Note-taking isn't rocket science
tsk.bearblog.dev
tsk.bearblog.dev
I had to laugh out loud. Thanks for making my day.
Yes, I agree. What works for me however is a fairly complex system (although the complexity is hidden in everyday usage) that took me several hundred hours to build, write and refine.
Taking notes is not so hard. Feel free to use any paper in your reach or any software capable of storing text. The hard part is actually using these notes. Getting something out of them. Relating them to other notes. Actually thinking "hey I have note for this?!" months later and executing on that thought. And then still have an input mode so casual that you also still input notes into your system.
Of course you can elect to care or not to care about that, same as you can elect to not care about properly sharpened knifes, identifying birds by sounds or child rearing practices.
But as with most things, if you care to do it well, it's anything but trivial.
IOW the best note taking system for me would be such that after I took notes I could just shred the notes and retain all the written down information in my head.
Personally I find that without at least some Spaced Repetition (or similar methods) there is no way to remember quotes, github repos or word definitions I jotted down once.
Very open to suggestions, though :)
The complexity must reside somewhere... but not during the moments I am taking notes.
But I feel like the author is "criticizing me" (not personally of course) because of the complexity that comes after the initial writing-down, since that is still part of my note-taking system, no?
When I opened the folder the app showed me 1-2 files from years ago.
Apparently it only supports .md files.
I literally laughed out loud and deleted the app from my computer.
You've got a damn knowledge map but handling txt files is beneath you?
That app is doomed to obscurity.
Quite arrogant to assume that an app not supporting /your/ specific note-taking workflow means it's "doomed to obscurity". It's a popular app with plenty of users, a healthy plugin community, and a team of six building it. I think that pretty obviously proves you wrong.
If you were actually interested in trying it out, you could've simply run a quick find command.
find . -name "*.txt" -exec rename -v 's/\.txt$/\.md/i' {} \;
The only annoying thing was that in my text files I often used indentation to group stuff and in markdown indented text is treated as code block.
There's usually a balance between planning and execution. Note taking is no different.
There's no simple always solution to "plan meticulously" vs "just do it". Every choice in life is a cost-benefit analysis.
Personally, I spent a little time to setup orgmode. Works for me.
Who would agree with using a note-taking approach that does NOT work for you?
One of the ways to figure out which note-taking approach works is to try the note-taking approaches from other people... It could be 18 multi-step note taking approach or it could be dead-simple. Unless you try, you won't know which one works for you.
You can’t just look at a system you don’t understand and deem it too complicated. You’d need some objective measure of how efficient and effective a note taking system is at doing its job - e.g., the speed a user can later find a particular note, or the success rate the user might have at querying their database of notes and getting back a quality answer.
The upper level (text file) category determines the high level structure, e.g. 01. todo; 03. ideas, concepts; 06. thoughts; 12. humour; 04. politics; 19. food; 05. self; 20. mathematics; 21. philosophy, etc, and the file itself contains high level remarks/thoughts, depending on how necessary it's to have subcategories. The folder is named after the text file category and it contains subcategories and material (research papers in pdf, pictures, sketches, etc). The system structure moves recursively downwards, although in most cases I only need 2 levels. For example "19. food" has subcategories such as 01. vitamin content; 02. electrolytes; 03. meal design, etc, and these could have their own subcategories.
I feel my system is like an externalized version of my ego (including extensions). As I put more content into the system, I become more aware of myself and my shortcomings and the thought/emotional patterns I have, and as I make changes to the system I develop/restructure my own thinking. It works really great, but I still haven't figured out 1) how to deal with the material in version control, because I'd like separate the text files that I put into git from sizeable material files; 2) how to automatize the backup process; 3) how to store sensitive data in git automatically (it would be nice if I could encrypt files in a meaningful way and still be able to have a measure of the size of the diff).
While I agree that it's better to have notes than not to have them, I think putting some effort into their structure is a big deal. 100 pages is not a lot of notes. At that scale, you can still comfortabley ctrl+f a google doc if you like.
But over the course of your career, I suspect you'll keep a lot more notes than that. I have a personal wiki with around 3000 pages of notes, and I'm just a beginner. I think it's important to optimize your notes for retrieving information that you only partly remember. I think that formatting and the SRP are just as important to docs as code.
If you click the link, you see that he uses other tools for notes, including Asana and Evernote. Google Docs is for writing a book.
One of those things that are not rocket science, yet is presented as such.
* View and edit
* Organise
* Search
* Sync
All in one solutions can be nice but also lock you in. It is as the name says: all or nothing (well all or figure out how to migrate your notes to another application). My current workflow is to use different tools for different jobs. The downside is it's more to set up and it may not be suitable for everybody.
* I use any markdown editor to view and edit notes
* I use the filesystem to organise notes by broad categories (directories are never more than two deep)
* I can use any tool I like for searching notes (my markdown editor(s) has one but I can also all use ripgrep or whatever tool I like)
* I sync using my preferred cloud storage provider
My markdown editor is doing most of the job of a note taking app but the point is I can seamless switch for something else without much hassle. Or use different ones on different platforms.
This does require search tools to do a lot of heavy lifting when broad categories aren't enough to find something. But I've yet to find a better way (I've not had much success managing tags, they get messy fast).
Beyond just folders for categories and tags, Obsidian also supports easy linking between notes (and shows backlinks for the current note).
In the end, it's great: should I decide Obsidian is no longer right for me, I have a bunch of Markdown on disk that I can take elsewhere.
[1]: https://obsidian.md/
So you're wrong, note taking is at least as hard as rocket science, probably much harder since algorithmically rocket science is a pretty straightforward control problem plus some tuning.
There's no reason we should view note taking, the activity, as the pursuit of finding "an ideal compression algorithm for human knowledge". Finding just "a compression algorithm for human knowledge that suits us" will do.
When we do note taking just want to be able to find and remember something down the road. That's what we need to solve, for our preferences and requirements, and being happy with something that works good enough.
The same way that when we play guitar we don't want to be "the best possible technical/emotional/harmonic/melodic player that can possible exist", just to be able to play songs to have fun, play in a band, or be good musicians.
Hacker news people are probably curious nerds.
“If you don’t write it down, then it never happened…”.
Yeah, some do it with a keyboard, but I find it hard to draw, scribble or whatever when I have to switch devices or associate drawings with text. Eventually, they’ll figure out a tech solution to all this but notebooks cost like $10-20, survive impact and even survive a bit of liquid.
No, I didn’t think this up myself. Merely watched a boss never lack info on what went down last meeting or last week.
There are even liquid tolerable notebooks that are more like textile and even those are pretty inexpensive.
Seems author didn't even read the article linked.
>Ideas I’m working on and anything relevant I come across all get dumped into Asana on my desktop. [...] I write in whatever comes to mind—a possible title, or a possible tagline.
Arguably this is a form of notes.
>I write and edit my books in Google Docs.
So not used for keeping notes but more like assembling notes or various thoughts in coherent format.
>I keep notes on what I read in Evernote.
Last one is literally a section title.
My process is to create a GitHub repository and README.md file and create a # markdown heading for each entry with a simple name for the thought or description of the idea. Then I write a few paragraphs to a few pages of ideas.
I number the markdown headings. GitHub has a indescript table of contents button in the top left of the README.md
When I get to 100-300 I create a new repository and repeat.
My computer ideas journal is kind of a blog and I write it in the open on GitHub. Here are links to it. There's over 450+ journal entries of computer software ideas, community ideas, algorithm ideas and software design ideas.
https://GitHub.com/samsquire/ideas https://GitHub.com/samsquire/ideas2 https://GitHub.com/samsquire/ideas3
The whole point is that an elaborate system for taking notes is unnecessary and likely detracts from the actual work getting done.
I'll still agree that notetaking doesn't need to be complicated, but... I don't see Markdown or Zettelkasten as complicated at all. It's like telling someone "version control isn't rocket science" and encouraging them to uninstall git in favor of versioned tarballs.
For something more substantiative, satire can be more effective: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_o7qjN3KF8U
Though that video is from- 2018?!
I agree. How is this a critique of any of that? They aren't calling out over-monetized SaaS products; they're calling out the entire market of notetaking apps. Their rhetoric doesn't support the idea that productivity porn is harmful, but rather that simplicity is paramount and everything else is superfluous. Which is simply wrong. Maybe it's easy for a solo-dev to piss on knowledge bases, but well-organized notetaking systems is what keeps the corporate world going round.
Unless the author has a better, simpler alternative to the organization products people already use, this article simply reads as whining. Who is even the intended audience?
I use CherryTree. I screenshot paragraphs, import them into gimp, highlight text, then drop them into CherryTree. After that, I do a vaguely engaging title above the screenshot. I.e. "What is LSASS and what does it do?", and then I finish by trying to reword the text that was highlighted. This basically forces me to read the same information 2 to 3 times, and think about it while trying to reword it. It also helps in making it searchable, should I ever need to Ctrl+F something in the future.
As far as structure goes, I just do: Module -> Topic -> Subtopic. If something feels like it belongs on more than one Subtopic area, I just put it in both. Seems to work fine for my needs.
I'm not really sure what else you could possibly be trying to squeeze out of the thing. Table of contents?
I've tried the minimal paper setup and it got to the point where:
- Recall was terrible (both in-notes, i.e. no quick search and physical notebook misplaced at the most incovenient times)
- Insane amounts of duplication (no easy linking to old notes)
- Unshareability (couldn't lend notebook to colleague as it was personal, had to type it anyway)
- No redundancy (dog ate notes)
I now have a digital text file system. Although it is not a "NASA project", I can add searchability with basically any tool, easy linking (with tags or wikilinks to dates, topics, etc), copy-pasting and proper backup. It is portable across devices and OSes and allows me to perform simple (and complex) analysis with simple scripts if I need.
Being simple text, I expect this system to scale for the rest of my life.
For paper note taking I like a good notebook with a fountain pen. Writing has become enjoyable once I re-discovered fountain pens for myself.
No idea what this blog post is getting at. Maybe they're trying to point out that consistently writing notes will produce higher quality notes than changing styles every 6 weeks?
This post is missing the point. Complex note taking systems rarely focus on capture. They are concerned with organization, indexing, retrieval, and quick recall.
So make that 62
I delved deep into meta note-taking with RR. Watched videos, participated in book clubs, built a zettelkasten, etc.
While meta note-taking is not note-taking, I found the time spent meta note-taking meaningful. It is a reward on its own. The benefit, is that I now feel comfortable using my tool. And using it, I do.
While I also prefer for each of my passing seconds to contribute to the production an artefact, if it is not the case then it is fine too. That is the distinction between project and hobby.
I started as note-taking hobbyist and now I guess you could call me a note-taking pro :)
Do not hate the hobbyist.
Now talk about it to yourself as if you're the expert professor person lecturing.
People seriously underestimate the amount of self discipline and determination required to keep taking and grooming notes.
Without that discipline the supporting software is quite irrelevant.
I was reading the James Clear story this AM, and it was pretty eye-opening, particularly that he didn't actually know the story or points he was trying to make. Rather, he was collecting a bunch of anecdotes and then would work it into a narrative later.
I've done something similar with ~100 pages of notes and it was a train wreck trying to iron it into something useful
NASA is known to study every trivial aspect of everything, because when an hour of an astronaut in mission is worth more than a year of work for the average American, they stop being trivial. And I am sure that efficient note taking is one of these things NASA takes very seriously.
Then I ran Dijkstra's algorithm across my notes (903 pages, 90 folder, 18MB), and the shortest pathway between rocket propulsion and communications (which is presumably the closest concept to "note-taking" represented in my obsidian vault),
Communications and locomotion are both applications of physics -- rocket propulsion being one specific model.
By virtue of the fact that both tasks are physics, I would claim the inverse and say that note-taking is indeed rocket-science, and therefore complicated as the common metaphor would suggest you're implying.
But then I loosened constraints (essentially 6 degrees-of-separation between communications and rocket propulsion), and came to the following realizations:
- Ink, toner, and the advent of electronics like the laser printer, are owed at-least in part to the broad effort in science of the space race.
- Additionally, since the flames of a rocket reach temperatures that would exceed human limitations, and the human limitation that speech is primary form of communications means that good note taking is a way to overcome a key human limitation I've identified.
- And since presumably, human communications regarding models of physics resulted in the physical laws and principles that resulted in us producing the thrust force and exceeding the escape speed imposed due to the gravitational interaction using combustion -- note taking caused rocket science.
Just my calculus on the situation.
I usually purge it every six months or so. Maybe I should keep a history, but so far I haven’t needed one. Anything I feel like needs to be recorded for posterity goes into documentation or work wikis.
Also, that “people be like” grammar sounds so offensively dumb. You loose all credibility for having anything smart to say instantly.
Sentences 2,3: really funny (assuming it was deliberately ironic), considering "loose" -> "lose", and using an adverb to end a sentence, while critiquing grammar... ;b
“People be doing” is dumb, objectively.
The absolute positioning of the adverb doesn't bother me, but I do read it as being bound to "say" rather than "lose" which is what I assume you meant.
Code typing is a practice of typing code, really. Why some people building their code editors like NASA engineers building the next rocket to send us to the next habitable Earth?
You don't need to meticulously craft your code editor, stop overthinking.
You don't need to, in the sense that you can craft code in anything, but surely anyone who is an expert in their editor of choice—whatever that editor may be—would feel a huge productivity hit if forced to use another, formally equivalent, editor.
>Let me mirror that with a sarcasm
It is a remark to the post's argument. Indeed someone doesn't need a note-taking system but their productivity may increase with one. (Whatever a note-taking system is to someone.)
> >Let me mirror that with a sarcasm
I didn't miss it, but I guess I misunderstood its scope:
> Let me mirror that with a sarcasm:
> Code typing is a practice of typing code, really. Why some people building their code editors like NASA engineers building the next rocket to send us to the next habitable Earth?
> You don't need to meticulously craft your code editor, stop overthinking.
I thought that the second paragraph was the sarcastic one, and the third paragraph was the sensible rebuttal. On re-reading, interpreting the second and third paragraphs both as sarcasm makes more sense.