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Comment by dodgerdan | Hacker News Reader

Joplin has changed my life. I now keep notes on everything and frequently reorganize and edit them.

I’ve no idea what the author is suggesting as an alternative, not making notes?

I regularly use Joplin and like it very much. But I guess note taking isn't for me. It's very far from having changed my life. Joplin is amazing for taking media-rich notes, combining PDFs attachments, images, bulleted lists, URLs, code snippets etc. into a single document. No other tool I know provides such richness. Whenever I need this unique combination, Joplin is a good bet. Regularly, I have files that fit nowhere, like a stray PDF that neither fits in my personal DMS (paperless-ng) nor into literature management software (Zotero); Joplin often is a good place for it. Allows to delete the file locally but still have confidence it's kept (with Joplin backed by Nextcloud, which is in turn backed up).

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.

> I’ve no idea what the author is suggesting as an alternative, not making notes?

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.

If you actually get some value from re-reading and reorganising your old notes, that's great. It sounds like you don't have the problem the author is addressing. But many people write tons of notes and save them but almost never look at them again, and subsequently worry they're wasting time writing and saving all these notes. This author is saying this worrying is misplaced, it's not a waste of time. The act of writing a note is valuable for tidying up the ideas in your head, even if you never look at them again. And that while you don't really need to save them (as you've already had the value from writing them), it can be easier and quicker to just save all your random notes, as a general policy, because trying to determine which notes have potential future utility is fairly pointless and stressful activity. Notes don't really cost anything to store. This policy doesn't work so well for physical possessions.

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