I keep my life notes in plain text in a directory called "notes", usually formatted with markdown. I rarely render the markdown but I still find it useful for structuring my notes. I also incorporate a very lean take on getting things done (GTD). I host it on github and sync it between devices with syncthing.
My main requirement is that it should be very easy to start writing the note. This means not many decisions to make first (deeply nested directories or tags), and not being bound to a certain application or having an internet connection.
Plain text is great because it's small, portable, and I like being able to use grep against my note directory to find things.
basic structure:
- One file per year for a basic daily log in (log/2022.md) this is where I do at least half of my notetaking and journaling.
- a few GTD files in the top level, in.md, next.md, somedaymaybe.md
- a projects directory, prj/, which has a sub directory for various projects, these can be small stuff that take weeks, or longer things
- a list directory, lst/, which has lists of thing, example: books to read, groceries to buy, etc.
- a reference directory, ref/, for storing things that I'd like to remember but aren't active projects or notes that I expect to add to often (those should be projects or just go in log/), example: a recipe
I've been doing this for a few months now and I am liking it quite a bit and expect to stick with it. The biggest headache is getting syncthing to work with ios so that I can reliably have my notes on my phone, open to suggestions on that.