Daily Notes Considered Harmful

> The value of a note is directly proportional to the number of times it is visited.

That’s an easy thing to measure, but that doesn’t make it a good measure.

A note is valuable when it aids your thinking, problem solving, recall, etc. How many times you visit it is irrelevant. Some of my most valuable notes were ones I visited once or twice. Some were valuable because I just wrote it down; that was enough to aid my memory or thinking.

Proxy metrics are more harmful than the worst data-hoarding habits. See: JIRA

“That value is exponentiated each time a note is shared.”

I disagree, I write notes for my eyes only. They would be less useful, not more, if I shared them: I world have to make sure others understand it, and would need to censor it to avoid offense.

A note that will be shared is called email, or a social media post, not a note. A note is for personal use. This notion of a note being more valuable if shared is baffling to me.

This is quite a personal thing... I'm terrible at note taking and I've tried a few methods. I find organising this kind of "data" very difficult and I also find habit forming around note taking very difficult also. Finally, I always hated the idea of daily notes/journaling, so I resisted it for the longest time.

But when I finally started making a journal it was a lifeline. It works so well for me. I stop worrying about what I'm writing, how well I'm writing it, how I'm structuring it, where I'm storing it... and I just write it.

If it's something pertinent to what I"m working on, then it'll be a note from the last few days. Old notes, I just don't worry about.

I do have a page for "todo" type thing and I'm still working on that and I also write "proper" documentation separately. But daily notes are a huge win for me.

I have a single system that I use for both digital and paper notes. Start writing, put new stuff at the end. Date every entry. Use topic headings that stand out clearly from the text. When it gets too full, slap a date on the file / notebook and open a new one.

Mostly this is not for returning to, but for thinking things through, although the paper system is also good for to do lists.

Well I have been doing daily notes for probably 10 or 15 years, and love it. The clean slate every day is a godsend, and it's really not that hard to 'cat <some range>' or even cat * | vim - if you want a full note.

I guess all I can do is average out TFA since we precisely disagree.

https://jodavaho.io/tags/bash.html

I disagree with the author, but I also get the impression that their view of notes is fundamentally different than mine so there's that.

I like the way LogSeq implemented daily notes, UX wise. It's an infinite scrolling page where you can add and edit dailies, so I end up "doomscrolling" my daily notes and re-reading them a lot more often than in other apps.

> Instead you should focus on creating notes that you are likely to revisit or likely to share.

One interesting thing I have discovered: the interface matters just as much as the content.

The faster you can recall notes, the more useful you find them, which makes it more likely you will write more notes.

I also put answers in the titles of my notes which allows me to scan a list of previously solved issues. The combination of a vague yyyy-mm-dd.md title and just a file system UI makes recall harder.

I have a fuzzy search app for Apple Notes that has been working well for me:

https://github.com/emadda/hot-notes

It's difficult for me to read past the sentiment of the author's language, which is unfortunate, because there are interesting ideas here.

At any rate, my takeaway isn't anything to do with whatever the author considers a "daily" note or not, but about how the way we structure and synthesize our thoughts, alters the things we make.

For example, if in the creative process, I create an audience for myself (i.e. by thinking of sharing my notes), that may or may not introduce productive constraints to my process. On one hand, it could force me to better articulate my thoughts. On the other, my inner critic could preclude important insights.

I do weekly notes instead of daily. My problem with daily notes was that managing them was tedious and felt very duplicative (even when I found ways to automate their creation). It made searching for a particular topic or task more difficult because the unfinished item is in 3-4 daily notes cause it gets buried and I have to search through all of them.

Now that I am using weekly notes, I find myself finding information easier and the work to create the note is a 1/5th of the chore since I only do it Monday mornings.

My daily notes are only a few words. It is helpful to have some record of what I've been working on when preparing to meet with my manager, and for annual reviews.

I like that “one note per issue/resolution” thing. I have an .md in our company’s main internal app’s repo which is just a bunch of tips and patterns for doing DevOps tasks. At the bottom is a section called “## Useful Shell Script,” a collection of scripts each in their own block quote. The approach work well for our small team, but it couldn’t scale. Having a personal repository with this sort of pattern would be very helpful. Thank you!

Daily notes are my life line.

If you’re managing any fairly complex organisation and handling multiple threads on variable time horizons, daily notes can be an immensely useful tool.

So what happens if I feed an LLM my worthless notes? Author seems like he's living in the past with his conclusion.

A daily notes page or view is ideally automatically appended to with a reference when you create anything that day, so you spend little time on it but it’s there when you want to find something or review/reflect.

I can see how a time-consuming/duplicative effort dated notes page would not be worthwhile.

It seems to me a good part of the value of daily notes is to reflect and consolidate, even if the notes are never revisited.

Sticking the whole mess into an LLM might be a good way to get some 'recall' use from notes, without necessarily revisiting them.

I indulge in daily notes but make and organize them (mostly) topically. Dates are obfuscated, "discreete" if you will; they are, or can always be made, visible if so desired.

The notion of "not asking the same question twice" is laughable to anyone who interrogates different structures based on the same parameter(s), e. g. for comparative purposes. And daily notetaking based on a date-based organization principle is of course widely applicable, e. g. for (project) diaries, "to-be-sorted" infodumps, etc.

But then again, I find most programmer's notions of notetaking to be quite tedious, often bordering on the literally void. ;)