Hacker News Reader

Comment by Jemaclus | Hacker News Reader

I have a notebook and I essentially dump everything into it. Each meeting I put a simple header: "Payments Weekly" or "Bob 1:1" or "API Review" and then jot my notes underneath. The only organization that exists is that it's written in chronological order.

I'd like an app with dead simple "just start typing" with a basic header to name the section...

but what I don't want to have to do is go back and clean up and edit and organize. I'm just not that kind of person. I'm not very organized in general, and I don't have the personality traits needed to say "Hmm, I think I'll organize my notes."

But it'd be great if something would detect that I've had five "Bob 1:1" meetings and would group those together, for example. Maybe something lightweight like this exists, but I haven't seen it...

View on HN

Do you ever re-visit your notes?

* If so, how?

* If not, what is their value?

Edit: I've returned and re-read that comment. It may come off as a little snarky, but it's not intended as such, it's a genuine question. I ask, because I'm interested in how other people's processes work, and wonder whether my system would be of use or value to anyone else.

Not who you were replying to, but:

* Most of my notes relate to a single blog post / article / paper that I read.

* In my notes, I jot down any new concepts I learned, and summarize them in a way I know I will be able to understand later.

* I'm very forgetful, so it helps to have this type of "condensed" representation so I can go back and review in six months when I inevitably forget what I learned.

* It's even better if my note-taking software can help me find old notes that I may have forgotten about. This is where tags and bidirectional links come in handy.

* My notes contain a lot of math, which is why I can't just use a plain text editor. The side-by-side style some editors use (like the VS Code Markdown Preview) is also suboptimal, because it wastes screen space -- normally I want half my screen to be notes, the other half to be a pdf). So far, Typora is the only software I've used that gets math editing right. But I'm slowly working to fix that! [1,2]

[1] https://github.com/benrbray/prosemirror-math [2] https://benrbray.com/static/prosemirror-math/index.html (only tested in chrome)

try https://www.monsterwriter.app/ It has support for inline equations as well as block equations and mermaid diagrams.

Took a look at link 2 in Firefox, both the inline and block equations render excellently. Great looking project!

The rendering is all thanks to KaTeX, which is indeed great! Maybe it's not clear enough from the page, but the page is actually editable -- click anywhere and start writing. You can add new math by typing an expression like $x+y=z$. The untested bit has to do with math editing on -- there are some issues with moving your cursor around using the arrow keys on FF.

The value of some notes is the act of taking notes keeps me from falling asleep and missing the 1 thing that I should care about that nobody would tell me otherwise...

This, definitely.

I don't allow my team to bring laptops into any of my meetings, unless they are giving a presentation, and I have taught and encouraged them to avoid taking laptops to other team members' meetings. Instead, we bring notebooks and pens.

This serves a few purposes. First, like you said, it forces you to pay attention. You learn a lot more, and you get more involved. You ask more questions and you walk out of the room having learned something.

Second, it makes you look GOOD. Imagine going into a meeting with the CTO and you're the only person without a laptop, the only one making eye contact, the only one writing things down. As far as the CTO is concerned, everyone else is dicking around on Facebook, and here you are, bluGill, taking notes and being a go-getter.

My team resisted my rule when they first heard them, but (pre-COVID) I've overheard them suggest to other people not on our team to leave the laptop at their desk and bring a notebook instead. It really works.

Not who you asked but my thoughts:

I usually write notes on paper for _every_ meeting I have in my professional life. Even at meetups or other low-key situations, I will write down things before, during, and after.

However, I hardly ever go back and read them after the event. The point is not to keep a record of what I learned but instead to help me learn _in the moment_.

I have found that by hearing/reading something then creating a new thought/paraphrase of the thing I learned, then writing that new thing down, then reading what I just wrote all help solidify the new knowledge enough in my mind to not go back. I don't remember everything but I have the knowledge associated with other things enough that I can build on top of it, usually.

When I do go back, I hardly know what the notes mean and usually give up and throw the notebook out. The only common exception to this are action items/todos as I've learned to write those very clearly and with clear expectations.

I do return to my notes, yes, but only within a week or two. Typically I'll take notes on Monday and then reference the notes from the meeting at either the next meeting or at a 1:1 or when I'm compiling my weekly status updates to the boss man.

How? I just flip back through my notebook until I find it. The problem is that some days I have 15 meetings and some days I have 3 meetings, and some meetings have 2 pages worth of notes and some have 3 lines worth of notes. And due to the sheer amount of notes I take, it's not easy to remember in which meeting which topic was discussed, so I sometimes have to read 15-20 pages worth of notes just to find the one thing I was looking for... very frustrating.

You’re looking for something like Roam Research or one of the apps it’s inspired.

You beat me to it. Roam's Daily Notes (automatically created) are about as low-friction as it gets to meet the OP's "spec".

Never heard of it. I'll check it out!

> it'd be great if something would detect that I've had five "Bob 1:1" meetings and would group those together, for example.

This is really interesting. Thanks for the idea! We don't currently offer this kind of detection in bytebase.io but I see how this can be very useful.

The way I take meeting notes in bytebase.io is with a feature called "create scratch collection" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tlCQZ8xGL-Q). How it works is you hit q and then just start writing, kind of like you're texting yourself.

With scratch collections, you don't need to worry about where your notes go. You just get them down. Then, sometime later, you can go back through and name the notes and categorize them - if you're so inclined. You can also extract anything actionable into todos

I use `org-journal` to have timestamped daily notes. If I think it's going to take more than a couple of minutes, I start a new .org and add bullet points to it (currently just dumping these in some canonical, indexed location, haven't felt the need for something fancier like org-roam yet)

If it's all just plain text, you can grep -a to find all of your 1:1s with Bob. It's not as pretty as some overengineered electron app, sure, but it will get you what you want.

"`grep -a 'Bob 1:1'` Hm, not as much as I expected. Maybe spaces? `grep -a 'Bob 1 : 1'` there's a few, maybe any number of spaces? `grep -aP 'Bob 1\s{0,}:\s{0,}1'` Oh I could have spelled it out `grep -a 'Bob one on one'` Or it could be in a different order `grep -a '1:1 with Bob'` ...

    diff --git a/2020-08-09.md b/2020-08-09.md
    new file mode 100644
    index 0000000..c599ee6
    --- /dev/null
    +++ b/2020-08-09.md
    @@ -0,0 +1,9 @@
    +* Set up one on one again with bob on 2020-08-24 13:00. I thought I set one up
    +  with him for next week already but I can't seem to find it.
    +* I figured out some searches I can do to find one on ones:
    +
    +        grep -a 'Bob 1:1'
    +        grep -a 'Bob 1 : 1"
    +        grep -aP 'Bob 1\s{0,}:\s{0,}1'
    +        grep -a 'Bob one on one'
    +        grep -a '1:1 with Bob'

Reply on news.ycombinator.com