Comment by thomascgalvin | Hacker News Reader

Comment by thomascgalvin | Hacker News Reader

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A big part of my note-taking is just to get stuff out of my brain. I might never revisit any of it, and that's fine. If I write it down I know I can always go back when I need to, but if I don't, it's going to be an annoying distraction in my subconscious.

A lot of my note-taking therefore becomes an excuse to successfully ignore the things I know I don't need to pay attention to.

I do have a bunch of notes that I use for everyday stuff, however. My engineering journal is a hierarchical notebook, allowing me to go back and see all of the contributions I've made to $PROJECT, which is great come review time.

I also have a tech notes section for problems that I seem to have to solve over and over again. For example, every time we have a power outage, my Mac Mini gets stuck in a reset password screen, and I need to reset the NVRAM to fix it. I don't remember the keycode to do that, so I have a note called "Fix mac mini password reset" that tells me that it's `Cmd-option-p-r`.

Lastly, anything that might be good in a self-hosted wiki goes in my notebook; basically, my own little set of `README.md`s.

That first paragraph is exactly my experience, too. When I read "Getting Things Done", the lightning bolt that struck me was learning that simply getting stuff out of my head and into a trusted system is enough to let me stop obsessing about it and concentrate on other things.

Last week I had one of those dreaming-about-writing-code sort of nights, where I half woke up and was thinking about the stuff I'd been dreaming about and couldn't go back to sleep. I tossed and turned until I grabbed my phone, opened my notes app, jotted down some of the idea, then closed it. That alone let my mind say "ok, now I won't forget it" and I was finally able to go back to sleep.

Some people go full-on Zettelkasten, which is awesome and I'm happy for them. Turns out I really don't need all the organization. I just need somewhere to offload my thoughts where I know I can find them later, and just the process of writing them down usually gets me 99% of the benefit of having such a system.

Same here. The combo that seems to work for me is onenote combined with zotero.

- Onenote for ideas and scribbles - zotero for bookmarks and documents. Supports tags - physical notebook for note taking during meetings

btw you can easily connect zotero to your own nas via webdav and you have unlimited storage. Works fine for me. The only drawback of zotero is that you dont have a native mobile client.

I love Drafts for the Mac ecosystem. It has two giant things going for it:

- It opens instantly to a blank window ready for me to type into.

- It's extensible with built-in actions and JavaScript so that I can automate things like posting the text I just wrote to Twitter or Mastodon, or add it to OmniFocus, or text it to my wife, etc. etc. etc.

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