The Notetaking Cold War (2020)
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1. Shorthand: A memory mechanism to simplify/summarize a complex text.
2. Logbook: Record a series of events which occurred and what order.
3. Planner: Todo lists, upcoming meetings, due dates.
4. Whiteboard: A worksheet for working through a complex problem.
5. Time-capsule: Long term memory about why we decided to do [thing].
If you take someone who treats notes like a Whiteboard and try to sell them a system which looks like a Logbook, they will think it makes no sense.
I meant it as a joke, in comparison to e.g. PARA or LATCH systems. The funny thing is, listing out all the different types feels much more useful to me than any other "note taking system" idea. It would lead you to design different UIs and workflows, depending on the type you're currently working with. I use several of them, sometimes via different tools. Being more aware of and explicit about the types seems like a good thing.
Think your list is comprehensive, or is it just an off-the-cuff summary? I mean, the full list must be a pretty good start to making actually decent notes-software.
Notes related behavior is a good place to find ideas, but not a good goal itself. 'Notes' is where information lands which isn't being specifically captured. Looking at your organization's notes will draw the outline of the system which isn't present, what feature the present system is missing, or what training doesn't cover.
Drafts for blog posts; ideas for YouTube videos; half-formed notions which might one day make a good speech in Toastmasters.
As a “Planner”, I default to digital notebooks and uses the tools such as Apple Notes, Obsidian, Sublime Text to write.
I also love recording memories as part of my “Time-Capsule” and are more structured. They are in Markdown and I use iA Writer, Obsidian, or Sublime Text to write it.
While in a meeting, thinking, scribbling, I turn on my “Whiteboard” on a physical Notebook and use a pen to write it. The additional thing I do is if I have a to-do in my mind and need to write it down, I start from the end of the Notebook. So, in a typical 200-odd paged Notebook, the last 4-5 pages are filled up with check-box TO-DOs. At the end of most meetings that I attend, people usually take pictures of my Notebook.
Any serious note taker eventually realizes that the way their brain works doesn't really fit into any PARA, ARPA or any other standarized system.
Note taking is a messy business. It's not supposed to be organized because you take notes to become more organized, not to organize more notes.
Just take your notes.
Organization will automatically happen. Humans are very bad at doing things randomly. There's always an order, a sequence, a method to the way we do things. Who's to say your method is better than mine?
People will surely, as you say, adopt certain habits, e.g. ordering notes chronologically for lack of a better idea.
That doesn't mean that there isn't a "best" system, which anyone who wants to be productive should adopt. But what I regret is dogmatism unsupported by empirical evidence of superiority (=unscientific claims), and the world of productivity systems (including note-taking) is full of that.
Notes may contain ideas that need to be captured so that they aren't forgotten. Notes may contain event logs that need to be capture to verify later what actually happened (or not). Notes may contain task lists, potentially with commitments and/or assignees and associated promised completion dates. (Many notes can be repurposed later: an informal list of things may become a list of chapter titles in a book one day - I guess that view makes me a pragmatist [pragmaticist, more precisely, c.f. Pierce], maybe not surprising for a student[yours truly] of a student[Spärck-Jones] of a student[Masterman] of Wittgenstein).
The good thing about computers as tools that support our personal knowledge management is that we do not need to worry that much about the organization compared to e.g. a paper-based system, because we can always fulltext-index everything, so at least there is a high chance of re-finding things (known item search) at least as long as we give things specific names or we can recall sets of keywords we likely used in describing something.
EDIT: PS: My personal note on note-taking is that indexed plain text beats any particular software anytime - because notes (any data, really) live longer than the note taking software of the day, so you don't want lock in.
There is a craving for generality here that I suspect is rooted in an investor narrative - "the total addressable market of a good note-taking app is huge!" - rather than a good faith effort to solve the particular problems of particular users.
The notion of a universal canvas which can host multiple content types and allow the creation of new modes of interaction is the holy grail of this sort of thing, but the common platforms today are not free-form enough to accommodate this.
It’s another reason I don’t like to set effortless meetings like standup in the morning, because they occupy an important spot in the day where I could use energy to do something more meaningful
(I am not sure if it's relevant, but I processed the information this way because I classify the notes regarding tasks I need to do, otherwise notes are only organised by topic, and I don't see how else would it be meaningful to classify them)
To take clothes as analogy: when you buy a shirt off-the-shelf, you can (usually) choose between XXS to XXL. Let's assume you want to wear the shirt for the rest of your life, wouldn't the natural conclusion be: a tailor-made shirt?
The real solution is to take one note taking system as starting point and adapt it to your needs. There is no shortcut, it will take a while till you've figured out what your needs are and how you can adapt the system you chose.
Note-taking apps are designed for storage, not insight – can AI change that? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37262265 - Aug 2023 (72 comments)
I just wanted easy daily task tracking and timestamped notes at first, now I slowly add things to it. I can deep-link to items or sections in other files (even at different commits) and have helpers that effectively exposes an API for my tasks. Everything else is just standard neovim things, like using Telescope for finding labeled items.
> The more precisely we know what to use a piece of information for, the more precisely we can organize it.
Well, duh. Notes are the leftovers of, and precursors to, more structured information. The miscellanea. This seems to me to be obvious and unremarkable.
If i ask 4 people what CRM is I might get 4 different answers
Some notes have a known place in a system from the start. Some need to wait for connections.