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My rate of reference is pretty high. I have a job that involves a lot of research projects. My process often goes like this:

1. Someone calls me with a project. I take notes about what they need.

2. I look at my notes to figure out what to research. '

3. As I do the research, I take notes about the results

4. I look at my notes to draft an e-mail or memo about the research

5. I look back at my notes from the call to make sure I got what they wanted

Another task I often have is having a call with someone (sometimes a very long call) and then writing an e-mail about it:

1. Take notes on the call

2. Draft e-mail based on notes

3. Review notes to make sure the e-mail encompasses everything

I definitely refer to old notes less. But here are some examples where I constantly refer back:

1. I have a note with the terminal command to strip Mac OS system files from .zip files. I refer back to that a lot.

2. I have notes about my wife's favorite takeout orders that I check before I put the orders in.

3. I have a long note called "Python Dev Stuff" that describes how to set up my Python environment, that I look at whenever I get a new laptop or do a major OS update.

4. I have a "blog post ideas" note where I write down ideas for blog posts. When I want to do a post and can't think of what to write about, I look at that note.

Like another commenter mentioned, I have different types of notes: procedural (how did I fix X), thought processing (I want to design Y, what's the best way to do it), and non-code documentation (this setup works this way because person Z requested it).

I regularly refer back to procedural notes (I'm a contractor with multiple projects on infrequent maintenance for years), almost never refer to thought processing notes, and rarely refer to non-code documentation.

However, while my rate of reference to procedural or documentation notes is fairly low, the value I get from that reference tends to be very high - for instance, "how did I solve that problem with the database that took me an entire day to resolve, because online docs/examples were sparse?" or "my client is asking why feature A was implemented in such a silly way; it's because they insisted it be that way, five years ago". For me I think the trade-off of regular note-taking is worth it.

I suppose I could delete my thought processing notes after I've used them, but they're already archived and don't clutter my note space, so there's not that much point.

> what would you estimate as your rate of reference to prior notes?

For arbitrary links and bookmarks, probably quite low, so I rarely bother with that sort of noting (never managed to make pinboard an essential part of my life).

If I am specifically researching something deeply, like a personal project, I am much more likely to go back to a link I've noted, because I've usually gone to the trouble to describe that link in a searchable way.

For work-related notes, close to always. I _start_ by reopening the note relevant to the job (Apple Notes search is so fast this is easy), and I modify/append to it as I go along; those notes are "workbooks" effectively and they are essential to my process now.

There's two types of notes for me. One is stored procedures for things that are tedious but I know I will need to do again, a lot of programming snippets might fall into this one but procedures of any kind.

Second is writing my current thought processes as I'm working on stuff, once a task is complete these are rarely if ever references again but they're very handy for if you're working on something, get interrupted and need to get back on task.

I use Roam Research for both.

I think for people who heavily link and organise notes by subject, they're more about getting back within a specific context area and getting the brain firing on that context area than necessarily finding specific answers.

Within a week, I frequently refer to notes. It drops off heavily after that, as I start forgetting that I had notes on that topic.

Maybe I need notes of the notes I took.

They are known as MOCs...

https://www.linkingyourthinking.com/

My memory is not good enough to go by what I can recall, so by necessity I live in my notes.

For me the notes are my long term memory and all I have to actually remember is what I’m currently working on. They are organized for easy retrieval (hierarchical, topical and searchable), and I do regular refactoring on my notes to improve retrievability and archive outdated material.

I got through all of school, including two professional degrees, organizing all of my notes chronologically. It worked really well for me — right up until I tried to write a novel, hah.

I think the "best process" is driven by goals — my husband gets by just using notepad and plaintext files, because he and I have very different goals with our notes. He's a software developer, and I'm a nerdy scifi author.

As long as his code is documented clearly, he mostly doesn't need a system more complicated than some .txt files and browser history search. Me? I've got way too much going on, and I need to be able to follow reference chains so I can figure out what the heck I was thinking six months ago when I wrote the thing I'm trying to publish.

Many of my notes are write only. I might refer to them here or there, but it's mostly about laying my thoughts out.

However, I love flipping through old notebooks. They're a personal diary made of schematics, sketches, lists and recipes.

I'm now a bit more conscious about dating each page, because I combine those with other data to form a personal timeline [0].

None of this is about productivity. It's closer to an artistic hobby like calligraphy.

[0] https://nicolasbouliane.com/projects/timeline

Timeline looks really great!

I'm a fan of this approach to users owning their data: it enables things that are interesting and valuable for the user, rather than making it something that necessarily requires an audience.

I hadn't previously considered incorporating notes into a personal archive as I often see them as being of a fundamentally different class to journaling, but I'm starting to reconsider my biases in that regard.