Notes apps are where ideas go to die (2022)
reproof.app
reproof.app
We think we write to remember, but it's really the act of letting go as the article gets into as a theory, that really lets those notes become effective to us. We can revisit these notes at a later date, with fresh eyes, having forgotten about it entirely. It adds value, not because the original idea or note was particularly great, but because of what we are then combining it with (action and experience).
This is also why blindly making notes isn't effective as a form of memorizing. You are writing just to write, you have to revisit them blindly in a new way for them to become effective with a new combination. As if you are a chemist creating a new concoction previously thought impossible.
So let your notes app become a giant trash pile. It's better for you, and they should do their job with proper search anyways. Don't spend time optimizing for note link graphs or any of that BS that doesn't help you and you absolutely will stop caring about those "features" in 5 months anyways. Such features are just productivity industry nonsense to make you feel productive while the content remains elusive to your mind.
I revisit old notes maybe once a month, and every time I do that I wonder why I still haven't migrated fully to Logseq.
> Such features are just productivity industry nonsense to make you feel productive while the content remains elusive to your mind.
Don't forget that everyone has a different workflow and what works for you might not be ideal for someone else. Also Obsidian/Logseq are both free vs Roam/Notion/etc -- some people just intensely incorporate notes as a part of their workflow.
I do agree everyone has a different workflow, but also you're a really good example of why the productivity is so massive despite the very little improvement to productivity brought on by these additional services: everyone is so desperately trying to convince themselves a better workflow is right around the corner. That someone else has a superior workflow, you just have to use that new app or service. Repeat every time a new gimmick comes out.
Isn’t that the goal — to process your notes, so as to come to new insights and connections?
I mean, given that you pose this question and leave it entirely unanswered, the rest of your response reads pretty condescendingly to me. A knowledge graph in markdown is not propped up by Big Notetaking, what an asinine stance.
I have ADHD, and I couldn't function without my notes.
I myself have a huge OneNote notebook, with all kinds of interesting projects or snippets that I've collected from HN or Reddit over the years. Being able to query that like a super-smart friend ("what was the error I ran into when I tried to implemt a self-hosted Synapse instance? How I can I fix that?") would be insane for personal productivity.
It's explore vs exploit (or hash table vs graph lookup); keywords are faster if you know what you're looking for. But reviewing linked notes leads to more exploration about related topics, and walking the graph can still be a reasonably efficient way to find what you're looking for. If you adopt networked notes, you get both at the cost of some notetaking overhead, but it's typically pretty small.
The one thing I hate about some of the notetaking apps is (and I understand folks need to make money) notes are really personal and private and need to stand the test of time. I can't have my notes locked away in a proprietary format or held hostage by some company charging $/mo so Notion is a no-go for me. I also don't really want to get locked into a workflow only to find out that the app is discontinued and then have to reinvent my workflow.
But yeah, networked thought is still cool and totally unrelated to why I don't use typical networked thought tools. Logseq came closest to converting me.
I've sucked it up and use a ton of electron apps. I can hardly blame anyone for doing that given the terrible fragmentation of hardware and lack of easier to use unifying APIs. Sometimes we just don't have time for that shit :)
I’ve found this to be true with writing music as well. Prior to recording stuff I found I’d play stuff that I had written a lot. The act of recording lets me forget those things and write more (and usually better) song ideas.
Like was thinking about a fully virtual avatar, not a person. But the tech wasn't there, and still ain't, to generate decent conversation, virtually rendered body with humanistic movements and facial expressions. Not to mention being able to select an interest field, Ie likes tech, hence tech conversations.
Back then I thought it was a brilliant idea. Now, it's quite impossible and better left sometime in the next 10ish years.
I get to see page views. The pages I'm really proud of nobody reads. The pages with the most page views are boring stuff (related to process, navigating my company's org structure, etc.).
More broadly, I've noticed that the things you do which have massive impact aren't always what you'd think. I once wrote a VBScript (long enough ago, it predated powershell) for a friend of mine to just run a program if there was no already running process by that name. He worked at an engineering firm, where for some inane reason some engineering software was always exiting and requiring a long init time to restart. The script kept it more or less always ready when you needed it.
Years later, I'd forgotten about it when he mentioned that it was a massive productivity boost. Every engineer at his company who had seen it in action, wanted it for themselves. Dozens of engineers were saving hours of productivity every week because of a throw-away script. Madness.
I do exactly that.
The act of writing helps me solidify that information in my brain - I have to process it to commit it to words. Paper works better than a text file, but a text file has the advantage of being faster and searchable. Once I've taken notes, I rarely go back and look at them. (Conversely, if I don't take notes, I'll wish I had)
I definitely do not take notes to abandon the information. Information I don't see the value in, I browse the web while listening. Some of that still sticks with me anyways.
I do diligently record things in Apple Notes, since they finally added categories (or groups, or whatever). I used to use Outlook notes the same way. It's really all I need. And I DO truly refer to them, although sometimes it's a long time later and I find way more detail and cool ideas than I remembered having come up with.
But browser bookmarks... these are mostly a waste. I have a big collection of them, again organized in groups. But it is vanishingly rare that I use them instead of just doing a new search.
However, one feature I would really love to have but never seen, is a combined todo - notes app.
I often jot down notes as in "things to note / remember", but also, in the same flow, I'd note thinks I'd need to do. I would love to be able to gather those automatically in a view, and be able to see them as done when I revisit the initial note after marking them as such from the "todo view".
The closest I've seen was some VimWiki, but I've found that fairly unwieldy (though I love the idea of taking notes in vim).
When I'm back at my laptop, I merge it into my Obsidian Vault.
I'm using that right now for both TODO and notetaking. I have syncthing set up so that it syncs my vault across 3 devices (including my phone). Very easy to set up (tho admittedly also easy to mess up the set up process). Have had minor hiccups the past 5 months but nothing that would make me want to stop using this setup.
All this is free. I feel like I've found a gold mine that nobody else seems to know about.
What do you like about LogSeq?
I don't feel like learning emacs and trying to shoehorn vim mode (evil?) into it (vim-style editing is much too ingrained in my text-editing muscle-memory).
TickTick comes to mind.
Then again, "notes" mean different things to different people.
Writing it down helps to solidify an idea into the heap from the stack, maybe even take it from hot storage to cold storage. It allows you to jot it down while it is still fresh and offload it to focus on it later. This is super helpful in ideas, jokes, thought streams, todos, one pagers on some projects, etc. It does help you remember but also allows you to move to the next thing for now.
Writing down ideas is like a sketchbook, ideas/actions/iteration of thoughts both good and bad. It is important to write thoughts down though because how many times have you had a great idea and you are like "I'll never forget this" and then a while later you are wondering what that was or you entirely move on because life moves fast.
Creatives, writers, comedians, developers, or just projects, are better when writing is involved in ideas to realization of those ideas.
Writing it down and notes is a form of brainstorming. Brainstorming allows ideas to be spontaneous and allows improvisation to get to better ideas. Even writing down bad ideas because somewhere in it is something good.
I use notes apps but more now just a repo (super easy with github.dev everywhere) and notes have easy history that way and you can freely add/remove without feeling like notes are lost. When I use notes apps or even Google Docs, yes they have history but it isn't as fluid/quick as github for that. The important thing is find something that works for you that makes the barrier to writing it down almost non-existent. It needs to be very easy to write things down in between busy days and to capture these fleeting moments.
I think if we look at note taking as a sorting / filtering function, then maybe this article isn’t that painful to read..
I can now actually whip out enumerative combinatorics to solve problems, or do on the spot estimations of the standard error of log-odds differences from contingency tables, or compute the power or any number to any other with mental maths, without looking it up in my notes first. That's immensely powerful.
But it also doesn't stop there. Since I now remember far more higher-level concepts, I can also make sense of more advanced reading in a way I was unable to when I had to dip back and forth between my notes and the text to try to piece things together.
Essentially, remembering what I've read has allowed me to raise the level of abstraction of my thinking, which has been more helpful than I expected it to, across a number of different situations.
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That said, I'm only a few months into my spaced repetition journey, so maybe there's a balance to strike and a judgment to make between forgetting and remembering, and I'm sure that's something I'll get better at finding as I get practise.
Maybe the first few months of spaced repetition is the time before diminishing returns set in. I don't know but I'm excited to find out.
That doesn't mean that if you make the effort to read the notes again you won't get value out of them. It's just saying "You realize you aren't on track to read any of this ever again right?"
For directed study, though, I find making the notes if oten more helpful than referring to them again.
A really great, fun game on this is from Nicki Case called "How To Remember Anything Forever-ish" [1]
Additionally, the site has some other amazing games that really should be part of everyone's education and are Oregon Trail like in their impact.
One of my favorites is the "Evolution of Trust" about game theory. [2] Probably the best game theory game out there.
As an aside, you can program yourself and people with spaced repetition. Lots of propaganda uses it heavily but it can be used for good and bad. If you hear small facts everyday or small bits of promotion/propaganda everyday, it can over time evoke an pavlovian like response to the information, either good or bad. Using it can also bump up things you want to know about, and be aware when external information is being pumped.
Basically spaced repetition mimics how you'd naturally come across something repetitively and the learning becomes automatic, it is iterative.
Educational games like Nicky Case makes are awesome and really do help simplify and solidify certain topics so check them out. [3]
Similarly, propaganda and the like builds on the recency/frequency heuristic in System 1 which makes things you commonly hear seem true, and it's triggered by repetition -- perhaps even more efficiently than by spaced repetition.
Spaced repetition is based on iterative learning, small bits compounding to refine skills/memory. The point is to get it into a higher point in memory by regularly revisiting. Spaced repetition tunes into the natural repetition/learning cycle at a point that becomes muscle memory almost. Once it is in there, the spacing can grow and it can bring that all back up.
In usability for instance three or less items feels simple, over seven feels complex. When you repeat something about seven times, whether that is immediate or over time, it moves to a higher importance in your mind/memory. When you stretch these out you can train your brain via spaced repetition but it all comes back to that it is a regular iterative practice and doesn't have to be the exact specs of spaced repetition.
We are habitual creatures so if you can get a pattern going of regular learning of a topic, it becomes easier to process in small chunks over time. You can also use this to program or promote ideas and products as people when they hear things over a certain amount of times, as you mention, it moves up the importance in their thought process.
When working on a side project for instance, if you work on it just a little bit everyday, or a medium amount every week, it will keep rolling. If you take large breaks you have to work to reload that information and it starts to stagnate. Small, repetitive and many times, spaced iterations, compound into shipping products if you set it up right. That can be used for almost anything from education to career to hobbies and more.
At the core of spaced repetition is the spacing (time + testing) but really the small bits that are easy to repeat. Small bits of info regularly is almost more important than the spacing, "testing" size almost more important than the "time".
The spaced repetition index cards techniques are all about this, small bits of info tested over time, stretching the time to make it last longer. This is why cramming doesn't work very long, you have to revisit regularly and over a certain amount of times with space in between and they have to be smaller chunks of information to remember, you can't really do that when the thing is due tomorrow. Our current work environments look more like cramming projects rather than open/closed spaced repetition and that is a problem.
For context, I did a Maths degree, so I'm familiar with them all. I just never find myself needing them.
Granted, they could all be replaced by computer evaluation, but when someone shows me some numbers and wants a quick opinion, I've found that if I ask if I can take a moment to type it into a device people are more likely to go "that sounds complicated, never mind" but if I only jot down some numbers on paper they are more likely to put weight on the conclusion.
I'm familiar with spaced-repetition, and have played around with Anki a bit.
I'm just not sure how I would integrate it into my reading.
But I can try to summarise/expand.
A large part of it is learning to write good flashcard prompts. That was like 80 % of the hurdle for me. It does not come naturally for me, so I needed to look some tips up and then I notice I'm getting better with practise. I started by reading https://andymatuschak.org/prompts/ and Wozniak's https://www.supermemo.com/en/blog/twenty-rules-of-formulatin....
At least for me, another 15 % came from making it convenient to create flashcards. Actually designing the flashcard prompt takes a bit of mental effort (it's hard to write good prompts!) so if it then is technically challenging for me to create the flashcard from it, it's less likely to happen. I have a script that takes in essentially Markdown sections with bullet lists where each list item becomes its own flashcard with the title given by the Markdown heading. That works for fast entry for me. I write the Markdown on my phone, and then every now and then I use the script to batch import all I've written so far into my spaced repetition software.
The last 5 % for me was switching over from writing my plain old notes into writing flashcards instead. That bit was fairly easy because I was already in the habit of making notes. I stop and write notes on:
- Things that connect to something else I know, even if the authors don't point that connection out.
- Things that seem insightful, even if I don't yet know what the insight is.
- Things that surprise or delight me, or make me sad, or whatever. Any emotional reaction.
- Fundamental facts that other results build on, unless I'm already very confident that I know that fact even if someone would quiz me unexpectedly. (So I wouldn't write a flashcard for Bayes' rule because I can recite it in my sleep – but I do have a flashcard for the log-odds version of it, where posterior = prior + sensitivity - false positive rate, because I haven't yet seen/used that version as much (though clearly I did remember it just now).)
- Steps or details of a simple process that I'll likely want to follow later without having to reference the book.
This is probably not an ideal way to select things to remember, but I have to go by something and these are usually fairly good points at which I take a short break from reading anyway, so I might as well create a flashcard.
Then comes actually studying the flashcards, but that's not what you asked about so I stop here!
I suppose it's better than nothing, but I've found the same thing, if I don't revisit those notes, I do still forget it.
So I think a more formalised spaced-repetition process like this can help me.
> The last 5 % for me was switching over from writing my plain old notes into writing flashcards instead.
I would caution against dropping writing plain old notes for broader level topics. I've been doing SR for over 4 years, and a few times it's happened that I'm consistently failing flashcards on a particular topic. The way for me to get "unstuck" was to admit I've forgotten key fundamentals, and go back to my plain old notes for a proper review - the way I would do it before flashcards. This gives me the bigger picture, in a logical order.
Going through atomic flashcards did not help me "relearn" something.
https://help.supermemo.org/wiki/Incremental_reading#Introduc...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=saSFZGS-uCQ& - an example of incremental reading in Supermemo.
https://gwern.net/spaced-repetition#using-it
http://super-memory.com/help/il.htm#What_is_incremental_lear...
https://www.supermemo.com/en/blog/twenty-rules-of-formulatin...
I mainly follow my emotions and varying interests and try to convince myself that most of what I learn can be very useful, it just rests on me to find ways to use it. It helps that I'm a big fan of applying wisdom from different disciplines to find unexpected solutions to problems.
I do however focus a lot on fundamental insights, the things that actually help me guide a web search in the first place. If I didn't have rooted deeply in my brain that the sample error is composed of bias, between-unit variance, and sample size, I wouldn't even know to start looking for ways to reduce between-unit variance as an economical alternative to increasing sample size.
"In the future, of all the times I will need this information, will I spend more than 10 minutes looking it up?"
If the answer is no, he won't bother creating flashcards.
If the answer is yes, he will.
Now that doesn't account for the time spent creating the card, but for most cards it will definitely take under a minute to create - so it doesn't change things much.
Writing cards vs doing exercises is comparing very different concerns. One needs to eat as well, but it wouldn't make sense to ask "Write cards vs eating."
Flashcards are for recall. Exercises are for understanding. It is true if you use a concept over and over in practice exercises, it will aid in recall as well. But for concepts you use less often (i.e. fewer exercises), you are more likely to forget them. Flashcards guard against that.
Case in point: I took tons of engineering and physics courses. So the usual undergraduate calculus, along with trigonometric identities, are ingrained in my mind even though I haven't used them in over a decade. Now consider complex analysis (or complex calculus). It was one of my favorite math classes. But I rarely applied that knowledge in other courses. As a result, despite the fact that I basically reviewed the material twice after taking the course, I still remember almost none of it.
I could force myself to do complex analysis exercises occasionally for the rest of my life. Or I could put them in flashcards. The former will definitely lead to a richer, deeper understanding, but is impractical due to the heavy time requirements. The latter is a good compromise.
What I got from it is that, the process is less about storing/retrieving information, but more about building a system that can surprise you - the way ideas emerge when you brainstorm with others. These others being people with the same level of knowledge as you - so, not the kind of information flow that happens between an expert and a beginner, but between peers who have access to the same kind of information, but simply look at things differently.
For some reason, every Zettelkasten system out there focuses on the mechanics, and in my opinion, not enabling the original intent of the approach. Not that I have a solution to the problem.
Yes. The Zettelkasten system is not equivalent to an unstructured wiki. It's more than just docs with links. I'm no expert, but I think of Zettelkasten as describing a way to work with your collection of notes over time.
Thanks for the link!
But the main weakness of that system is what makes it so powerful: it is, by nature, extremely time consuming. It is so powerful because, in order to add the smallest note, you need to sift through dozens of them, amend them, thinks about connections, create notes for those connections... In a sense, it is the exact opposite of what the article describe: the system _prevents you_ to just jote a quick note and forget about it. I does make it very powerful as a "second brain", but I ended up finding that the joy and insights I got out were not worth the time investment. I guess this is a reason app builders do not emphasize the process: "get more out of your reading by spending a few more hours per day organizing your thoughts" is not super sexy.
I now see that system as relevant only to people whose _main_ focus is to collect information and extract new insights from them: philosophers, anthropologists, some types of sociologists... But if you just want to remember a blog post about weird CSS tricks, this is probably overkill.
Create daily notes (tied to the day you wrote them) or transient notes (tied to a concept) as scratch areas to quickly dump your thoughts onto the page.
Then return later when you have the time and focus to explicitly process your notes - either discarding daily/transient notes that are no longer interesting, or growing them into evergreen notes with sufficient detail and linking. Make sure it's easy to list all your daily and transient notes in an "inbox".
Probably because most people don't learn the intent. Most people don't even seem to understand what a Zettelkasten actually is, and take it for the name of the system. It's a very common problem with most of those systems and tools. GTD and Bullet Journals have the same problems. I think it's because people only learn the culminating result, the system, but not the way that lead to the system and tool, and reasons why the system and tools are the way they are. And then they start the cargo cult and praise the name.
Now if something catches my attention, I'll read it immediately to the best of my ability, send some highlights directly from the browser (desktop and mobile) to my Notado archive (I'd say 90%+ of my tagging of whatever I save is automated with rules) and be done with it. Whenever I'm in the mood to look back through the highlights (and comments) I've saved, it's great to have that built-in quality+relevancy+interestingness filter that comes from RINORIN.
Life is much better now that I'm not living with that constant FOMO. Even if I could read, highlight and annotate everything (I can't, and neither can you, and that's ok), I would never be able to do something with _all_ of it (I can't, and neither can you, and that's ok).
It seems to work for me, but I don't use notes or tags and my list is about 20 items long at most.
My phones browser kept crashing. I thought I had about 80 tabs open so I went to close some.
I had 1200+ tabs open. Mostly HN stuff I surely couldn’t live without.
The next time it crashed and asked to restore.
No!
When I do read the printout, I highlight things I want to store permanently and put it in a different inbox which is processed every few weeks. However, this is the exception - probably less than 5% of documents have something I want to store permanently.
Details in the link:
https://blog.nawaz.org/posts/2021/Dec/consuming-articles-off...
I now actually go back and curate my notes into a kind of wiki that is meant just for me. I've tried running a wiki for my self, but it doesn't work offline. And I tried just using plain text or OrgMode, but they were impossible to deal with on my phone. It just strikes that perfect amount of customization and cross-platform support that I needed to make it somewhere I trust storing the information. And in the end it really is still just a bunch of markdown files in a git repo (thanks Working Copy!) so I am not really locked in like I was with any other apps I've used.
Why not use a tool that is specifically made for that?
TiddlyWiki works both online and offline, and is both a note-taking tool and a wiki.
As a showcase: I turned the notes I was taking for myself in preparation for my ADHD diagnosis by uploading the single HTML file to my website, and many people found it useful:
I’ve long suspected I’ve had it and so much of what you’ve listed speaks to me.
Honestly, the "cure" for 90% of ADHD symptoms is fixing our society that expects everybody's brains to work the same way for no good reason.
Most people are expected to be happy getting educated the same way, going to work at the same hours, and generally fulfilling the same sort of expectations.
We don't expect a racecar to be a great vehicle for hauls to home depot, but we expect all humans to be good with coming to work on time, filing taxes, paying fines promptly, etc — even when a lot of this can be automated away.
Then there are stimulants like Adderall which help people with ADHD manage the symptoms that affect them, like executive dysfunction.
But overall, the way ADHD is diagnosed is, remarkably, by how much inconvenience it causes to others.
Which is more of a you-problem than a me-problem ("you" here refers to society).
>which tools and programs would be needed to accumulate and distill all relevant information and let people with ADHD discover and implement that cure?
Tiddliwiky and social networks to raise awareness.
Frankly, that's going to get most of us about 90% there.
Most of "cure" of ADHD if changing the lifestyle and expectations.
Other than that, repeat after me: ADHD is not a disease, and does not need to be cured. Neither is autism.
Both can be a great asset too.
There is more than one neurotype.
That is an actively harmful statement. It is akin to saying losing a leg is not a disease and can be a great asset. ADHD is executive function disorder where person is unable to manage time and memory which is required for basic living. It may also come with issues in emotional regulation and other problems.
It is NEVER an asset. People maybe able to manage it and succeed despite having it never because of it.
You-problem becomes me-problem if you want to keep job/friends/partner or simply you want to keep track of the keys and turn off the gas.
Well, it's not. Losing a leg is losing a leg. It is not a disease.
It is, however, a disability, which is something ADHD may be.
But, unlike losing a leg, ADHD is not just a disability. It comes with a different set of abilities. Understanding that is key for a fruitful life and relationships - and that applies to both people with ADHD and without.
>ADHD is executive function disorder where person is unable to manage time and memory which is required for basic living. It may also come with issues in emotional regulation and other problems.
Note that we are not in disagreement here.
A disorder is not a disease. And executive dysfunction and time (mis)management are not the only ADHD traits. There are many others.
ADHD traits become symptoms when they impede one's life. Those can be treated and managed, but not cured (unlike diseases).
>It is NEVER an asset.
This statement is patently wrong and harmful.
People with ADHD are known to handle emergencies better than neurotypical people, for example. Having an immensely diverse set of skills and interests (which ADHD people are amenable to) is an asset.
So is hyperfocus[1].
There's a reason why you are more likely to find people with ADHD among software engineers and musicians.
It would be wrong to say that ADHD is an asset in today's world. But it can be, if you understand how your brain functions like, and have the right expectations.
What you say is akin to saying that a racecar is NEVER an asset because it gets stuck in the mud, unlike a tractor. Well, duh! It doesn't belong there.
>You-problem becomes me-problem if you want to keep job/friends/partner or simply you want to keep track of the keys and turn off the gas.
Sure, but again, you are not evaluating ADHD from the perspective of the person that has ADHD. Of course if you only look at how it inconveniences others, you will arrive at the conclusion that ADHD only inconveniences others.
Garbage in, garbage out.
Also, your comment is just the example of the society having idiotic/unreasonable expectations that creates a problem. Let's look at it again:
>or simply you want to keep track of the keys and turn off the gas.
Or you can simply install a door with a code lock (or put a spare key in a lockbox) and use an electric stove with auto shut-off (or instant pot/air fryer/microwave) to cook.
Presto! The problem isn't caused by ADHD, it's caused by having an expectation to do things that are hard for ADHDers when other solutions exist.
Which is another perspective of how ADHD is an asset: ADHD-friendly devices, interfaces, and ways of doing things are, in general, more human-friendly.
ADHD makes it hard to remember to switch off the lights, and easy to invent the automatic shut-off sensor. Which, ultimately, is good for everyone.
See my point?
I do most of my editing on my laptop, but a non-trivial amount is done via the phone. Mostly adding new links and stuff via iOS Shortcuts I made.
That said, I love this Wiki. I'll be adding it to my ADHD note :)
Indeed, I don't edit it on the phone. I use Google Keep a lot though, and then merge the notes on the desktop.
Now I'm actually surprised to have returned back to this HN thread.
Meta ADHD.
If expertise is learning all the ways to fail, I must surely be an expert in learning how to learn. I even did a survey of my medical school classmates on the subject and found some trends. I then proceeded to ignore many of those trends myself, and reaped the consequences. Finally, I implemented what I was supposed to from the beginning, and ... you know what? It fucking works.
Do not take a laptop to class. Take handwritten notes. Take your notes in a bound volume with a few pages at the front for a table of contents (1). Fill in the table of contents later. That will force you to re-engage with your notes and figure out what it was you meant to write, and boil it down to something very pithy in the ToC.
I told my kids what to do. I told them I would buy all the notebooks they wanted. I would keep them. They should never throw them away. They are now crushing it. My daughter has a 3.9 in a top school. My son hasn't finished high school and he ran out of math classes in the local community college (2).
I still journal. It's not really notes now, but I sit down at least a few times a week and write down the things that happened each day. Each and every day is documented. For a number of reasons. First, for my own letting go. Second, for remembering. Third, as memoranda for the record. It's quite hard to plagiarize page 42 of 256 pages when all the other pages are filled in too. (3)
(1) I strongly favor Leuchtturm1917 A5. Better papers, slightly wider, better ToC, better bookmark ribbons. I prefer dots or grid.
(2) the Silicon Valley community colleges have pretty solid math. There's a story that Hewlett Packard actually stocked de Anza's math department with HP engineers at one point because they projected they wouldn't be able to fill their hiring requirements without growing their own. Talk about a build-vs-buy decision!
(3) For journaling, I've switched to larger A4+ because I'm just writing longhand and, especially as a lefty, I find the binding (any binding) to be mildly frustrating.
So, notes are streams. You're not saving ideas to forget them. You're saving them to interact with them with different tooling. A relatively small portion of those ideas will ever make it to the end the flow, which is publishing. And they lose relevance to us because our context changes. An idea is important to you in a certain moment, with certain circumstances. The following day, the context has changed. Only the ideas which stick will retain their relevance. Just like only a small number of ideas will widely resonate with others.
I don't think there's a need to delete them. You're context later may return to a similar enough state that old ideas become useful again, and you can refactor them.
The acid test for note taking is: do you get back to your notes, process, organize, sieve, tidy and reformat them regularly?
So have a free insight if you're writing a note taking app: make it useful for serious note takers.
I’ve always had the bad habit of “Sure I’ll do that for you!”, then meaning to remember and forgetting about it. I was that person that you couldn’t rely on to follow through with stuff.
I over-estimated my own memory in the moment and yet at the same time I was too afraid to really embrace note-taking because I was worried that if I started relying on notes, would that make my brain weaker?
I decided to try and dive in, after all I owe it to the people I know to be better at this.
It’s actually had the opposite effect on my memory - I find the action of taking the note makes the memory more solid and frees space up in my head to get back to other things.
For me, being able to use scribble on my Apple Watch is what made it feasible. I have a notepad on my wrist and can discreetly write notes whenever I need to.
From there, they go to Drafts as my inbox. At night I can glance over them; some will stay there as to-do items, some will be sent to Obsidian for longer-term storage and others might be deleted or end up as reminders, etc.
It’s great. It bridges that gap between my working memory and long-term storage really well.
I get that people might need to keep a list of things to buy the next time they go grocery shopping. But what is it that makes some aggregate page after page of notes week after week? Is it both private and professional notes? Is it more a ritual of organizing thoughts than creating a lasting document? If so then I can understand it. Some people don't think clearly until they write. But are there people who also revisit these notes?
The topic of "notes" keeps popping up on HN periodically and I feel like I'm of a different species when I don't get what (after 20 years of running a family and software career) I ever missed to take a note of because I made none!
- Meeting notes
- Daily journal with related doodles
- Project ideas and UI sketches
- Research notes for new articles
Meeting notes are the most valuable, because I wouldn't remember what we talked about a day later.
Notes are a good way to dump an idea and revisit it later, because there's always a million things going on in my life and I can't keep it all in RAM.
Most of the time I just add another entry, instead of cleaning up the original one, so it's a bit of a mess. But if necessary, I can scan through them, keeping the good ones and deleting the rest.
I use notes app to quickly remember what would otherwise be forgotten. I use notes apps just to make sense of what’s around me and not to have magical ideas.
I’m essentially a staff engineer, and my scope is very broad. I can pretend I have eidetic memory ( which I don’t have), or be lucid, and use notes as a way to not forget things, and be able to draw à meaningful plan.
Basically GTD wants you to have a "trusted system outside of your head and off your mind"
This allows your brain to do things the brain is good at, instead of keeping lists of new things which it really isn't that good at.
I work in a similar Staff Engineer position and jump between lots of teams, immediately required to go very deep with each team. Then a few minutes later I need to jump to another team and dive deep into that team's problem.
One day, I was talking with my AWS rep and I said "hey do you remember this thing you told me related to X about a year ago. I can't remember what it was, but it helped me solve Y problem...". I had only a vague memory of it, and I didn't really expect him to remember much of it either. But within seconds, he started rambling off, what felt like near-exact quotes about the conversation and the links and documentation references he gave me on that day. It literally blew my mind! He had impressed me with information recall a few times before, but this was god-tier memory recall. So I asked him how he could possibly do that, and he explained LogSeq and how he records everything so that he doesn't have to waste mind-space remembering things that he would certainly forget anyway.
I tried it out, and it took a few weeks to get used to it, but saw the same benefits immediately. I find myself less mentally taxed each day because I am streaming information into my log sequence and not trying to store it in my brain. After you trust in the process, it relieves the stress on your brain to perform more powerful tasks or give you more energy. As corny as it sounds, it actually was life-changing because I instantly had more energy at the end of the day and started performing better.
There is a learning curve in the process. For example getting in the habit of using things like hashtags on anything you think might be worth searching later. But this quickly becomes second nature. There is also a secondary benefit of how scanning through your notes after or during a call can help you identify connections or ideas you may not have thought of in the moment.
Brains are good at finding patterns, expanding on ideas, and thinking creatively. But they are terrible at remembering large streams of information. By learning to harness a note tool to manage the remembering of large streams of information, it opens up our brain to do the things it is good at like expanding on ideas or being creative instead of handicapping it by trying to remember a minor tasks someone asked you to complete after the meeting wrapped up.
I'd say it is 90% unused.
But the other 10% really supports the important things I need to do or remember, even if I have to pull stuff out of a pile of other stuff.
I never forget things at the store, ideas for an active project are always recorded, I always have a list of movies I need to see captured from many sources, and yes... I empty my mind immediately and don't have to stress for the forgotten.
I wonder if this is how I'll avoid the ravages of age that affected the old people I knew when I was a kid. "I forget what I was going to the store for" or "what was that person's name?" etc...
If you’re just throwing notes into a note-taking app with no way of processing them, I can see how this would be true, but my system is constantly resurfacing old thoughts, and I make conscious choices about what gets archived and preserved.
I read the full article, and it sounds like the author hasn’t heard of these. Confident article. Not deeply researched in my opinion.
[1]: https://logseq.com/
With that said, my non-repeating notes are far from "dead". First, I have a lot of useful self-made references. Second, Obsidian really makes it easy to spontaneously group tags with its backlink system. Every now and then, I go down a rabbit hole and catch up to notes that would otherwise be dead. I only have to maintain a few "entry points" that mostly have other notes linking to them.
I call this idea 'anti-spaced-repetition': https://gwern.net/note/statistic#program-for-non-spaced-repe...
This "exponential" repetition it's not as optimized as the kinds of algorithms you're describing, but I find it good enough and it comes with a few distinct advantages:
1) Spaced repetition algorithms are hard to get right with two buttons like remembered/forgot. Anki for example added more buttons (easy/normal/hard/forgot or something like that), but I could never really intuit what would happen if I clicked any of them. Having 4 explicit choices makes it easy to understand what will happen, and also lets you "manually" push back notes on axes like "how much do I still care about this" and not just "how well do I remember this".
2) I really wanted to keep the metadata fields stored in the note and easy for a human to edit and understand. Right now, you only need `repeat: spaced every N days` (and similar) and the plugin adds a `due_at` field that has an easy to read ISO timestamp. You can also add `hidden: true` but don't have to.
I wrote a quick-and-dirty script to sync my Pocket bookmarks with Anki, since I have a large backlog in Pocket: https://github.com/telotortium/pockexport-to-anki. Over time, I'll probably deprecate Pocket, since Anki lets me make notes on articles.
Notes apps are where ideas go to die, and that’s good - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30344237 - Feb 2022 (158 comments)
Org-mode can't be beat, IMO, if you live in Emacs all day long, as I do.
Does such a thing exist in emacs?
Even a simple para oriented fuzzy search might be a good place to start.
But most apps make this surprisingly hard… you first need to figure out if you should create a new note or append to an existing one. If new note, then in which folder? If existing note, then which one?
It’s too much mental burden when all you want ia jot something down and be sure you’ll find it later.
I made an app that’s great at this, just this. It’s basically an infinite page where you write everything down, in one continuous stream. Then it has some basic tagging and search so you can find stuff again.
Feel free to try if interested: PaperRoll.app
Not sure about other apps, but Google Keep makes it pretty damn simple and efficient
Keep is quite simple as Is Apple Notes. But these, at least for me, become chaotic quite fast unless I’m very disciplined (and sooner or later there’s a day in which I’m not)
It’s the first time something like this works for me. I does so because I use it daily to refine, trash, and collect information.
Btw: I call BS on the section about Kahneman and loss aversion. Their experimental setup was too narrow to extend it to something like fear of missing out on information.
With Vim, I can quickly navigate to the other files.
I think Markdown viewers/editors should also be able to handle these links.
And yet... many of those people also have an urge to switch once they've used an app for a certain period of time. I think the issue is a note-taking variation of the "Hedonic Treadmill". Some people are just mentally the type of person that gets a kick out of organizing their notes and thoughts. Eventually those people return to their baseline and need to switch to a new system in order to get that adrenaline fix. More concretely, we have seen that users who say they have come to Supernotes after trying many other note-taking apps are much more likely to churn, regardless of if we have the features they say they are looking for at the beginning.
As far as solutions go, I think one common pattern is spaced repetition (Anki being one of the best known apps for this), where the system will automatically re-surface things it wants you to remember (and not just forget). Many in the space are now trying to utilize AI (i.e. LLMs) to give even better contextual info and resurfacing, which is a promising approach. Regardless I think features like this can definitely help make an app continue to feel fresh long after the honeymoon period. We try to solve this by just having your notes be a feed (rather than just a list of documents), which allows you to occasionally find things you forgot about. Definitely a tough challenge with lots of potential solutions!
[2] https://community.supernotes.app/t/trying-to-decide/1644
Struggling to find enough time in the day at the moment, but we are pushing out a big release soon (Supernotes 3.0), and after that I hope to find some time for proper blogging about development.
A regular stocktaking of planned action and choose to do or dropped stuff you wanted to do
Author misses a category of notes that are actively created as personal documentation for things you don't do often or keep forgetting. Those are human equivalents of a bash script
Say: "Install k8s on redhat 8.x"
Open this doc you've written, blindly follow steps you've done before, there is tremendous value in this.
Your future you and you are slightly different people, learn to keep the conversation going, don't blame the tech
Modern note-taking tools help our brains with their limited capacity to manage greater complexity, discover obscure connections and, of course, safely forget to free working memory for other things.
However, if you just write down some ideas from time to time that are not really related to each other or stash resources like interesting weblinks without making an effort to organize and connect them in meaningful ways, fancy new apps and features won’t really provide much value beyond just using a plain old notebook.
Overthinking really seems to be an issue with users of networked notebook apps and it can waste a lot of time and money. We should stop building elaborate systems or focussing on complicated workflows unless we really have a strong motivation, such as deep, long-term research and study. Serving this motivation will then be the actual focus of our efforts, not the tools or workflows themselves. It can be fun to explore “tools for thought” on their own, but they will not magically change our lifes if they cannot solve a problem that is meaningful to us.
However for much of my life I still struggled to get more out of the system than the mere act of committing the note, which often is enough to make something stick in my memory for longer. (Especially writing a physical note on my Remarkable tablet)
So just that committing of a note was worth it.
Still, notes were one way for me for me, ideas and thoughts did not get revisited.
A few things changed all of that for me.
For my digital text note system, Logseq.
I finally found a system where I am able to amend, see, change, work with all my existing notes when creating new notes.
Now a new note uses blocks from other notes, I revisit old info more and more.
My mind works wonderfully with this.
Logseq is an infinite outliner, a bi-directional note system that allows for true in place transclusion (put editable excerpts of notes into other notes always editable)
Also Logseq has an incredibly flexible and powerful query language that is just nuts. I love it.
And then recently I switch my physical handwritten notes from Remarkable to Supernote.
Why?
Oh my God
Supernote let's me create inter note links!
My own handwriting, I can just select the vector text, and link to any page of the note or any other note I have to make a link.
It's such a powerful addition now my notes are becoming so much more powerful.
Links are great, they let me easily revisit old info when adding new which I find is awesome.
The Supernote is kind of on a wiki level with its link capabilities which I used to think was top tier but since Logseq bidirectional linking blows wiki based out of the water. However I can't see how to add bi-directional to Supernote easily? They are making a Linux based version soon so perhaps when they do if I upgrade I could write a script to add that functionality?
Anyways. Going back to Remarkable or paper without any handwritten note links is not possible. I've been spoiled.
Also I am working on a script to auto convert and retain links to my Supernote and integrate into Logseq but haven't succeeded yet. One day!
A better way is to combine your notes tool with Readwise. If you use Notion, then save the page link under a custom book titled Notes.
You’ll get reminded once in a while. Just click the link, review the notes like flash card.
Or just use the static reminder feature in notion if you want more control over your reminders.
I've been pretty happy with paper notes on this front because you can quickly give up on structure and write things as fragments. You'll "know" it's there, and end up finding it eventually.
I think if you're using something like Notion or Roam, trying to keep stuff pretty flat (Search function exists!) is very helpful, as it lowers the cost of writing things down and means you don't get as burnt out.
"Old notes are worthless" is like... pretty glib though. I actually look back at notes relatively often! But it's often not a structured activity, so it's hard to say the notes are part of some generalized process. But there is a liberation in deleting some older notes, just like there is in deleting older projects.
I really on my old notes all the time. People mention "oh, I was going to look into X," and I do a quick search through my notes to send them some links to the investigation I did earlier on X. People ask a question "What are you planning on doing on Y?" and I find in my old notes "subject matter so-and-so says: Y? I wouldn't worry about Y." Especially in engineering, there are lots of things that I think are not important at the time because I lack context to understand it's importance, and I only understand it's importance because I wrote down unimportant seeming things, go back and read through my notes and realize "Oh, 3 different people told me Z is a big deal. I didn't realize, I should go learn more about Z."
Because as mentioned, some notes are evolving documents, and others are just scrap files. And I do get a lot of value out of shelving thoughts and ideas for many of the reasons the article describes. It's just written as an unnecessarily grand sweeping generalization.
A lot of my ideas are dependent on timing and that's why I write them down.
Like I have photography ideas for winter but it's not winter yet. Or something I want to do or eat the next time I go to a certain city but I don't want to fly to that city for that reason only.
Or vacation project ideas, but it's not convenient to take PTO right now, but when I can take PTO I hit a mental block about what to do with it, and it's nice to have a "menu" of ideas I had thought of before and pick one.
Timing-dependent ideas is one of my primary use of notes apps.
What I like to do is read a chapter of a book, scientific article, or blog post, let’s say, and then write a summary in a note. I can distill the message down and integrate it with existing knowledge by noting similarities.
After that step, I create Anki cards from the notes to remember the key points. By this approach I go from reading material to permanent memory.
If you’re asking me about the stack exchange question, I don’t use tags for my notes.
This has changed how I make notes as well. I have learned to make them searchable. I often think, "what will future me search in order to find this note" and this sprinkle in a few extra keywords.
For ideas:
1. I time box thinking about the idea I've had. If after 10 minutes I don't feel like it's particularly useful, I just forget it.
2. Write it in one of the markdown files I keep in my Documents directory (partitioned by broad category).
3. Skim through the rest of the file and see if the other things in there are still interesting. If not, delete.
For designs:
1. Usually while I'm working, I keep a temporary file in an editor that keeps a backup of open files (it won't even have a file name). Everything I think of goes in there roughshod, in between separators. Completely free-form.
2. If I need to switch to something else for an extended period of time, I save the file to disk.
3. Once I've built the project or feature, I close the unsaved file (i.e. throw it out).
For writing:
1. One markdown file per piece, done in a similar fashion to the design documents. The bottom-most section of the file is for the current draft, and everything above it is free-form rough ideas.
2. Either post it, throw it out, or put in long term storage depending on what it's for and how I feel about it.
-
Search is done with grep.
Backup is done with rsync over SSH (I just have it mirror my home dir).
No notes apps, no special systems. Just markdown files and directories so that I can access it from anywhere with anything.
I have no idea who is working on this and how old but if the claims are true it could be interesting: https://www.aphanmiz.com
I'd be screwed without Notes. It's a repository of so many abstract thoughts that I have no place thinking about all day. There's simply too much going on.
Having things written down in shorthand like a prompt is so handy when I have some time to go back and browse the gallery of good and bad ideas.
However, I believe there is a benefit to notes kept over a long term which is being discounted. I believe that notes allow you to see how your thinking on a topic has changed over time.
They allow you to cast your mind back to your thinking when you first encountered a new topic, or back to a time when you were struggling with an idea that now seems obvious to you. They are a way to observe the progress and velocity of your learning.
I think that notes can be for active learners what a lifting journal is to a power lifter, or a mile and pace log is to a runner. Those logs are objectively not that interesting, but they allow you to measure and reflect on your progress.
An aside: I personally find that audio recordings are the best form of notes. Hearing your own voice explain an idea or concept carries so much more information than can easily be captured with text.
I use GitHub README.md for my journals and journal in public. GitHub I hope shall be around in 10 years.
I've had 10 years of free hosting on GitHub and in theory shall have 10 years more.
I don't keep my ideas to myself, writing is thinking and improves the world.
- HDD is unnecessary - just use RAM.
- Git history makes no sense.
Most ideas aren't new or they don't make sense. And even if they do, we may never have time to put them into action. But this 1% (or maybe 0.1%) of ideas actually make sense. We may never revisit 90% of our thoughts and ideas, and 9% revisit without our gain, but for this 1%, it is still worth it to take notes. All discoveries, startups, books, and works of art come from this tiny fraction of ideas that were actually good. And on a more mundane level, think about all well-thought-out gifts.
It is super naive to claim that since most ideas are of little value, then all ideas have no value.
I believe that "forgetting" is really the wrong lens, anyhow. Aside from simplicity, Workflowy's primary draw for me is that it can help me rapidly (a few 10s of ms) find any keyword in my massive, 10+ year, 75k+ node list-of-lists. I can relax and "forget" because I trust that what I need is there when I go to search for it. This is the exact same mechanics at work in Inbox Zero, which is also something that helped me reclaim my life.
Workflowy has literally allowed me to forget more than most people know about the topics I'm expert in. If that's not a solid pitch, I honestly don't know what could be.
Bubbles up relevant notes automatically without having to link them like in Obsidian or something.
I think apart from that or an Anki like system there’s no way to solve this.
On the other hand maybe note taking is more about thinking and catalysing an idea and less about using in later
I stopped doing this around 5 years ago as an experiment and never looked back, I am probably more productive now and I sense my memory is sharper. My colleagues comment about how I can recall things from months back without looking at notes (sometimes to their annoyance).
I have found myself instead thinking a lot more and actually talking to myself quietly to process concepts and ideas, this is a bit weird I know and few colleagues commented on it.
Also instead of taking notes from meetings I mark expected actions from them in my diary to hold others and myself accountable to time.
I also religiously follow the 'two minutes rule' by James Clear.
I am super skeptical of organizing notes though, if your working memory has not managed to process the idea and come up with an outcome which is shareable in a given window, its unlikely that revisiting it, linking it upto concepts in a document ever brings the rewards.
Would love to see someone publish an MRI of the brain as we are writing versus the phase before it. Do we see increased activity in some centers and do we see that activity reducing post writing? Is that true for any creative endeavour?
This is precisely why you need an inbox[0] for your ideas that you do sort through regularly.
Sure, you can treat your Notes app as a trash bin that never gets emptied. That'll work fine for collecting quotes and facts and musings.
But when you get an idea you know you might want to take action on (not just hoard), you need a visible place to stash it -- if only so you can decide later that you won't take action on it after all.
The result probably varies a bit, depending on the note taking style and one's needs but my n=1 insight is that the few times I do, it is indispensable.
So its not a placebo, note taking works by giving you a few precious hints as to what was your state of mind. Its a digital long tail extension of the mind. Not somebody elses mind. They would literally make no sense of my notes.
A key consideration is how much time it takes. Too detailed and its probably a waste of time, too sketchy and it might not capture enough hints.
So the endless discussion about note taking apps feels like an obsession. Maybe we feel there is something dramatically empowering just beyond reach.
My next challenges are: how to organise a note, regarding its granularity and refactoring.
To elaborate a little bit, the question now for me is really when I reread a note about a topic I did not know well when I first wrote about it, and now I need to add new (more advanced) content.
Should I keep my newbie vision of the topic? Or replace it with the vison from the more advanced me? Won’t that make my note unreadable by a newbie, then?
I wonder how Wikipedian contributors handle that problem (especially when dealing with new pages, or pages about fast-evolving topics)
I don't write notes to remember, I write notes so I don't have to.
I do the same thing on my work computer, iPad, and iPhone. So the files are synced using the iCloud backbone. I just point each instance of Obsidian to the same folder locally on each computer and the file is synced in the background, with Obsidian unaware of this, it just treats it as a local graph. And it works flawlessly.
This is effortless for people with Macs. For people on cross-platform systems you could use dropbox, google drive, or onedrive or similar. Plenty of solutions out there.
I did something similar in the past:
alias notes='vim ~/notes.txt'
So I made a different tool to help me primarily maintain focus. A secondary benefit is having made a note months ago that I now need.
I also write stuff down in todo lists or notes apps etc and never revisit them, or revisit them weeks later. It's...annoying. I relate to this so much.
Just pick a single search-optimized note app and stick with it. I use Evernote as a basic note-taking app, but really this works with ANY app that lets you have hierarchical organization (i.e. folders), gives you a good search feature, works offline, has a mobile app, and sync so you can access easily notes from your mobile phone or PC interchangeably.
Your goal is finding info ASAP. Good search should:
1. Give a list of notes matching the search result, including snippets, like a Google search 2. Be lightning fast (so no online search) 3. Allow searching a specific folder, or all notes (for when you can't remember where you put it)
I have my AI folder, my git folder, my Linux folder, my nutrition folder, you name it. Inside a folder, it's a mix of organized well-thoughtout notes, or random one-shot scribbles of something neat I found on the internet. It doesn't matter because I can just search my nutrition folder for e.g. "fasting salts" and instantly find my note about mineral requirements when doing a fast, no matter what the title is.
I have 200 notes for Linux alone. I don't use Linux enough to remember everything, especially stuff I might only need every few months.
It's just the old idea of relieving your mind of remembering everything.
Everything these days is either archived, or gets lost in “the feed”.
I really miss the concept of a Desktop. A place where current work is done.
Unfortunately, people think that the filesystem is not for the endusers.. everything is solid per app, and hidden in it.
Ahh BeOS, where everything was a file.
All those rainy day projects are just waiting for a rainy day.
Also I happen to send a bunch of my best startup ideas out as a newsletter, so that’s something. Viewed cynically, I guess that’s just from my notes app to yours.
Agreed! Some of us enjoy browsing our notes + ideas. I even treat trash as a folder :P until it really is out of my way or I accidentally go through a backup...
> //i.postimg.cc/nLYLfpnY/12592-6-WIDER-BESSEREN-WISSENS-STATT-DES-GLAUBENS-FINAL-Mail.png
Hint: Yesterday i read trough the first third of the post... (-;
I'm a strong believer in "one app, one use case". It's easier to mentally remember what note app is used for what specific need I have
One app i use is designed to "forget" and revisit at a different point of time, mostly around personal challenges I've had in life. This is my private journal - i do not write anything technical here, i do not bookmark anything - and i only write it from my phone. Sometimes I want to go back and see how far I've come, to understand and remember what single life was, how I felt moving to a new city for the first time, etc. It's my private space to forget thoughts and move onto bigger things in life. I sometimes write in third person to basically give advice to myself here too. These notes are more emotionally driven. There can be many notes here
Another note app I use is designed for purely private technical note taking. These are bookmarks predominantly for work related wikis that only I look at. I keep a few notes for organized bookmarks - and keep chrome bookmarks as a bookmark wasteland. All notes here are purely factually driven - and I archive things i no longer work on. I limit the number of active notes made here
I use Google docs predominantly ad a form of collaboration with others/sharing or planning travel trips with friends etc. It's mostly just a one time use doc for quickly iterating planning
My blog posts are for public works of reflection, which I start the writing process in a different note app. These are memorialized accomplishments
I use a physical notebook to learn from courses or break down concepts on paper. If I constantly retrieve it - I'll create a blog post or a project based on those idea to reference later
My todo lists are just sticky notes on my paper and calendar reminders. I believe in keeping systems really simple so you don't get into productivity gardening
Camera photos are also designed for me to forget things, but sometimes I print pictures and memorabilia to remember things.
In my case, some note apps are where ideas go to die - to feel comfortable in forgetting - to do a brain dump. Other apps were just there for organizing thoughts on paper for a short duration, or planning things out Collaboratively etc
I do have trouble remembering things long term sometimes because i use so many tools for different reasons. It becomes a crutch. Kind of how for people who rely heavily on GPS systems for driving won't remember specific street names or how to navigate as easily without it
Why let go of old ideas? in a year you'll have a different perspective and a bad idea can become good or inspirational. I believe in quantity.
The app is for ideas only, so easy to retrieve. Most if not all my 'pet projects' started inside that app.
E.g. TextEdit.app (change default to plain text in settings) + saving text files to one particular directory with reasonable file names + regular maintenance (like twice a year) + Mac full text indexing/search works pretty well for me.
The thing is: After 6 months it's actually interesting to go through your old notes. The Finder preview makes it a matter of one keypress per file.
It's a browser extension that lets you write sticky notes on top of websites.