How to actually use the notes you take | Hacker News Reader

How to actually use the notes you take

dannb.org

83 pointsdannb36 comments

I use Logseq.

I don't take notes on articles I find boring. If I can't find value within the first few minutes of skimming, I don't take notes on it.

You see a lot of productivity gurus take an exorbitant amount of notes on articles that can be summarized in one paragraph at most.

A lot of my notes are for things I find very interesting and exciting. Whenever I am having a conversation about them, the link to those notes is immediately made and I can resurface information in conversation.

I touch on them every once in a while, but it's not something I do frequently.

Most importantly, I make sure that I can find my way back to the notes I've taken. I use lots of tags and backlinks that do not "look" right with the page, but make it easy to find using adjacent concepts and ideas.

Loved the effort and concept that went into designing Logseq.

The reason I don't use it: when creating notes, if one doesn't use hashtags etc. properly (and spell them correctly), one would pretty much never be able to retrieve the snippet.

I loved the idea of Logseq, but as of this writing, "logseq data loss ${year}" still shows people losing large numbers of notes on a regular basis. I don't trust it with my information.

I use Logseq and never had a problem with data loss so I did that search. Looks like the problem with data loss is a problem with people using sync. I don't use Logseq Sync and just backup my markdown folder to a cloud storage using any number of third party tools like Syncthing.

Ironic that: "you're data's probably safe as long as you don't pay extra to sync it".

Does Syncthing work decently on iOS? I'm using iCloud Drive for such things today.

Shots fired

No shots intended, I swear it! Logseq is really nice and I liked it a lot when I tried it. However, the bug reports in the forums kept me from seriously considering it. For now at least I just keep my notes in a synced folder of Markdown docs and maintain them with a regular editor.

How is search working for you? I unfortunately find it to be lacking the ability to filter anything and open the results in their own view, making it not nearly as useful as it could be for me.

Queries are used instead of the search directly.

> You see a lot of productivity gurus take an exorbitant amount of notes on articles that can be summarized in one paragraph at most.

this

The best thing I have done for making my notes usable is to have a simple grep script that runs anywhere and searches all the notes files I have. My script is case insensitive and matches lines that contains all the strings you searched on.

Indeed. For Emacs users, there's consult-notes-search-in-all-notes which does that with file previews.

To that end I recently wrote about several modern ways to convert handwritten notes to searchable notes. I primarily write handwritten notes because of the mental benefits of doing so.

https://notes.joeldare.com/handwritten-text-recognition

Couldn’t agree more. Make your notes discoverable by search would be my number one recommendation.

From Peter Drucker's "Managing Oneself", a 28-page pamphlet that any productivity person may find interesting:

>There are people, like Churchill, who learn by writing. Some people learn by taking copious notes. Beethoven, for example, left behind an enormous number of sketchbooks, yet he said he never actually looked at them when he composed. Asked why he kept them, he is reported to have replied, “If I don’t write it down immediately, I forget it right away. If I put it into a sketchbook, I never forget it and I never have to look it up again.”

Do you have the exact quote for sure?

I really want to explore this topic. Been taking daily work journal notes for over 3 years.

I don’t use specific note taking software; tried them all, settled on markdown files in VS Code + VS Code Tasks.

Tasks are bada$$.

Can you expand on how you use tasks for notetaking?

I’m also interested in your usage/workflow.

I find that advice about note taking is always unclear about what "note" means. It's also important to identify what problem you're trying to solve.

If you're recording information that you want to find later, then the overruling principle is whether you're able to find it and use it later. This is obviously very personal and even varies based on your progress through life.

If there is one piece of universal advice, it would be this. When you're writing a note, envision a future situation where you will want to find the note, and write the note such that the note can be easily found and understood in that situation.

Then, whenever you experience a situation where you would like to find a note but can't (or the note does not contain the information you need), update the note according to your expectations, and remember the incident for the next time you need to predict how to write a note.

People who get too into productivity or notetaking expect some kind of nebulous value from their notetaking, that it will somehow make them more organized as a person or grant them a higher frequency of inspiration leading to personal success.

If you're looking for organization in your life, I recommend the Getting Thing Done meta-method, which tells you what your personal organization system needs, but not specifically what fancy tools you need to implement it.

If you're looking for creative inspiration, unfortunately, both creativity and inspiration are fickle beasts. I have heard praise for the Zettelkasten method, but you'll probably have to try different things.

I’m a prodigious note-taker with pen and paper, and have made peace with the idea that I’ll never reference 99% of the notes I write. Same with webpages I bookmark for later. But for me, just the act of writing helps me to stay more focused on whatever or whoever I’m reading/watching/listening to. If it’s something that I may actually need again (usually a code snippet or command flags) then it goes in a Markdown file.

> I'm a prodigious note-taker with pen and paper, and have made peace with the idea that I’ll never reference 99% of the notes I write.

I abandoned pen-and-paper in favour of text files and maintaining a dir tree structure because just grepping through your notes is all it takes to get a hold of even the most obscure notes you've taken.

This system works very well for me. One time I had a team member reaching out to me because I was the last one touching a module years ago and there was a critical issue involving that module that needed fixing. It took a single grep run to pinpoint the engineering log entry I added for that day, and from thereon I could reference a couple of notes where I added the necessary and sufficient context regarding how and why something was done. This turned a multi-day spike into a couple of hours of tests. Running grep once was enough to save the day.

I'm sure graphs and colors and markup languages and pictures work well for some, but the hard part of taking notes is querying them, particularly in the medium to long term. If you start with a strategy to easily query data, you already solved the hard part of taking notes.

I have not used properties yet in Obsidian.

But this is a very interesting article. I take a lot of notes in Obsidian.

One of the things I try to do it link right away if I remember a connection.

If I am going to save a link from online, I write one or two sentences of context as to why I am saving it.

I still have not found a good routine for reviewing notes.

I use them to add: date created, date modified, tags.

The tags are used to colour my knowledge graph.

#1 (processing notes) got me through a big chunk of college. After classes, I'd go through and rewrite, organize, and otherwise reprocess the notes to make them more readable, understandable, studyable, etc.

I’ve been working on a note taking app specifically for literature where the idea is that small groups of writers will come across one another’s notes while they’re reading the same work. By responding to another user’s notes the original note taker then has the opportunity to revisit the note and also a book that they may have finished days, weeks, or months ago. It works alright, and I use it extensively, but as you might imagine taking notes on books is a pretty high hurdle for your average user to get over. I’m still hopeful I can find a small market.

The article doesn’t really explain anything of substance, regarding “how to actually use the notes” - but rather, lists a whole bunch of busywork, and dogma, one should follow, to achieve an amorphous goal, i’ve yet to decipher.

Index cards, in a real card catalogue; or in software, like Scrivener, seem to be a decent compromise - if one can’t construct, and use a graph database, for home use!

Ditch tags, organize in folders, or don't organize at all. Use search either way. Take your time to give your notes distinct and meaningful names. The rest will be a huge mess no matter what you do. You don't know what you don't know. That's why we're taking notes in the first place, isn't it? Formatting is evil for the same reason. A wise person once said: If you make everything bold, nothing stands out. Headings and code blocks do just fine.

And for the love of God, don't read or write articles or posts such as this one of mine on how to take notes :D I'm sort of joking, but not really. What a waste of time... Everybody's different. It takes many years of trying to figure out what works for one and what doesn't.

I completely agree with what you wrote.

One addition, if I may, is that I have found that handwriting my notes first, then typing them later to be far more beneficial than just typing the notes from the start.

I take most of my notes by hand, not for some kind of additive memory bonus, but more so that I can work things out by hand i.e. learn the material. Pen and paper do not have notifications, do not vibrate, and do not tempt me to get distracted.

The typed notes are for referential usage, and then I can use things like tags and whatnot because digital notes are 'finalized' which I find easier to organize, format, etc.. But hey, that could be a "just me" thing.

Maybe it’s generational, I too prefer to jot down my notes with pen and paper then I parse or rewrite for posterity whatever is relevant/important.

Sometimes I fell it’s wasteful though, because one page of scribbled notes can take me half hour to process and convert into a properly filed note.

So I learned to embrace chaos and not care so much. And fzf is your friend and all is well in the world.

One thing that's worked for me is jotting down stray thoughts in a tiny pocket notebook or in a note app. I just finished writing a full post about that process.

https://notes.joeldare.com/stray-thoughts-notebook

Interesting. I hand write notes in a notebook and I'm unhappy with how difficult it is to find things later. But I can't install an app like Obsidian on my work computer, so I think I will use a simple text editor for now.

I think I've tried just about every note-taking app, as well as a few fancy "smart notepads" and the like, and in the end, I returned to using pen and paper.

None of the electronic alternatives worked for me because they seriously reduced the quality of the notes I took. Apparently, pen and paper is just how my mind works best.

I still wish I had a solution that let me search them, but it appears that's just not a thing for me. In practice, I'm pretty good at searching my notebooks, though. I seem to have a navigational sense that takes the various doodles and diagrams as landmarks and gets me there.

My use case is rather different than what the article and others here are talking about, and that might matter. I don't take notes in meetings at all, because if I do so then I don't really absorb what's happening in the meeting. I take constant notes about what I'm doing when I'm actually working, though.

Finding things later is downstream of deciding what you want to remember, which isn't going to be clear on the first pass through. The act of taking the note is supposed to be more intense than sitting there and thinking "yeah I'll remember that".

So my workflow is to take notes from my notes repeatedly, until I've distilled what I want out of them. Having a variety of stationary is part of this, but I'll also use text editors or spreadsheets. That is, I think, the "bicycle for the mind" use of the computer. If I start acting like an archivist that has to publish cited works or a student grubbing for the grade by dotting the i's and crossing the t's, then I get away from the thought.

Is there a way to do the random note button but for a random tag? I keep ideas in one note but tag each idea either gamedev, writing, zine, or webdev. Would be nice to bring up random ideas for a potential spark of motivation.

Are you using Obsidian? Check out [Smart Random Note](https://github.com/erichalldev/obsidian-smart-random-note) or [Advanced Random Note](https://github.com/karstenpedersen/obsidian-advanced-random-...)

The former lets you "random note" search results, so you could query the tag and then random note it. The latter allows for similar customization of the random note feature.

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