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Comment by thenerdhead | Hacker News Reader

While the stuff we write down is not valuable, the process of doing so is very valuable.

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.

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I agree -- I'm a lifelong chalk/whiteboard-er. Having a large space where I can write/draw/diagram is critical for me to work through ideas. Occasionally I take pictures or copy down my notes, but usually I just erase and feel like nothing is lost.

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.

It's not the stuff we write down is useless.

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 have a high barrier of entry to my shoebox personally. Totally agreed that 99% of notes are throw-away, but the 1% are absolute gems.

Yeah, but why not reuse like... 99% of your notes? Why not just write things down only if you're going to need them again, and in a way that you will be able to find them when you need them? I'm more likely to reread a note many, many times than to take one I never reuse, because every time I need to use a cardinality aggregation or invert a conditional, I go back to the notes for that.

I noticed "I think through writing". Whenever I need to implement a new feature I first explore status quo and write it down on confluence, jira etc. Then write down that I'm gonna do, alternatives etc. It takes time but makes it way clearer how to move forward on fuzzy things.

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