What notes do you keep if not a student or a writer?

Question

There has been a recent spike in HN discussions on the best tool for taking notes, as well as different note-taking methodologies. And I agree that there are good reasons to do so if you are preparing for an exam or writing a book on civil war (or a blog post comparing two JS frameworks). But for the rest of you, what notes do you keep?I mean if I'm learning something new, let's say type embedding in Go, and I need to refer to it later, 1 - in most cases accessing it via a Google search is much faster than referring to my notes, 2- in 6 months, probably someone has written a better explanation for it, which probably will rank higher in Google results, and 3- in 5 years, it probably is obsolete anyway.More fundamental types of knowledge are not going to expire, but the first two reasons are still there.I see the need for a more temporary note-taking, say what actions the team is going to take after this meeting, but I think that is not what most people on HN mean when they talk about keeping notes.So my question is: what are the topics for your notes, especially in the context of retaining knowledge for the long term?Much appreciated!

badrchoubai · Accepted Answer

Lately, I've been using GitHub Wiki pages to keep notes on random topics I find interesting. Books I read, articles that I want to refer back to, a weird mathematical equation that helped me solve a problem, etc...

tkainrad · Answer

I feel like this depends a lot on yor tasks and use cases.
For example, if you have a blog, or if your professional role includes a lot of writing, you can benefit a lot from notes. Usually, when I start a blog post, I go through my notes on the topic and when I am done with that, my post is halfway finished.
I have a post about knowledge management that has a section specifically about when to take notes:
https://tkainrad.dev/posts/managing-my-personal-knowledge-ba...

satvikpendem · Answer

I write daily, through a Markdown file for each day. The sections include:
- Dreams: recording dreams to enhance lucid dreaming
- Notes: daily notes about what I'm thinking
- Plan: nested todo list of what I need to do today
- Next: what I need to do tomorrow or later. This is copied into the next day's Plan section, so tasks roll over if not done
- Research: things I want to research. I write them down here so I don't waste time if I think of something interesting and want to follow up later.