Notes apps are where ideas go to die, and that’s good
reproof.app
reproof.app
Just listen to David Lynch:
"I write [ideas] down so I don't commit suicide later having forgotten the idea. I've forgotten probably two or three major ideas, and it'll make you sick, just horrible. Write the idea down. You'll say: I'll never forget this idea. Ah-uh: you can forget them."
You could counter with "then it wasn't a good idea if you didn't remember it" but it's the structure of how we think rather than the quality of the outputs. Why do we retrace our steps when we misplace something? What does that have to do with anything? It's the scaffolding structure around which we build a mental model. It's so you don't run outside and start looking under rocks. If you believe you wouldn't do that, you have to consider then why, and that is innately tied to the pattern-finding structure of our brain.
Creatives may cling to a lost node as the Rosetta stone, perhaps assigning more weight than is qualified, but then you won't actually know unless you find and explore that branch of thought. Its value lies in its unquantifiability.
With regards to your quote, writing down helps the brain memorizing. It turns out typing it out doesn't help as much. In that sense, a notes app isn't akin to writing a note, the former isn't handwriting and the latter isn't digitized with all the advantages (and disadvantages!) attached. Its why I bought a reMarkable 2 for my mother (before they went all cloudy). She writes down a lot. It became a mess of notes, pure chaos. A digital notebook is the best of both worlds.
I suspect it still loses data and maybe corrupts profile if there is a disk full.
It deletes history entries once they're too old, and it also only keeps the last timestamp of when a URL was visited, so you can't know how often you visit a URL.
https://superuser.com/questions/1054833/does-mozilla-firefox...
So, if I don't write notes, I can't do anything complex. Some 20% of the ideas turn out to be useless, and must be discarded, otherwise they add up, but most of them, buy a large margin are stuff that should be executed.
Knowledge management feels like the western frontier of tech in some ways. Lots of wins can be had if you get it right and it’s often up to the note taker. Tools alone can’t solve the problem for most, at least not yet. Hasn’t stopped many from trying though.
This somehow enables me to chew through a tremendous amount of work compared to projects at work that are rigidly organized. Sometimes I will write down a huge list of tasks, never look at them again, work for a few hours, and check my notes to find that I can cross them all off.
I have tried using the tools we typically use at work like Jira or Azure Boards. Total waste of time that stifles the mind.
I'm often doing this with my wife when she cooks - trying to write it down so we can recreate it when something turns out great; and it often does and we haven't captured it. But I always remember the story I read about a guy whose side gig was inventing a colored solution for kids to use blowing huge bubbles (harder than you think - it's got to be colored enough to see, but become transparent and nonstaining or their moms will instantly kill the product). Several years in, he found a perfect solution - then discovered the next day he hadn't written it down and couldn't recreaate it. It took him several more years to find one that worked and successfully bring it to market.
So, sure, maybe most of what goes in the notebooks is cruft, but the process is key. And the author DOES have an excellent point that the search & discovery capabilities of your system are key.
I wish I could remember ideas well enough to even remember that I've forgotten them. When an idea of mine disappears, it's gone without a trace. I think I need to sleep better.
The GTD methedology can work well to park ideas in a Someday/maybe pile.
There are plenty of to-do/task managers which can accept tasks via email, and having a sudden idea can be as easy as sending that email address a quick note.
the problem is i seem to treat browsertabs the same way. i open tabs intending to look at them later. then forget about them, and so they accumulate. i could close all the tabs, but some actually are important. and so i have to go through them, and clean them out once in a while.
Those of us who keep accumulating tabs often do so as a "I think I care about this in the near future" halfway bookmark. I don't know about you, but my browser history for just this morning (it's noon here) is already so extensive that it's worthless for that purpose. When I do need to find something with Onetab, it's maybe 1% of the size of my browser history or less.
EDIT: What's more is that when I reopen, it disappears from the list, whittling down what's left over until I can confidently press "delete all" for a given activation (it groups the tabs by which were open when you pressed it; but you can also drag and drop the "bookmarks" from one list to another)
Thank you for the OneTab elevator pitch. I'll give it a try.
Google and Mozilla have both completely shit on the entire idea of personal browsing continuity. Just close all your tabs at night, then go to the home page they provide and start from scratch every morning and nobody gets hurt.
1. Tabs - Current 2. Tab Pins - For tabs that are living in my browser for more than a week or two. 3. Session Manager - I used it as a semi-archival bookmarking and used it for categorizing my tabs. This stage is where I decides that I need a new browser window, so I put all of my saved tabs in there and will review them in the future. After I review them, I moves the tab to the last stage. 4. Browser Bookmark - the final stage, I only use this for permanent archive. Bookmarks are regularly backup and sometimes merged from other browser bookmark through NirSoft tools.
This could be a hilarious product idea: adding a leaderboard and achievements to any arbitrary site. I'm sure someone has already done it.
Between the time spent in waiting rooms and actual travel time you can actually go through quite a lot of material (of course, pandemic didn't help with this strategy).
I do something similar with reminders - I schedule everything instead of keeping lists. That way I get reminded in a more digestible fashion and often by the time the reminder comes up, it's no longer relevant anyway. Makes clearing the list more organic and less cumbersome.
yep. I've been thinking about this problem for some time now. With Google, and especially Slack, what I've discovered is resurfacing is more important than organization. You have some tiny thread of memory than you want to input into a system and have that system bring back the webpages and context. This is what Slack gets right.
We have Slack, we have Google, but we do not have anything that is personal. A personal search engine. Something like macOS Spotlight, but more contextual. In Slack you can find individual messages which match a pattern, but you can also expand to see the entire context of that message with date and time. The bookmarks in Chrome do not even tell you the date/time you added them. That's such a basic thing that is missing. The ability to create a "view" of your bookmarks organized chronologically would be another useful tool. In addition: what other sites were you looking at around that time? What city were you in? What was the weather in that city at that time? Sounds silly, but this sort of info can jog your memory.
The browser extends into the global but we have not yet discovered that the browser should extend the other way, into the personal. On one side we should have Chrome, on the other end should be Joplin or Obsidian.
If I don't need something right now, it is stored in a read it later service (blog post, news articles) or a bookmark service (software projects, company web pages, etc).
Otherwise I start drowning in browser windows and tabs
Hum... Try process engineering principles. They have no relation to computer science, but with the area of knowledge that focus on organizing work.
I may start adding things to my "scratch" workspace, and then if I realise this is something that's turning into more than just visiting a single page I'll tear of the tab and send it somewhere.
Many of those workspaces can stay up for weeks or months.
I recently started using a bookmarking app (one of the many, so many) because there were often one or two lingering tabs that I didn't want to close, and it was interfering with the way I normally clean up my screen. Normally, I close the entire browser and start fresh two or three times a day, during the workday. At night I turn the computer off, and start with a blank desktop the next morning.
The act of entering information into a Notes app feeds the compost heap in a more or less indirect way, which then acts as subconscious nurture for later creativity. If you of the creative kind, that is.
[1] https://writingcooperative.com/neil-gaimans-top-13-writing-t...
Most people don't even take notes or use a shoebox/second brain to store these things. What most lifelong notetakers know is that the notes themselves aren't important, but rather the process of physically writing the notes, internalizing the information, and building new connections in your head is quite important.
The remnants of this process are mostly throw away from the author's perspective, but may be novel to a random person. This reminds me of someone uncovering a journal of nonsensical information saying "What's this about?" to then the author says "That's how I figured it out".
The beauty of it all is that it's meaningful to the author and not necessarily anyone else.
let's assume that without a good note-taking app, we reuse 1% of our notes. And with a good note-taking app we reuse 2% of our notes.
Our feeling will stay the same:those notes are a trash heap.
But we doubled the number of the "ideas" we can access, which seems like a good ROI.
And definetly, the process is useful.
I also find the physical component of whiteboarding to be very helpful -- standing up, walking around, pacing, etc vs. just sitting down and writing on a notepad.
Just a simple thing so I enjoy the act of offloading in whatever way I feel like doing (scribbling, thoughtful stuff, drawing, whatever) and then I've freed up some space in my head so I can relax.
I could try the same with a notekeeping app but I feel like I have to actually maintain them, or work with their system. Not to mention, it requires screen time that I might not want. A pen and some paper has no such system so it's liberating.
I'm increasingly convinced of the value of checklists for small items - especially repeated tasks.
If it's a cool idea for, like, a new business or the start of essay without any predefined time to pick it up and work on it it ends up being kind of pointless and just creates a mess.
For those things, if it's a good idea it'll pop up in your head again, probably in a better form.
Note taking has to act like a pipeline to be useful.
I always feel a little obsessive or over-careful making lists for this sort of thing but it’s amazing how much easier and less stressful it makes packing for me.
Writing a paper about your idea is the ultimate form of this, but of course most of the time overkill. But it is good to bundle everything up in a paper once enough stuff has accumulated.
I guess I'm lucky that this rarely happens. Search works great, and is instant.
I kept waiting for deeper insight, like a system of prioritzation, or culling tricks. But the article seemed to just repeat itself: writing things down frees our brain, and forgetting is ok. We feel value in doing so, ok.
Sometimes I chuck out a whole bunch of Todos just to free my mind and it never turned into regret. I think that is why all these new note taking tools and ideas are not that important; the most important bit in note taking is taking the damn note.
DevonThink solved this problem for me years ago. I just pull in all the documents/pdf/web pages/text, let it auto-categorize them && forget. The only difference is that it has quit powerful and fast search, so that I can find them again in seconds. Bookmarks never worked for me and I don't have time and dedication for Zettelkasten-like systems.
I would als not be afraid of losing something: the search is very solid and there is also a custom search with filters and boolean logic if you need it. The only thing I need is to remember that I have it and the topic for keywords, then I can find it with search.
As for the content...meh. The file(s) or book(s) you put your ideas in are like compost piles. You throw things in them, and every once in a while you get out the pitchfork and turn them over. You see if some half-baked concept has become fertilizer for your current thoughts. You admire how some old brainstorm has rotted down to goo after you've learned more on a subject. You fish out some weirdly undecayed thing and go, "Oh, I was looking for that."
The trouble is that people try to fit the kitchen sink into the note app and that doesn't work. As a programmer, I have specific workflows for each note that I take.
Example. I want to try stand-up one day. Each snippet that I think of as a joke, I write down in a note. All snippets go into the same space. Sometimes I think of a snippet which could extend an existing bit (a joke which is larger than a one liner.) Once this page got to a certain length, I didn't even have to think about new snippets anymore. All I would have to do is open this page and they would jump out at me.
One approach is that if I feel like I got nothing, I can simply scan the list and find something which hits me. Like, I'll see a line and immediately think of something which could extend it. Or I'll see multiple lines which hit me and I can come up with something which mixes the two together. This may start a new branch of a joke.
Apply this to every reason I might add a note. Yes, I have what's basically a trash bin where notes go to die. But anything else is sort of like these jokes, they go into a place where I have a specific way to use them. Within my notes app, I have a system of navigation and discovery, which is basically like a website where you follow links and use metadata to place things in certain spots (unless you're adding to an existing note.) I use a template which fills in most of what I need and then the remaining is a quick add. I can then query that metadata as if it's a real DB.
I use Obsidian for this. I used Roam at one point, but it didn't have a way to hide things which weren't in my navigation path. Everything leaks, because, NETWORK! Nah, I look at it is like building spreadsheets. Each spreadsheet has a certain usage. I don't cram all the data into one spreadsheet. I use multiple spreadsheets. Then the app I use (Obsidian) has the above mentioned tools for nice navigation.
Sure, much of these are abstract things which could end up with you doing the same stuff but a different way. But I find that changing a path in front-matter is less painful than moving a file. And I can put a thing in multiple paths.
I use the Obsidian Zettel note to automatically name the file and I shove them all into the same directory. I then use the Dataview plugin to run queries for what I need.
I have MD files strictly for navigation, as if they are part of a static site layer. These files contain the links to go further into the navigation. It's basically all index files.
I keep everything together in the same vault, because so far I don't see a need to do any different. I just want to be able to navigate through the thing so that I'm not seeing a bunch of unrelated junk to distract me.
I do use directories to separate very different types. Like PDF's and Epubs go into one directory. Images go into another directory. MD files go into another directory. I don't know that I even need to do this, but I haven't run into a problem.
Just a curious question about the index notes: don't you feel they're cluttering up the graph and result in superficial relationships between the notes?
In my personal case: I used to create index notes to make navigation easier, but then I've found myself wondering "where should this note be indexed?" and also not getting much value out of the relationship graph.
Once I've discarded the index notes, the relationships became much more organic and authentic. Surprisingly, finding notes hasn't become more difficult after eliminating the index notes -- queries and lists are a beautiful thing.
What are your thoughts on this? Do you encounter any challenges with indexing?
Before Emacs I abused a Tomboy "wiki" style journal - even there I could set up several Notebooks as entry points. Every time I typed a word that happened to be a title it would link.
Initially this was useful for discovering links between subjects but without a naming convention it became overwhelming.
Is that what you mean by leaking? Can you briefly explain these issue and how Obsidian solves it?
It has been a while since I used Roam, so maybe these points have significantly improved. But the first thing I would see when I logged into Roam was the most recent page. I don't care about these things, Obsidian with a plugin allows me to create a a home page from an MD file which then has links to whatever else I want.
Roam also pushed things like a daily journal and backlinks in the sidebar. Most of the time, I don't want to see backlinks and I don't use the daily journal. I only want to see exactly what I have set the thing to show, anything else is a distraction. With Obsidian, all of this is so much more configurable, and easy to do so.
I think a lot of the thinking overhead issues people have when they think "where do I put this" is from seeing too much stuff which isn't important to what they are working on.
You can automatically check against web accessibility with tools such as WAVE: https://wave.webaim.org/
In your case, #6B7280 on #F2F2F2 is a contrast ratio of 4.31 which is below all standards for normal sized text. Even for large fonts it would only be valid at lower compliance levels and not at AAA.
LOSING AN ENTIRE INBOX
Once while doing a work rotation in Hong Kong, I was RDP'ing back into my NYC machine and I accidentally deleted ALL of the email in my inbox. At first, I was crushed and felt awful. I quickly moved past this thinking that if anyone really needed me for something, they would reach out again. If I lost anything crucial, I could probably go ask someone else.
This was very freeing! Tim Ferriss has a similar exercise where he recommends acting as if you have $0 cash/credit card access etc every so often. This helps you a. move that state from "unknown" to "known" b. help you see that many situations seem bad only b/c you've never lived through them.
IDEAS IN THE ROLODEX
I was watching a documentary about the early days of Mad Magazine. They mentioned that one of the writers had a Rolodex of notecards with random ideas he had stored and organized. If they were stuck coming up with an idea, he would spin through the rolodex till he found one that worked.
I've always liked this story as it's a form of decoupling (asynchronous?) idea inception from idea need. It requires more "caching" than trying to have ideas on demand with the trade off that you are not coming up with the ideas under pressure. While ideas sometimes get generated faster in the immediate need timeframe, I would imagine that also sometimes cuts the scope of those ideas. The decoupled model allows your idea generation boundaries to be much larger.
I’ve no idea what the author is suggesting as an alternative, not making notes?
On the other hand, I recently flattened (that is: deleted a bunch of superfluous, deep hierarchy) my Joplin notebooks. Flat is better than nested in this case, it was a good change to make.
I wonder if "frequently reorganizing" notes is not an anti-pattern. Who wants to do that? It's a waste of time.
It doesn't matter where or how you write down your notes. It's just so you get the security of having that somewhere and not needing to think about it any more.
You can write "I don't want to be writing this" over and over if you like. But it turns out that you usually have good things to say.
Reminds me of some years ago when I finally burnt all sketches and notes, many actually quite pleasant to watch, of a startup I've shutdown in 2015.
I think for me, that it was kind of a rite of passage of what it wasn't meant to be. And I certainly needed the feeling of moving on.
But instead of saying 'yeah whatever' they try to prove that their way is the right way
I've been doing that for more than half a year on various topics -- world locations, news, films and books I've seen/read, CS papers, research ideas -- and the results are great: I can remember more and I call recall and describe my memories more fluidly. What's important is that note-taking isn't the only way that "old" ideas can be re-encountered. If you want to remember information about the world, just take a look at the world map from time to time, point to places and think about what you want to remember.
As a software developer there are too many technologies, libraries and tools to master. I cannot keep it all in my head.
But I find that that writing articles around what I have learned is most effective. I put those online and I can later use Google to relocate them. I actually do this quite a lot.
I also found Ulysses and iA writer very useful as they let you categorize notes in a hierarchy and store in markdown. I have most so much notes from using obscure formates.
Sticking to markdown has been my best choice for note taking for many years.
Another habit I have found useful is to begin highlighting and scribbling in the margins of books.
It allows me to reopen a book later and more easily recall important stuff. I avoided this most of my life as I wanted to keep books in pristine conditions, but all you get is this perfectly nice looking book which you read at some point but which no longer hold value because you will never bother reading the whole thing over again.
Recommend actual fire.
I don't have that experience with my notes at all. I regularly refer to old notes. A sample of the queries my notebook (really a folder full of text files) has answered:
- How did I sort those things in bash?
- What were the setup steps for that software?
- Where did I get this fact that I'm quoting?
- I have a bad impression of this movie, why is that?
- Why did I choose to architect this code this way; what pitfalls was I avoiding?
- What was that brand of tea that I like?
- What voltage RAM does that old laptop use?
Sure, I can reconstruct all of this information with a combination of Google, experimentation, and physical examination of the relevant items. But it takes time. Having this information compiled in an easily grep-able format is like having information in RAM, versus having to fetch it from the hard drive.
Now I am working on making a digital slip-box
For those interested in essays about note-taking, thinking, writing & PKM, note that Matthew's article is also part of the PKM journal [1], an online publication that I've recently launched.
"All truly wise thoughts have been thought already thousands of times; but to make them truly ours, we must think them over again honestly, till they take root in our personal experience."
– Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Amusingly, also tying in with what someone above said about starting a compost heap, that quote has stuck with me after reading "Just Enough is Plenty" by Samuel Alexander [1] (an introduction to Henry Thoreau's economic ideas) whose first preface is entitled "Compost Capitalism".
[1] Available as a post-consumerist 'pay what you want basis' here - https://simplicitycollective.com/just-enough-is-plenty-thore...
I mean ~2000+ years ago people understood this. Day to day relatable ideas generally come to anyone involved in the cutting edge of any era of humanity, and such ideas will generally resonate with one's contemporaries who are likely thinking similar things. Billions of us can't really claim to have found something new. We didn't invent countability, or factoring, or primes.
But it's also a bit of a cynical lie that may comfort some of us, that being ordinary is okay, because ordinary is normal. Over the millennia we managed to turn philosophy into science, mathematics into machines, and miniaturise them into our hands, generate energy and resources unthinkable to our ancestors, and create networks of algorithms complex enough we offload a significant portion of day to day thinking and planning. These are new things.
Is it true wisdom? Define true wisdom - my understanding is there is no objectivity in such matters. There is only the balance and friction between forces of imagination wrought out by human minds and hands, always building on knowledge that came before. Take away all knowledge, and the cycle will continue, it's just what people do. We think, we imagine, we create.
I ramble but it probably feels day to day like nothing is ever new, and everything is always being recycled, but it's in this compost heap that new ideas ferment and take root, so that is an analogy I'll be adopting henceforth (not in the least as it makes me less disappointed in my own unpursued ideas).
Then Evernote got rewritten as a bunch of sluggish Electron garbage that got in the way and now I never touch the fucking thing. I really wish I could find a replacement.
(Criteria, before someone suggests their favorite: allows collaboration, works on Macs, iOS, Windows, and Android, with native apps.)
It's just kind of a cheesey way of making a surprising normative claim.
But for whiskeys and blog posts, it is very useful and I depend on it weekly at least.
At least the first half of the sentence would have made just as much sense my way.
Install and use helm (others may suggest something different, but I like it). With it set up, when you start typing M-x and typing out a name, it will show you all the current possible matches and their keyboard shortcuts. Makes discovery much easier than without. It can be hooked into other parts of the system as well, but that's my #1 reason to recommend it to a new emacs user. Emacs discovery is pretty good, but this makes it even better.
Use the "apropos" commands and the built-in help capabilities. C-h <various things> will tell you all about emacs, in general, and your current configuration. C-h b, for instance, tells you all the current key bindings (which can be different depending on the currently active modes).
Use daemon mode and emacsclient. The key thing here, if you close all your open windows your emacs session doesn't terminate. You can reopen it and all your buffers will be accessible. You can force kill it (M-x server-force-delete) and restart the daemon later if you get into a weird state (possible early on when playing with your configuration).
Read the manuals. The emacs manual and org-mode manual (I don't use org-roam so can't comment on it) are fantastic. Just browse through them, see if a table of contents item catches your attention, go to that section and read it. See if you can apply it, otherwise "forget" it and maybe later you'll think, "I want to do X, oh, wait, I think I saw that in the manual...".
You learn it like any other thing in life. You probably didn't learn to use your OS of choice all in one go. You maybe started with a graphical interface or the shell. Learned a few key things, and only later learned more options that you were able to use to enhance your experience. "Oh, C-r lets me search backward through my shell history. That's cool, I'll use that a lot." But you probably didn't know it when you started learning (or forgot because you were inundated with information).
Im not that comfortable yet to start customising my keybindings or rewrite my init/config file to really personalise emacs.
System crafters playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLEoMzSkcN8oPH1au7H6B7...
It's okay to waste ideas.