If You Didn't Write It Down, It Didn't Happen -- Take Notes | Hacker News Reader

If You Didn't Write It Down, It Didn't Happen -- Take Notes

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66 pointscschanck44 comments

One of _the_ most effective meeting strategies that I've seen recently, is our Technical Project Director who leads our 30 minute scrum each morning, starts off with a structured five part agenda in the form of an Email (Strategic Issue of the week, planned critical Must hits of the week, P1 unplanned emergencies, Daily Sprint, and, if we have time, tasks to be accomplished that week (mostly the jira-tasks with due dates landing that week)) - and, as we _scream_ through the agenda (people rarely have more than 20 seconds to respond, provide updates) he rapidly types all updates and responses into the email.

When we get to 10:00 (Our scrum runs from 9:30 - 10:00 AM) he announces "It's 10:00, and this meeting is done." and hits the Send Button on the email.

I realize that this can be all done on a Wiki, or other mechanisms, but it's surprising how _reassuring_ it is to know that I have on my laptop/iPhone a detailed list of all the strategic/Commitments/P1s/Sprints/Tasks that the org is worried about today/this week. Also, it's a very efficient mechanisms for the person taking notes. Their job is complete before we leave the room at 10:01 AM.

And, additional bonus - when I have my Staff meeting on Mondays, at 11:00 AM, half of that meeting is simply going over the relevant parts of the email that was sent out at 10:00 AM.

Very cool. I'd be interested in hearing more effective meeting strategies from others. There are tonnes I read about in books but as someone who learns best from examples, I really appreciate anecdotes like yours!

That is fascinating; I may have to try that.

Sounds like an awful way to start the day.

Like hamsters in a treadmill, just looking for the next two weeks, and never ahead enough. ( I know this by experience).

The scrum process is fine when dealing with bugs, or small incremental features, but it is very ineffective when dealing with completely new products or when trying to deal with innovative features.

Scrum throws all creativity out of the window. By creativity/innovation, I mean doing completely new things that are even a magnitude better, or just faster processes that what you have.

Creativity is a thing that just gets killed by planning. Often it happens when you are dealing with a problem. But the scrum process, puts blinders on developers, as you are supposed to work only on what you planned/committed to, and nothing else, like a good horse just watch the path you are told to by your manager/pm/team lead, and don't get distracted by anything else. Kills any instrict motivation, and sends a group towards a path of mediocrity as it delegates all decision making/creativity on the team lead (manager, or mp).

If your process is a straitjacket for the people involved, you have a problem with the people, not with the process.

We use variants of agile at work. Daily stand-ups, email notes, two-week iterations. My daily standups look a lot like the grandparent, except they're at 4:00 PM instead of 9:30 AM and last only about 10 minutes.

But everyone recognizes that the process is there to guide us and not to constrain us. If your report is "I did nothing for the project today", well, that's your report. I had one feature where my report for every single one of the first 4 days was "I tried this and it didn't work." Followed by 2 weeks of furious coding where I didn't check anything in, followed by dumping 2500 lines on my code reviewer. I didn't get any grief from my coworkers (got lots of encouragement, actually), because they recognized that it was a hard problem, there were a lot of constraints, and we didn't even know what the constraints were until could put something up on the screen and start testing it.

I think that it all depends on the PM. If your PM understands that it is OK to do nothing sometimes, it is completely different story than PM who expects some work every day.

It nails down my problem with most of the methodologies: they all do depend on people involved, yet there is very little talk about the right attitudes.

(FYI, according to Harvard Business Review and similar publications, the direct management is one of the main reasons why people decide to leave)

(BTW, why you downvoted him?)

The another problem with the hour is that -- I don't know how about other people -- but I'm the most productive in the early morning, or very late night. My mind is completely focused on work then.

If there's a meeting, or whatever, it means that my output will be seriously hurt. That's another problem with such methodologies' descriptions: it is very tempting to response me that I don't fit to the team or I should try to change my habits, even if, in the right environment, I'm always the most productive team member.

I agree with you about the hour. What I did on my last major consulting assignment is to get in at 0600 and get lots of stuff done before any meeting was threatening to happen.

Well, this is a "Manager's Scrum" where each of the organizational managers/directors/leads identify what needs to be done. The individual contributors mostly work out of Jira at their own pace.

Also, I work in an operational organization, so, a lot of our design patterns are pretty well laid out, and so most of the creativity comes from improving the patterns (which we do in design review or our bi-annual architecture refresh) more than creating anything particularly innovative during the week. We're mostly focused on execution and hitting commitments - and tracking them and writing them down at the beginning of each morning makes sure we know, and hit those commitments.

It's for exactly this reason that I keep a personal, daily journal. At the end of each day, just before I go to bed, I take a few minutes to reflect over what I did that day that I'd like to be able to remember in 5 or 50 years.

I keep it mundane: I did this, then I did that, and after dinner, I did this. If commentary occurs to me, I'll jot it down, but if not, a Joe Friday "just the facts" transcription will do just fine. It usually takes only a few minutes. And yet reading entries even a year old can be fascinating: the amount you will forget in a year's time (to say nothing of a decade) is enormous. Even recording just big-picture outlines of day to day life makes a great journal.

I also recommend having some sort of personal log. People forget things easily, but they're just as easily reminded of them. Rereading old entries helps remind you how you changed (or how you haven't), and helps you recall events that otherwise would have been forgotten.

Do you use a paper journal or an electronic one? I used to use composition books, but last year I switched to digital since I can easily back it up. My system is just text files in a directory hierarchy:

ggreer@carbon:/Volumes/DIARY/2010/01$ ls 02.txt 03.txt 04.txt 05.txt 06.txt 10.txt 11.txt ...

In the rare event that I want to draw something, I'll draw it on paper and scan it or draw on a whiteboard and take a photo. I prefer text though, since I can grep -r it.

Your method sounds good.

Right now, I use paper. I do create backups (photocopies), although whether I'll buy another paper journal when I fill this one is an open question. One advantage that paper has is that, if properly preserved, it's quite durable; it's not vulnerable to file system changes or anything. A disadvantage is that it's laughably easy to destroy in a flood or fire, whereas data can be searched and backed up.

I also have some irrational quasi-romantic attachment to a journal written in my own handwriting, but I'm probably going to need to let that go.

anyone who is serious about being an innovator MUST keep a log. innovation occurs from the connection of ideas and you don't want to limit yourself merely connections between ideas that just happen to occupy your head at any given time. jotting down ideas (your own, and your reactions to other people's) allows you an easy way to play with connections.

I can't recommend FreeMind highly enough. It easily gives you a ten IQ point advantage, in terms of being able to create insights you wouldn't have been able to see otherwise. Anyone not using it might as well be eating paint chips.

I have tried FreeMind on several occasions and my biggest frustration point with it is that it is a tree instead of a graph. Is there an easy way to get around this? Many (most?) of my ideas interconnect and it would be nice to be able to organize them non-hierarchically.

Most ideas do interconnect, so at first it would seem that the best way to model a system would be using a concept map. But forcing yourself to think in trees usually leads to much deeper understanding. This is because you end up listing examples of something, or arguments for and against things. And once you retrain your brain to see see the connections between the arguments and examples, you see that this is infinitely more valuable than just being able to see the connections between concepts.

I'm another fan of text files. My system has grown a bit over the years I've been keeping my notes like this. I have a shell alias to open vim with a file in my diary subdir, named according to the current date. That stays open all day, and is where I write and record everything that doesn't fit into an organized project. Topic-specific notes go into other text files, depending on subject. Pyblosxom running over that whole directory hierarchy gives me a presentable view of all my notes in a browser (with slightly-modified markdown for formatting).

It gets synced to Dropbox, and is also a hg repository that I intermittently push to a server for safekeeping. Honestly I've very rarely wanted to check the revision history, but it's there if I need it. [and another advantage of plain text].

It may sound over-elaborate, but that's just because it's grown over the years according to what i've needed. I'll probably add some kind of lightweight tagging/search system soon, if only because at >1m words, it's reaching the point where grep is a bit sluggy. And it's hard to overstate the benefits of having a view of my daily life, year by year.

The best note-taking app I've yet to find is Notational Velocity: http://notational.net/

Completely mouse-free and uncluttered. Also, it doesn't make the mistake to organize the notes, since this is usually impossible and a waste.

EDIT: web-page seems down, check Github instead: http://wiki.github.com/scrod/nv/.

I've tried many of the note taking methods the author has mentioned. But only the plain text files manage to stick around. And once I found Dropbox, I symlinked my note taking text files in to Dropbox directory.

I suggest yEd to do mind mapping instead of Freemind/Xmind

http://www.yworks.com/products/yed/

and Quotepad for simple text note-taking

http://quotepad.info/

Evernote includes the clipping and time stamping of quotepad, plus syncs all your notes to web and mobile. http://www.evernote.com/

By Quotepad I mean simple. Evernote is alternative to OneNote.

When I'm at work, I keep notes in a dedicated spiral notebook. That's where I draw out diagrams of the stack, write down kernel crash messages, and sketch out new stuff. Lately, at school, I've been making notes for my projects on dozens of sheets of printer paper.

Fact is, paper is probably the most versatile way to take notes, because when you need a graph or an equation, you don't have to muck about entering data points or writing TeX equations, you just draw/write the thing. You don't have to worry about formatting or anything like that.

I take this ethos in a different sense, if you didn't write it down then it "shouldn't" happen. Everything for me starts with some kind of design, and that's pen to paper, every time.

Simple text files works even better if you check them in to a DVCS like Mercurial og Git. History of deleted items and instant replication between computers.

I'm very interested in this, but I need to be able to write down equations.

Is there any good note-taking software where I can write equations, either as latex or something similar?

Thanks =)

When I was taking physics courses, I took notes in plain text files with TeX formatted equations inline. I could write them almost as fast as the professor was writing them on the board. They were even modestly readable, so long as I took care to insert meaningful whitespace.

Thanks! (And for viewing.. u exported them to pdf?)

I prefer to use straight tex files when math equations are needed. If your emacs is properly configured (auctex + reftex + preview) you can preview the equations while typing. C-c C-p C-{p,r,s,d,b,etc}. I'm running emacs 23.x here. org-mode also supports embedded latex formulae with preview! http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/org/Proce...

I have tried taking notes on a laptop, but it just doesn't work so for a computer engineer. Yes, as another commenter mentioned, you can write TeX formatted equations, but I also need to be able to draw circuit diagrams, truth tables, and VLSI layouts. Now, as I'm going into grad school, I still take all my notes in a spiral notebook with either a fountain pen or a nice ballpoint.

I can recommend Evernote, it's great for notetaking. I'd also like to correct some inaccuracies in the article, for people who don't know the software:

- if there isn't a network connection, that isn't a fail. You can use native client in offline mode, and the data will be synced next time you will be online.

- the notes does automatically open in editing mode. (at least in version 3.1 I use).

In my job if you don't make notes then it pretty much legally never happened.

It's done wonders for my productivity having to make constant critical notes. Especally if you have to go back to a problem after a break.

I do it the old-fashioned way - With a big old pile of paper notebooks:

http://i.imgur.com/l7J0e.jpg

I use prolog written in text files, it's pretty much the perfect query language and so there's no better tool for organizing your knowledge. (it's such a cool way to organize notes that i often go overboard with taking too many notes and too much organizing).

It's also a brilliant metaprogramming language (i use it for html, java, javascript, python, sql, mozart/oz) so you can spend all your work time in it if you're a programmer.

You use prolog for note taking? That's fascinating - any chance you could paste in just a few lines so we can see what it looks like (and maybe an example of a query you might run)?

It's not so fascinating at when first writing a note, but it gets interesting after that -you have tags on tags -and finally you get an ontology or thereabouts

I'm not sure it's cut out for everyone though

hackernewscomment_paragraph_id("I use prolog written in text files, it's pretty much the perfect query language and so there's no better tool for organizing your knowledge. (it's such a cool way to organize notes that i often go overboard with taking too many notes and too much organizing).",1,1030).

hackernewscomment_paragraph_id("It's also a brilliant metaprogramming language (i use it for html, java, javascript, python, sql, mozart/oz) so you can spend all your work time in it if you're a programmer.",2,1030).

comment_tag(1030,prolog). pllanguagecomment(X) :- comment_tag(X,Y),pllanguage(Y). pllanguage(prolog). pllanguage(java). description(pllanguagecomment,"tell me comment id's where i commented about a programming language").

check out protege ontology editor for people who'd like a graphical tool for this style of organizing

I use emacs org-mode and get a lot of mileage from it.

> prolog ... metaprogramming

This is very relevant to my interests. Please post or write an article about this.

Reminds me of this wonderful scene of Yes, Prime Minister:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jNKjShmHw7s

God, what a great show that was. For those who are members, it is available for streaming over Netflix.

A log of notes. Hmm, I should try this.

I started using Org mode in Emacs recently.

Anyone have any experience for the best way to use Org mode for note taking?

Sacha Chua has some very nice instructions (from her upcoming book on Emacs) : http://sachachua.com/wp/2008/01/outlining-your-notes-with-or...

Her blog (found from HN comments) was half my motivation to start using Org. But I haven't seen that page of hers. Thanks! [Edit: But sigh, not discussing logs. :-)]

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