Ask HN: What's your way of saving/recollecting important career notes? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What's your way of saving/recollecting important career notes?

31 pointsanudeep201119 comments

I read a good amount of articles every day and whenever I find something useful I note them down digitally. Once a week I go over my notes and filter out the ones I want to retain and look back after a while (let's call them 'important-notes'). My 'important-notes' are filled with 'mistakes-not-to-repeat', 'career-advice', 'motivational-stuff', 'quotes', 'things-experience-taught-me' and so on.

When I am starting out on new things (like learning a new framework), or just lacking motivation, or looking to improve productivity I go back to my 'important-notes' and read them over.

This has been super helpful for me. I can give a bunch of reasons as to why it's helpful but they all boil down to this: It helps me avoid repeating mistakes, and to avoid stupidity.

In theory, it's perfect but I do not execute it well. I do not go back to them every week to filter. I do not read the 'important-notes' often. A lot of times I still make mistakes which I should not because I have clearly written about those in 'important-notes'.

Anyone else in similar situation? Do you take notes that you want to go back and read? If yes, what's your model to deal with this? Any tools that you found helpful? Any better solution to the whole idea of 'important-notes' and going back to them?

This might be off-base, but i think your problem is not about storing information, more about keeping all that info in your mind so you can apply it. I tend to have an itch to catalogue and store information, but it quickly reveals that the constraint is time and what I can keep in my head rather than the info i have squirreled away somewhere.

The key is to understand that organizing/filtering the relevant info is a separate task from cataloguing. I spend a little time every week doing that.

Tools -

https://workflowy.com/ - hierarchial lists, very useful! to keep track of important todos/things to remember in the week.

ultra.work/lights-generator (thats a URL) - to track habits that i want to do every day.

Wow that's a nice way of handling lists.

That's right. I do not have problem storing information. I use workflowy already.

Thanks for sharing lights-generator. Checking it out.

I'd recommend looking into Standard Notes. Cross-platform, and mobile. I really like it.

http://standardnotes.org

Looks great. I wonder how it compares with Evernote. It looks lighter, which is nice.

It definitely doesn't have all the whistles and bells of Evernote, but maybe all the OCR and stuff isn't what you're after?

I do almost the same thing with pocket and GitHub. I use Pocket to save articles. I slack in tagging them but sometimes sit down and tag all the untagged items at once. About going back, I have recently started taking notes from them in a Github readme so that I can just go back to the readme and find the appropriate one to see. I have only recently started doing this as the number of saved articles have become overwhelming.

It works out well, if not perfect. Usually, articles are not to be re-read completely, only the important parts or the gist is enough.

https://github.com/m2n037/learning_notes

Please let me know what are your thoughts regarding this. May be we will both find a better way to deal with this.

This is similar to what I do, save brief notes about important stuff. I hardly save links. Mostly it's a line or 2 from the link that I save.

You can always put the link along with the lines so that you can still access it.

Most articles are saved to pocket. If I really like it, you can "favorite it". When I'm bored from time to time, I'll scroll through what I've favorited. A good chunk of the time I'll prune stuff I no longer appreciate.

If there's certain types of learnings that I really appreciate --> I'll add it to Anki, but just a little snippet of Q/A.

Q - How should you view SSDs when scaling high traffic sites? A - "Think of SSDs as cheap memory, not expensive disk" - This was from an article from High Scalability about Reddit.

I have always looked at pocket like 'read it later' (it's previous name as well). Save -> read -> archive.

However, looks like a lot of people use it like a bookmarking tool.

and thanks for sharing your flow.

Filters and labels in Gmail.

Any email I send to myself is automatically marked as read... then based on what’s in the subject line a label is automatically applied. For example, if I have an idea for a design I send an email with a subject of “Design - blah blah” and whatever text in the body. The filter I set up in Gmail looks for the word “Design” in the subject, marks it as read so I don’t get notified of a new email, and then applies the Design label. From there, I usually start an email thread on that subject line as I have more ideas.

That's awesome.

But it should soon become overwhelming if you have a lot of content coming in. If you want to have a glance at all your saved quotes, let's say, you have to expand into each mail to read them even if they are just 2-3 lines.

I can see how this works nicely for half-baked ideas in mind. You can simple reply to the thread each time you have more points.

I use DevonThink for full text indexing of PDF, web links, docs, RSS feeds, etc as part of a local knowledge base. Syncs to mobile as well, so I have access to key info when traveling. I organize content into logical groups for various projects or research areas.

http://www.devontechnologies.com/products/devonthink/devonth...

Does anybody think it would be a good idea to use AI to automate reminders of the information when it becomes relevant? How would something like that be implemented?

Personally, I keep a digital commonplace book —

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commonplace_book

In practice, this ends up being a huge markdown file (so I can store readable code) with entries prefixed by tags to make for easier searching.

I use tagging heavily with any note taking application (like One Note / evernote). I use voice recorder to record any useful ideas / lessons that my subconscious brain tells me. I then push it to my note taking application with appropriate tag and push it to my cloud drive. I review them once in a while.

I am assuming you will not review them all but only the important ones. So you probably have a tag called 'important'?

Take a spring cleaning day every quarter. Review notes, think, use mind maps or outlines to distill whatever you are thinking of.

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