing the list more organic and less cumbersome.
that's why i don't just bookmark everything. it also takes more effort to open a bookmark than to switch to a tab. instead i try to use bookmarks for the really important things.
I never understood how people can use browser tabs this way. If open tabs represent your backlog of stuff to come back to later, what represents your "current working set"? How can you concentrate on one task when there's so much other stuff open?
If I don't need something right now, it is stored in a read it later service (blog post, news articles) or a bookmark service (software projects, company web pages, etc).
I don't run my brain according to computer science principles, but generally the "current working set" for me are the tabs furthest to the right of a browser window's tab bar.
I use the Tree Style Tab add-on for Firefox. The working set can be one nested tree, like a directory in a file system. Or it can be a window, while I also have other windows with many tabs. I'm not well-organized though, just saying how it is.
For me its actually the browser window itself that represents a working set. I put all related tabs into their own windows and put the windows I'm not using on my supplemental monitor in the background so they're out of the way.
Otherwise I start drowning in browser windows and tabs
My working set is a workspace. I send browser windows to separate workspaces if I context-switch apart from a few basics like e-mail etc. which has a workspace to itself.
I may start adding things to my "scratch" workspace, and then if I realise this is something that's turning into more than just visiting a single page I'll tear of the tab and send it somewhere.
Many of those workspaces can stay up for weeks or months.
For open browser tabs, have a look at Onetab (browser extension). It'll close the tabs but keep them in a list however long you want. It lets you reopen things from the list with a click and optionally remove the ones you reopen from the list. In practice I find I very rarely go back to one of them, but for the rare occasions I do it matters, and knowing the urls are all preserved makes me much more likely to actually click that button now and again.
Not to sound obtuse, but that just sounds like browser history at that point. What sets it apart, aside from only storing the "fatal pages" - the pages that tabs were killed at?
What sets it apart is only storing the "fatal pages". That's the entire point.
Those of us who keep accumulating tabs often do so as a "I think I care about this in the near future" halfway bookmark. I don't know about you, but my browser history for just this morning (it's noon here) is already so extensive that it's worthless for that purpose. When I do need to find something with Onetab, it's maybe 1% of the size of my browser history or less.
EDIT: What's more is that when I reopen, it disappears from the list, whittling down what's left over until I can confidently press "delete all" for a given activation (it groups the tabs by which were open when you pressed it; but you can also drag and drop the "bookmarks" from one list to another)
This pretty much exactly describes my (ab)usage of tabs. I had a tab open with the HN submission for the death of Google Reader for two years, because there were so many interesting replacement suggestions. I finally admitted that Google had ruined RSS for me, and closed the tab.
Thank you for the OneTab elevator pitch. I'll give it a try.
The browser history has been destroyed in my experience. No one seems to care for its usability. One-page applications, pushState/replaceState, non-descript title pages and a horrible UI for it in the browsers, it goes on.
What browser do you use where history is at all usable for finding any specific thing? Combing through 150 or 500 by-domain YouTube entries with no other metadata? That thing that was a week or three ago on, uh, some domain with --ohhh look-- multiple subdomains? Hope you remember some words from the page title?
Google and Mozilla have both completely shit on the entire idea of personal browsing continuity. Just close all your tabs at night, then go to the home page they provide and start from scratch every morning and nobody gets hurt.
Moving tabs into history doesn't address why people are keeping tabs pen. The presence of the tab reminds you of something. If you move it into history, you have to go looking for it, which only works if you remember that you saved such a tab in the first place.
As a person with ADHD, this is exactly why I leave some tabs alone to remind me to look into it. I have a structure that helps to manage my process.
1. Tabs - Current
2. Tab Pins - For tabs that are living in my browser for more than a week or two.
3. Session Manager - I used it as a semi-archival bookmarking and used it for categorizing my tabs. This stage is where I decides that I need a new browser window, so I put all of my saved tabs in there and will review them in the future. After I review them, I moves the tab to the last stage.
4. Browser Bookmark - the final stage, I only use this for permanent archive. Bookmarks are regularly backup and sometimes merged from other browser bookmark through NirSoft tools.
hmm, the tab management page of one tab is interesting, but it is only available if i move tabs into onetab. i'd like the ability to manage tabs like that, assign them to groups, move them to windows, etc while all the tabs are open. i remember the original firefox container feature had something like that.
That does sound useful, yes. Chrome bookmarks at least can get you part-way there by letting you bookmarks all tabs in a window (right-click on the title bar) or letting you open an entire bookmarks folders contents as tabs, but it's not quite there.
I recently started using a bookmarking app (one of the many, so many) because there were often one or two lingering tabs that I didn't want to close, and it was interfering with the way I normally clean up my screen. Normally, I close the entire browser and start fresh two or three times a day, during the workday. At night I turn the computer off, and start with a blank desktop the next morning.
Anything that really matters will pass by you multiple times in different ways. So, while some of those tabs that collect during the day no doubt have value, arguably none of them are worth keeping.
Chrome has a "bookmark all open tabs" feature, I do this to clear everything out once in a while, safe in the knowledge I'm still hoarding the data safely somewhere.
Yeah, they copied that from Firefox after they noticed how useful it was. So did Microsoft; well after FF, but IIRC long before they rebased Edge on Chromium. In Edge it's even the same hotkey: Ctrl-Shift-D.
Reminds me of one of the writing tips by Neil Gaiman [1]: "Start a compost heap"
The act of entering information into a Notes app feeds the compost heap in a more or less indirect way, which then acts as subconscious nurture for later creativity. If you of the creative kind, that is.
This looks interesting. It sort of reminds me of an open source obsidian. I tried obsidian for a while but ended up switching to a dropbox directory full of markdown files. Felt likely slightly less friction to start a new page in vim, and also be able use ripgrep to find old ideas.
While the stuff we write down is not valuable, the process of doing so is very valuable.
Most people don't even take notes or use a shoebox/second brain to store these things. What most lifelong notetakers know is that the notes themselves aren't important, but rather the process of physically writing the notes, internalizing the information, and building new connections in your head is quite important.
The remnants of this process are mostly throw away from the author's perspective, but may be novel to a random person. This reminds me of someone uncovering a journal of nonsensical information saying "What's this about?" to then the author says "That's how I figured it out".
The beauty of it all is that it's meaningful to the author and not necessarily anyone else.
I agree -- I'm a lifelong chalk/whiteboard-er. Having a large space where I can write/draw/diagram is critical for me to work through ideas. Occasionally I take pictures or copy down my notes, but usually I just erase and feel like nothing is lost.
I also find the physical component of whiteboarding to be very helpful -- standing up, walking around, pacing, etc vs. just sitting down and writing on a notepad.
Yeah, but why not reuse like... 99% of your notes? Why not just write things down only if you're going to need them again, and in a way that you will be able to find them when you need them? I'm more likely to reread a note many, many times than to take one I never reuse, because every time I need to use a cardinality aggregation or invert a conditional, I go back to the notes for that.
I noticed "I think through writing". Whenever I need to implement a new feature I first explore status quo and write it down on confluence, jira etc. Then write down that I'm gonna do, alternatives etc. It takes time but makes it way clearer how to move forward on fuzzy things.
One of the reasons I have a nice notebook and pen to write with is because I can enjoy getting stuff out of my head and then, probably, never returning to it again.
Just a simple thing so I enjoy the act of offloading in whatever way I feel like doing (scribbling, thoughtful stuff, drawing, whatever) and then I've freed up some space in my head so I can relax.
I could try the same with a notekeeping app but I feel like I have to actually maintain them, or work with their system. Not to mention, it requires screen time that I might not want. A pen and some paper has no such system so it's liberating.
IME when the note is intended to be dropped off and picked up at a particular time it's useful (e.g. remember to pack insect repellent -> add to packing list -> wait 4 weeks -> check packing list).
I'm increasingly convinced of the value of checklists for small items - especially repeated tasks.
If it's a cool idea for, like, a new business or the start of essay without any predefined time to pick it up and work on it it ends up being kind of pointless and just creates a mess.
For those things, if it's a good idea it'll pop up in your head again, probably in a better form.
Note taking has to act like a pipeline to be useful.
Ditto for camping. After one trip, I inventoried everything I took out of the car and added items that I wished I'd had. And then typed it up and left copies in my gear bin.
I also do this! A bonus benefit is you can go back through the list when packing up to come home so you don’t leave your charger/toothbrush/… in a hotel.
I always feel a little obsessive or over-careful making lists for this sort of thing but it’s amazing how much easier and less stressful it makes packing for me.
Since I started note-taking a few years ago, my productivity has increased dramatically. The biggest benefit is that you can stop working on an idea for a bit, then come back later and read it back from disk to main memory, often now seeing issues with what you have written down that are apparent now, but were not back then.
Writing a paper about your idea is the ultimate form of this, but of course most of the time overkill. But it is good to bundle everything up in a paper once enough stuff has accumulated.
> Then you try to relocate a note, only to find
> that your favorite app’s search doesn’t seem
> to be as good as you thought it was at first.
> Now we don’t feel safe forgetting anymore
I guess I'm lucky that this rarely happens. Search works great, and is instant.
I kept waiting for deeper insight, like a system of prioritzation, or culling tricks. But the article seemed to just repeat itself: writing things down frees our brain, and forgetting is ok. We feel value in doing so, ok.
Most notes I take I never read again. That's OK, that's what archives are for. Same with mail, bills, etc. It's still useful to collect them, and in case of notes write them.
Sometimes I chuck out a whole bunch of Todos just to free my mind and it never turned into regret. I think that is why all these new note taking tools and ideas are not that important; the most important bit in note taking is taking the damn note.
I think that author has a point - most of the time I also save pages just to have it saved, and never look at it. But, on the other side, if you need something again, you need it badly in my experience.
DevonThink solved this problem for me years ago. I just pull in all the documents/pdf/web pages/text, let it auto-categorize them && forget. The only difference is that it has quit powerful and fast search, so that I can find them again in seconds. Bookmarks never worked for me and I don't have time and dedication for Zettelkasten-like systems.
How did you get to where you could trust DEVONthink auto-categorization? It seems powerful, but I would be afraid of forgetting where I put something. And there's no auto-wikilinking based on classification, right?
I try to keep a simple tree (no more than 2 levels) in all DBs and for many things I just keep a kitchensink-style groups, like „General“. DT struggles with categorization if the amount of items in a group is small - the categorization is based on statistics and keywords. For bigger groups it makes a solid guess most of the time.
I would als not be afraid of losing something: the search is very solid and there is also a custom search with filters and boolean logic if you need it. The only thing I need is to remember that I have it and the topic for keywords, then I can find it with search.
Just to get it out of the way: 300 weight #6b7280 on white. Someone hates eyes.
As for the content...meh. The file(s) or book(s) you put your ideas in are like compost piles. You throw things in them, and every once in a while you get out the pitchfork and turn them over. You see if some half-baked concept has become fertilizer for your current thoughts. You admire how some old brainstorm has rotted down to goo after you've learned more on a subject. You fish out some weirdly undecayed thing and go, "Oh, I was looking for that."
These articles are as bad as the notes people they are bagging on.
The trouble is that people try to fit the kitchen sink into the note app and that doesn't work. As a programmer, I have specific workflows for each note that I take.
Example. I want to try stand-up one day. Each snippet that I think of as a joke, I write down in a note. All snippets go into the same space. Sometimes I think of a snippet which could extend an existing bit (a joke which is larger than a one liner.) Once this page got to a certain length, I didn't even have to think about new snippets anymore. All I would have to do is open this page and they would jump out at me.
One approach is that if I feel like I got nothing, I can simply scan the list and find something which hits me. Like, I'll see a line and immediately think of something which could extend it. Or I'll see multiple lines which hit me and I can come up with something which mixes the two together. This may start a new branch of a joke.
Apply this to every reason I might add a note. Yes, I have what's basically a trash bin where notes go to die. But anything else is sort of like these jokes, they go into a place where I have a specific way to use them. Within my notes app, I have a system of navigation and discovery, which is basically like a website where you follow links and use metadata to place things in certain spots (unless you're adding to an existing note.) I use a template which fills in most of what I need and then the remaining is a quick add. I can then query that metadata as if it's a real DB.
I use Obsidian for this. I used Roam at one point, but it didn't have a way to hide things which weren't in my navigation path. Everything leaks, because, NETWORK! Nah, I look at it is like building spreadsheets. Each spreadsheet has a certain usage. I don't cram all the data into one spreadsheet. I use multiple spreadsheets. Then the app I use (Obsidian) has the above mentioned tools for nice navigation.
I've been meaning to set up Roam since my org folder is getting unmanageable.
Before Emacs I abused a Tomboy "wiki" style journal - even there I could set up several Notebooks as entry points. Every time I typed a word that happened to be a title it would link.
Initially this was useful for discovering links between subjects but without a naming convention it became overwhelming.
Is that what you mean by leaking? Can you briefly explain these issue and how Obsidian solves it?
By leaking, I mean how much of other content I see when I'm using the app for some purpose where that content isn't important.
It has been a while since I used Roam, so maybe these points have significantly improved. But the first thing I would see when I logged into Roam was the most recent page. I don't care about these things, Obsidian with a plugin allows me to create a a home page from an MD file which then has links to whatever else I want.
Roam also pushed things like a daily journal and backlinks in the sidebar. Most of the time, I don't want to see backlinks and I don't use the daily journal. I only want to see exactly what I have set the thing to show, anything else is a distraction. With Obsidian, all of this is so much more configurable, and easy to do so.
I think a lot of the thinking overhead issues people have when they think "where do I put this" is from seeing too much stuff which isn't important to what they are working on.
Thanks for sharing; I'm also an ex-Roam, daily Obsidian user, with similar (or at least overlapping) reasons for switching to obsdmd, and have a comparable workflow.
I love Roam, it would be on a short list of things to take with me to the after life. It's just that at the end of the day, all I really wanted was something to manage MD files and run queries on the key-value data in the front-matter.
I hate titles, hate naming files, hate moving files around in folders.
Sure, much of these are abstract things which could end up with you doing the same stuff but a different way. But I find that changing a path in front-matter is less painful than moving a file. And I can put a thing in multiple paths.
I use the Obsidian Zettel note to automatically name the file and I shove them all into the same directory. I then use the Dataview plugin to run queries for what I need.
I have MD files strictly for navigation, as if they are part of a static site layer. These files contain the links to go further into the navigation. It's basically all index files.
I keep everything together in the same vault, because so far I don't see a need to do any different. I just want to be able to navigate through the thing so that I'm not seeing a bunch of unrelated junk to distract me.
I do use directories to separate very different types. Like PDF's and Epubs go into one directory. Images go into another directory. MD files go into another directory. I don't know that I even need to do this, but I haven't run into a problem.
I'm exactly in the same boat as you regarding both the mentality and approach.
Just a curious question about the index notes: don't you feel they're cluttering up the graph and result in superficial relationships between the notes?
In my personal case: I used to create index notes to make navigation easier, but then I've found myself wondering "where should this note be indexed?" and also not getting much value out of the relationship graph.
Once I've discarded the index notes, the relationships became much more organic and authentic. Surprisingly, finding notes hasn't become more difficult after eliminating the index notes -- queries and lists are a beautiful thing.
What are your thoughts on this? Do you encounter any challenges with indexing?
This depends on which tool you're using. I use Obsidian, which has options for creating indexes without polluting the graph view. My indexes are produced from queries which don't create actual links which are picked up by the graph.
Since it looks like the author posted this article: Please use better color selection. Slightly darker gray on light gray has almost no contrast and is impossible for many to read (and causes strain in those who can).
You can automatically check against web accessibility with tools such as WAVE: https://wave.webaim.org/
In your case, #6B7280 on #F2F2F2 is a contrast ratio of 4.31 which is below all standards for normal sized text. Even for large fonts it would only be valid at lower compliance levels and not at AAA.
Erm, no, I execute on all my bookmarks and put them to use. Because I said I would. I don't use an app for bookmarking, just a massive 10000+ list of URLs in a boring text file that I revisit constantly to GTD. As for exobrains, yeah I'm an externalist[0] through and through, and not ashamed of that. For journaling and note-taking I use Standard Notes.
Once while doing a work rotation in Hong Kong, I was RDP'ing back into my NYC machine and I accidentally deleted ALL of the email in my inbox. At first, I was crushed and felt awful. I quickly moved past this thinking that if anyone really needed me for something, they would reach out again. If I lost anything crucial, I could probably go ask someone else.
This was very freeing! Tim Ferriss has a similar exercise where he recommends acting as if you have $0 cash/credit card access etc every so often. This helps you a. move that state from "unknown" to "known" b. help you see that many situations seem bad only b/c you've never lived through them.
IDEAS IN THE ROLODEX
I was watching a documentary about the early days of Mad Magazine. They mentioned that one of the writers had a Rolodex of notecards with random ideas he had stored and organized. If they were stuck coming up with an idea, he would spin through the rolodex till he found one that worked.
I've always liked this story as it's a form of decoupling (asynchronous?) idea inception from idea need. It requires more "caching" than trying to have ideas on demand with the trade off that you are not coming up with the ideas under pressure. While ideas sometimes get generated faster in the immediate need timeframe, I would imagine that also sometimes cuts the scope of those ideas. The decoupled model allows your idea generation boundaries to be much larger.
I regularly use Joplin and like it very much. But I guess note taking isn't for me. It's very far from having changed my life. Joplin is amazing for taking media-rich notes, combining PDFs attachments, images, bulleted lists, URLs, code snippets etc. into a single document. No other tool I know provides such richness. Whenever I need this unique combination, Joplin is a good bet. Regularly, I have files that fit nowhere, like a stray PDF that neither fits in my personal DMS (paperless-ng) nor into literature management software (Zotero); Joplin often is a good place for it. Allows to delete the file locally but still have confidence it's kept (with Joplin backed by Nextcloud, which is in turn backed up).
On the other hand, I recently flattened (that is: deleted a bunch of superfluous, deep hierarchy) my Joplin notebooks. Flat is better than nested in this case, it was a good change to make.
I wonder if "frequently reorganizing" notes is not an anti-pattern. Who wants to do that? It's a waste of time.
> I’ve no idea what the author is suggesting as an alternative, not making notes?
It doesn't matter where or how you write down your notes. It's just so you get the security of having that somewhere and not needing to think about it any more.
If you actually get some value from re-reading and reorganising your old notes, that's great. It sounds like you don't have the problem the author is addressing. But many people write tons of notes and save them but almost never look at them again, and subsequently worry they're wasting time writing and saving all these notes. This author is saying this worrying is misplaced, it's not a waste of time. The act of writing a note is valuable for tidying up the ideas in your head, even if you never look at them again. And that while you don't really need to save them (as you've already had the value from writing them), it can be easier and quicker to just save all your random notes, as a general policy, because trying to determine which notes have potential future utility is fairly pointless and stressful activity. Notes don't really cost anything to store. This policy doesn't work so well for physical possessions.
It's the same mechanism as Morning Pages - write exactly 3 pages right when you wake up, whatever is on your mind. It's tremendously helpful to move you past whatever you're stuck on in life.
You can write "I don't want to be writing this" over and over if you like. But it turns out that you usually have good things to say.
What's funny with people like OP is that they forget that most people never take notes and are still able to achieve as much as people who take notes. It is like developers who use vim, they deliver as much as people who use VS code.
But instead of saying 'yeah whatever' they try to prove that their way is the right way
I'm struggling to tie your comment to what the author is getting at. The advice to write thoughts down so you can stop thinking about them isn't offered as a way to achieve more efficient performance, it's to let yourself stop worrying.
This is exactly what I love about Git. I don't have to worry about throwing away code and can go back in history whenever I want to (even though I rarely need to).
Yep, it’s very freeing being able to just delete things even if you think you might need them later. I just recently resurrected a test which was deleted 6 months ago because it wasn’t useful at the time but is now. Version control also saves a lot of commented-out code sitting around - delete it, and if something needs doing to it then make a ticket/task.
I agree with the part where taking notes lets us structure our ideas and helps us remember. However, here's one principle that I found very useful: note-taking should be structured in such a way that you _encounter_ notes that you took previously. This is part of the idea behind Roam's backlinks, but I think no technology by itself will help here. The problem is having the correct approach: it should be possible to list notes on a topic, and they should be reviewed from time to time to see if they are relevant or not. This way, ideas which were noted down can be reviewed, kept track of, and pruned -- just seeing the title of a note is more than enough for this.
I've been doing that for more than half a year on various topics -- world locations, news, films and books I've seen/read, CS papers, research ideas -- and the results are great: I can remember more and I call recall and describe my memories more fluidly. What's important is that note-taking isn't the only way that "old" ideas can be re-encountered. If you want to remember information about the world, just take a look at the world map from time to time, point to places and think about what you want to remember.
I think this story is both right and wrong. I take a lot of notes. But mine are a bit more like descriptions to myself. To me they are invaluable because I forget too easily.
As a software developer there are too many technologies, libraries and tools to master. I cannot keep it all in my head.
But I find that that writing articles around what I have learned is most effective. I put those online and I can later use Google to relocate them. I actually do this quite a lot.
I also found Ulysses and iA writer very useful as they let you categorize notes in a hierarchy and store in markdown. I have most so much notes from using obscure formates.
Sticking to markdown has been my best choice for note taking for many years.
Another habit I have found useful is to begin highlighting and scribbling in the margins of books.
It allows me to reopen a book later and more easily recall important stuff. I avoided this most of my life as I wanted to keep books in pristine conditions, but all you get is this perfectly nice looking book which you read at some point but which no longer hold value because you will never bother reading the whole thing over again.
Flipping through your old notes suddenly “feels like sifting through stale garbage,” as Dan Shipper found, disillusioned after building a galaxy of notes in Roam Research.
I don't have that experience with my notes at all. I regularly refer to old notes. A sample of the queries my notebook (really a folder full of text files) has answered:
- How did I sort those things in bash?
- What were the setup steps for that software?
- Where did I get this fact that I'm quoting?
- I have a bad impression of this movie, why is that?
- Why did I choose to architect this code this way; what pitfalls was I avoiding?
- What was that brand of tea that I like?
- What voltage RAM does that old laptop use?
Sure, I can reconstruct all of this information with a combination of Google, experimentation, and physical examination of the relevant items. But it takes time. Having this information compiled in an easily grep-able format is like having information in RAM, versus having to fetch it from the hard drive.
I feel like almost everyone is working on some variant of digital garden/zettlekasten/digital slip box since the pandemic started. At least that's when I found out about it.
For those interested in essays about note-taking, thinking, writing & PKM, note that Matthew's article is also part of the PKM journal [1], an online publication that I've recently launched.
Your comment and a comment below about "frequently reorganizing" notes is not an anti-pattern reminded me of this.
"All truly wise thoughts have been thought already thousands of times; but to make them truly ours, we must think them over again honestly, till they take root in our personal experience."
– Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Amusingly, also tying in with what someone above said about starting a compost heap, that quote has stuck with me after reading "Just Enough is Plenty" by Samuel Alexander [1] (an introduction to Henry Thoreau's economic ideas) whose first preface is entitled "Compost Capitalism".
"What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun. Is there anything of which one can say, 'Look! This is something new'? It was here already, long ago; it was here before our time."
I mean ~2000+ years ago people understood this. Day to day relatable ideas generally come to anyone involved in the cutting edge of any era of humanity, and such ideas will generally resonate with one's contemporaries who are likely thinking similar things. Billions of us can't really claim to have found something new. We didn't invent countability, or factoring, or primes.
But it's also a bit of a cynical lie that may comfort some of us, that being ordinary is okay, because ordinary is normal. Over the millennia we managed to turn philosophy into science, mathematics into machines, and miniaturise them into our hands, generate energy and resources unthinkable to our ancestors, and create networks of algorithms complex enough we offload a significant portion of day to day thinking and planning. These are new things.
Is it true wisdom? Define true wisdom - my understanding is there is no objectivity in such matters. There is only the balance and friction between forces of imagination wrought out by human minds and hands, always building on knowledge that came before. Take away all knowledge, and the cycle will continue, it's just what people do. We think, we imagine, we create.
I ramble but it probably feels day to day like nothing is ever new, and everything is always being recycled, but it's in this compost heap that new ideas ferment and take root, so that is an analogy I'll be adopting henceforth (not in the least as it makes me less disappointed in my own unpursued ideas).
Also worth noting that almost no effort has been made by the folks making note taking apps to help people make better use of their entries. Sure, they've implemented things like gallery views, filters, and tagging, but these are all passive and require the user to seek out the information. Why not active features like an API that makes code snippets available in my IDE, a feature that surfaces recipe recommendations from my collection, or how about automatically organizing my receipts by month and offering an expense summary report? There are a ton of features that could be made to help people better access and use the notes they make.
For a while Evernote was where my ideas went, and where they got developed into full-blown scripts for comics by me and my creative partner. A lot of ideas went there to die, some went there to hibernate, some went there to be nurtured and grow.
Then Evernote got rewritten as a bunch of sluggish Electron garbage that got in the way and now I never touch the fucking thing. I really wish I could find a replacement.
(Criteria, before someone suggests their favorite: allows collaboration, works on Macs, iOS, Windows, and Android, with native apps.)
I'm not a fan of this headline style but it's not really telling you how to interpret the story any more than "It's fine that ideas get forgotten in notes apps" or any other normative sentence would be.
It's just kind of a cheesey way of making a surprising normative claim.
I get what the author is saying, but I write down ideas to delegate to myself for later exploration. I find search is often good enough to get to what I'm looking for within a couple of queries, and a general read through of the collection makes for a great diving board when it comes to getting started on brainstorming
It looks like the poster is the author here, so hopefully he sees this feedback. Please, please, please pick a better contrast ratio for your text. Grey on slightly-lighter-grey is a terrible color combination for reading. I read the first paragraph and gave up on it because it wasn't worth the eye strain.
The biggest benefit for me of note taking apps are tracking whiskeys and blog post ideas. Everything else I try to use the note tacking apps for (parks near me I'd like to check out, movies to watch) it ends up a write-only log.
But for whiskeys and blog posts, it is very useful and I depend on it weekly at least.
This addresses the problems with the hype related to digital note tools but does not apply to the effectiveness of a real analog zettelkasten: https://youtube.com/user/scottscheper
The start-of-sentence capitalisation threw me off for a while there: So they meant just ordinary notes apps after all; and here I thought they meant Notes apps... As in Lotus Notes.
At least the first half of the sentence would have made just as much sense my way.
A primary feature of my note app resurface 10 random notes I made. I don't write them to forget, and I often use it to revise and expand upon my original notes, or more often these days: Linking them up and creating my own internal wiki.
I've conditioned myself to think if something is worth saving then it is worth spending time to give it a meaningful title, tag it and put it in the right notebook. Without these added details I agree it is pointless.
Notes are what let me carry transient thoughts from places where I can't execute them to places where I can. My memory isn't that good, so it's a sort of Sci-Fi augmentation!
Not to mention, it's not so much because we forget them, but by writing them down they can be later cued and synchronized to other ideas for fruitful promulgation.
About to jump onto the wagon. Zero emacs experience. Hoping to achieve emacs -> org-mode, org-roam, automatically publish as a Hugo site as a knowledge base. Any essential, tips, advice or "I wish I had known earlier", lay it on me. This looks to be a trek.
Go through the emacs tutorial (built-in) to learn how to navigate buffers and the system correctly. Learn incrementally. When you start with org-mode, start by treating it as a fancy outliner. Pick one or two new features to integrate into your toolkit every couple of weeks (maybe more or more often, everyone's pace is different) to use. Abuse the hell out of them to make it muscle memory, and then scale back to a more reasonable use.
Install and use helm (others may suggest something different, but I like it). With it set up, when you start typing M-x and typing out a name, it will show you all the current possible matches and their keyboard shortcuts. Makes discovery much easier than without. It can be hooked into other parts of the system as well, but that's my #1 reason to recommend it to a new emacs user. Emacs discovery is pretty good, but this makes it even better.
Use the "apropos" commands and the built-in help capabilities. C-h <various things> will tell you all about emacs, in general, and your current configuration. C-h b, for instance, tells you all the current key bindings (which can be different depending on the currently active modes).
Use daemon mode and emacsclient. The key thing here, if you close all your open windows your emacs session doesn't terminate. You can reopen it and all your buffers will be accessible. You can force kill it (M-x server-force-delete) and restart the daemon later if you get into a weird state (possible early on when playing with your configuration).
Read the manuals. The emacs manual and org-mode manual (I don't use org-roam so can't comment on it) are fantastic. Just browse through them, see if a table of contents item catches your attention, go to that section and read it. See if you can apply it, otherwise "forget" it and maybe later you'll think, "I want to do X, oh, wait, I think I saw that in the manual...".
You learn it like any other thing in life. You probably didn't learn to use your OS of choice all in one go. You maybe started with a graphical interface or the shell. Learned a few key things, and only later learned more options that you were able to use to enhance your experience. "Oh, C-r lets me search backward through my shell history. That's cool, I'll use that a lot." But you probably didn't know it when you started learning (or forgot because you were inundated with information).
I followed the system crafters Emacs from scratch series to get some coding going, just to get a feel for emacs with evil(vim emulation). This weekend I started writing some notes in ORG and ORG-ROAM. But i was already used using links etc because i used obsidian note taking.
Im not that comfortable yet to start customising my keybindings or rewrite my init/config file to really personalise emacs.
Notes apps? Never found a good one that really worked for me. Rhodia notebooks - simple, effective and permanent. I write stuff down to remember, the ideas never die...
Is this GPT-3 generated? This looks like affiliate links content farm designed specifically to nerdsnipe HN visitors: topic which are popular here:writing and organizing knowledge, plenty of affiliate links to most popular books frequently mentioned over here, some quotes sprinkled with truisms here and there, unknown author
Just listen to David Lynch:
"I write [ideas] down so I don't commit suicide later having forgotten the idea. I've forgotten probably two or three major ideas, and it'll make you sick, just horrible. Write the idea down. You'll say: I'll never forget this idea. Ah-uh: you can forget them."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uHhf76z6BkM&t=197s