Why the obsession with note taking?

It isn't about note taking, it's about supporting a brain that simply isn't capable of retaining the level of information that we have to deal with. The ultimate note taking device is actually an augmented human brain that has perfect recollection and organisation.

In the mean time the note taking apps help with:

Working memory - a page can hold far more information than I can retain in my working memory. Having a bunch of information helps me build a working model without having to retain all the information while I'm building. Spot patterns - by organising information it's easier to spot patterns.

Long term memory - your brain just isn't very good at retaining information long term. Maybe you have a company wide wiki but the act of building your own notes is enough to form some connections in your brain so that when you come back you have far greater familiarity and insight associated with the information.

I love note taking. The act of writing something down gives me so much insight and clarity. It's similar to trying to explain something to other people, it requires a much deeper understanding.

Even if I don't share it with anyone it helps me figure stuff out. I don't read back 90% of what I write, the writing itself is what provides most value to me. Although it can be handy to dig into the archives to understand my thinking of months back.

Tooling wise; I like handwriting, as I can draw arrows and quick sketches. I used to always carry an A5 notebook around, now I use an iPad with Apple Pencil (recently upgraded to the new mini which is perfect A5'ish size).

Apps I use on the iPad are; GoodNotes for actual notes and Concepts for more visual sketching and such.

If I need to take notes that I need to share I generally use https://nota.md which is imo by far the best markdown note taking experience available. Think of it as a markdown editor with code editor features (e.g. multi cursor). It also works with normal markdown files so no lock in.

When on my phone I use the Notes app on.

Yes, lots of tools, but I find different tools are best for different things. It does means everything is spread around, but it works for me, it's sort of an organized chaos, I can find stuff when I need to.

I think the joy comes from the idea of maintaining all information, of "getting your shit together" in a way. I think most humans truly enjoy collecting and organizing things. Notes, similarly to todos, bookmarks, lists etc are just tools to scratch that itch, the more the better!

I mostly abandonded keeping notes, bookmarks etc because I realised it became another "collecting" exercise and sucked up time far in excess of it's utility.

I make specific exceptions (especially for things that may be of use to others) but I become too addicted to the act of collating and organising.

Gmail with it's "search don't sort" was an eye opener back in the day. I stopped filing emails and realised with a decent search, I saved so much time.

> Do we all secretly believe we can be truly better people if we can just get this right?

I think you're onto something here. There's definitely some magical thinking involved. We all have a hidden genius that could be unlocked - if only we would find a method to put all that mess in our heads together in the right way. We conveniently forget that if 90% of everything is crap[0], then it should apply to our own thoughts too :)

My take is that notes are overrated. Almost everything I write down becomes outdated in as little as a few months. Anything older than 1 year seems ancient and is only useful for entertainment. I have my digital notes going back to 2014. I never look at them.

What's not overrated is note-taking. The result doesn't matter, the act itself does. It's a thinking tool. A way to offload ideas from your head and let it do some actual thinking.

If that rings true to you, then it makes sense to optimize for writing, not organizing or reading. To me that means a simple paper notebook and a gel pen. I haven't yet found anything that can beat paper in writing experience [1].

Might be an ipad or org-mode for you - literally doesn't matter, as long as you use it with pleasure.

As for evergreen content, my rule is that it should be public. That's what blogs are for.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturgeon%27s_law

[1] I wrote a blogpost about my primitive paper journaling system https://tadas.blog/posts/paper-journaling-system/

It's not "note taking", it's "information organization". At least, that's how I think of it. There's a lot of data out there that I have to be able to "know" with only limited brain to store it in, and a lot of people have issues with ADHD or Executive Function Disorder. That compounds issues with recall and incorrect focus, and notes/wikis/orgmode/roam/jupyter can all at least feel like they're helping, if only to help calm the chaos in our heads a little.

As with anything, yak shaving can creep into what you do. Certainly I need to stop myself from further refining my Emacs init from time to time. People yak shave by trying lots of different note taking systems, sucked in by shiny promises. It's much easier to start something than to expand and refine what's already there, like deciding to refactor an entire codebase rather than tackle difficult bug fixes and feature requests.

There's also the feeling that we're not good enough, that others are better because we only see the end-product of their organization, not the struggles they went through.

Others have pointed out in this thread why note-taking is taken seriously by many. Those comments are directly related to note-taking. This one isn't.

All of us were trained in many disciplines, and in one (or two) disciplines in depth.

It is very easy to wrap your head around the idea that you need training to manipulate numbers, mathematical symbols, etc. We also take for granted the fact that we need prolonged training to understand the history of the Civil War or the Roman Empire or understand the geography of regions.

But nobody notices that there is one thing largely absent in our curricula- self-management. How to think, how to make decisions, how to manage your time, how to make yourself be efficient without driving yourself mad, and so on.

Our brains, our bodies were not evolved for knowledge work. We we hunter-gatherers a few thousand years back. The industrial revolution, and the ones came after the first one did not change our bodies or brain. We need to actively learn how to do knowledge-work and learning efficiently.

And this is not modern. Many accomplished individuals had well-thought-out systems to do work. These are detailed in biographies of the likes of Einstein, Da Vinci, Feynman, etc.

Why this was not the phenomena?

Before, a very small percentage of the population even needed to think about these. Because the sheer number of knowledge workers were very very low. Now, knowledge work has expanded beyond the few with no large scale training program available for everyone.

So, this craze on note-taking is merely a symptom of people seeking to solve modern problems in a structured manner.

This is why the Getting Things Done book or Deep Work book gets a lot of mentions in Hacker News books lists. People want to solve these problems.

My take - note taking is a symtom of ADHD. The fact these topics are popular on HN suggests there are quite a lot of ADHD people here.

The counter intuitive thing is that these apps are thought of as something that helps with attention disorders. But wanting to "organize life", "track thoughts and ideas", "never forget what you learned", etc, are symptoms, not cures.

A lot of people think that traditional note-taking can be improved (me included). As evidence, below is a short list of note-taking companies that YC has recently given money to.

Clover: https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/clover

Athens: https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/athens-research

Dendron: https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/dendron

Heptabase: https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/heptabase

My current favourite tool is the whiteboard feature of Diagrams.net (https://sketch.diagrams.net/). It is similar to the philosophy of Heptabase, which is centred around organizing notes and images with a whiteboard. But I like the openness and portability of Diagrams.net (Although I'm a big fan of the Heptabase team and product!).

I organize my notes in an outline/mind-map style similar to Amazing Marvin (https://amazingmarvin.com/) left to right connection is parent to child while top to down connection is older sibling to younger sibling.

Dude, I just take notes so I can remember stuff. I imagine everyone else is like me and was born human with a human brain, and let's face it, that piece of soggy bacon just doesn't work worth a damn.

There really isn't anything more to this, people enjoy being productive and meaningful in their lives, and it is one of the fundamental drives of the human condition.

A related question for note-takers: what would you estimate as your rate of reference to prior notes? For my own part that rate is so dismally low that right now I get more value out of making notes than retrieving and reading notes.

I'm reminded of a response to another thread on HN a few weeks back about organizing physical documents. Many commenters had very sophisticated processes with scanning, OCR, indexing etc but there was one commenter who organized their documents as a stack of paper, divided by year. The use case for documents might be a bit different because the number of times you're likely to need a document is probably quite different the number of times you will benefit from reading a note.

A more concise reframing of the above: for those who have adopted a disciplined approach to note taking (geared towards retrieval and linking) do you get enough value from the disciplined approach to encourage us unstructured notes-everywhere to invest the effort of adopting a better process?

So much of the chaos of day to day work is an inability of organizations to make decisions and even after making the decision, remembering enough of it the next day or even next hour to use the information. When it comes to spreading that over a year or after someone departs, forget it.

There is also enormous inefficiency caused by covering the same ground over and over again, but it happens quite frequently as nothing survives from one discussion to the next. In addition, lots of decisions get made in side Slack channels.

There are some massive gains here to be had if this can be solved.

There are a few vectors to it:

- Note-taking (only by hand, mind you!) helps with learning [1], and thus it's recommended by many specialists. Unfortunately, "note-taking" vs "keyboard typing" is quite often lost in context for those situations

- It adheres to kinesthetic memory. Some people need to have physical activity to remember better

- It might be a coping mechanism for ADHD - those can include doodles, colorful tags, etc.

- It scratches the "collector" itch for some (data hoarding is a thing)

- It allows for externalization mechanism (ever had this feeling that you won't be able to get back from somewhere after driving there with GPS? - similar thing but with notes)

But in the end, it's relatable since almost every person with internet access had to take notes at some point in their life, and - as you mentioned - that's dopamine, so a fun thing to check out to something that relates to almost everyone.

As for me, personally, I use the act of writing itself, as I never revisit the notes. A long time ago I caused quite a stir in my school when I went for concept maps instead of having full-text notes (which were required at the time).

[1]: https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2017.0070... (Sidenote: there are more studies about it as it's quite researched subject)

I feel like note taking/personal knowledge bases are still an unsolved problem (with many attempts) and there will be a disruptive technology in this sphere at some point.

People often take a shot at this problem, which makes for the monthly or bimonthly thread on HN, but I think there's still a lot of room for innovation.

My understanding of the phenomenon is the following:

1. The gap between how many things human brain can reliably and easily keep in mind (bringing up every time it is importantly relevant) and how many things do we have (for optimal performance, suboptimal performance means failures and stress) to keep in mind today is mindboggingly huge.

I even believe an average person would be orders of magnitude the Einstein (or whoever you like better) genius if they could simultaneously recall and relate everything they ever learnt (let alone read/heard/seen).

2. Note-taking software can potentially help a lot. Some note-taking apps and some methodologies help some people in some extent.

3. The actual current capability and UX of existing note-taking apps is miles away from perfect (let alone fitting everyone). This means there is a lot of potential to explore.

4. Substantial activity in 3. has been taking place during the pandemic.

5. All the above ideas have became more visible.

6. People get more interested.

Bonus: the very act of writing a fact down (let alone structuring them) itself contributes to learning it.

It's one way for people to cope with information overload. Instead of letting the information firehose spray into space, try to store it somewhere.

You can certainly store some for future use, but when people get excited about fancy systems it's probably a sign that they should cut down their information input, rather than looking for fancier offloading tools.

It's analogous to a scarcity/abundance mindset. The abundance mindset realizes that all the information will still be out there when you need it, so there's no need to hoard. (Information that's specific to yourself is still worth recording.)

I think it's partly the fantasy of having all the information you need at your fingertips. Surely if we had the right software, it would be possible!

In practice effort is probably much more important than software features, but we blame the software we've tried instead of our own lack of effort at making good notes, and keep looking for that hypothetical perfect tool.

Personally I don't even put in enough effort to install these tools, but I look at articles about them anyway, and futilely wish I had better access to my information.

All notetaking apps are disappointing with the possibile exception of Obsidian that I haven't tried long enough to have an opinion on.

There's no open source standard. No LibreOffice or Krita of notetaking.

They all only have a small subset of features one might want.

And yet they are critical infrastructure for people's entire life. It's a pretty exciting space.

It taps into so many productivity desires we have. In reality very few people are probably good at keeping notes and organising them well, yet we all want to be better and feel like note taking utopia and external organised brain is just over the next productivity summit.

It’s a hard problem to solve and that leads to many people “having a go” at it.

A big part of a software engineer’s job is to organize data. Notes are data. Usually very personal data that we understand completely. If we can’t even organize that right, then what hope do we have?

It’s professional pride.

I believe the main reason for the obsession is that we intuitively know that it can be done "right" (according to our own personal preferences) - but that a solution is not yet at hand. So we install every possible attempt we come across, only to find that no - not yet.

Here is some of what I am personally looking for:

- a wysiwyg rich text interface, with embedding capabilities, with an optional markdown interface and (closest) representation

- integrated web clipper a la Evernote

- multidimensional categorization (i.e. not a single hierarchy of notebooks) that links to universal categories

- AI-supported automatic summaries and categorization

- Optionally encrypted when stored centrally, with finegrained visibility options.

- Optionally savable locally only, encrypted or not-encrypted

- Datahandling and coding capabilities, a la ObservableHQ/Jupyter/Datasette

- Linkable in various ways to other notes, my own or others

- and more!

I went through that phase.

I've stopped trying to get it _right_ and I just focus on actually doing it.

Simplenote, Things and Apple Notes get the closest to doing what I need; I've used only the latter for several years now (despite the egregious alternate lowercase A and all the yellow).

My guess is that we all think that the right application can save us from the failings of (or failure to consult) our notes, when the truth is that it's note-taking discipline that wins the day, not functionality.

The main thing I took from all of my searches through the world of notes apps is that if you don't write almost all your notes (and especially your to-do actions) as complete sentences, you're failing right out of the gate, no matter what app you write in.

My deep dark secret is that I never take notes. Not for lack of trying, I just don't know how to do it. I never did it at school, never did it at work, never did it outside of work. I'm in my mid-thirties now, I just gave up on the concept.

Every time I see a post on HN about how somebody manages to organize their lives around a personal wiki or org-mode or whatever I get a bit jealous.

"The only difference between screwing around and science is writing it down" - if you write down personal experience or observation in the context of time and place and are able to recall it instantly in the right time in the future, it might save your time, health, life, money.

I completely understand the fascination with note taking. Most of us don't have photographic memories and look askance at a classmate in college who does well despite never taking notes.

What's curious to me is how many note takers don't also talk about mind maps and concept maps, although they are talked about often on HN. I've developed my own ad hoc mind map, concept map and note taking system and one of my retirement projects is to tie it all together into a consistent application.

https://hn.algolia.com/?q=concept+map

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concept_map

https://hn.algolia.com/?q=mind+map

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mind_map

Bonus: Note taking with VR and AR apps

https://www.google.com/search?q=virtual+reality+note+taking

https://www.google.com/search?q=virtual+reality+mind+map

https://www.google.com/search?q=virtual+reality+concept+map

For me, note taking is about creating pointers to practical knowledge I don't use very often, but it's very hard to find in a way useful for me.

i.e. I don't want to try to remember all the peculiarities of a system I implemented or installed or encountered during my life and get stressed about it. So, I write it all down with pointers on the web, or with all the documents I can find and, store it somewhere like Evernote in the relevant notebook with correct tags. When I need to re-use that information I just open the note and look up what I need.

I also take notes while learning something which starts as a simple and single entry point to the all knowledge and resources around it, allowing me to resume or improve much faster with less effort.

OTOH, if I'm going to transfer responsibilities, I make a copy of the notes and hand it over. Rarely any questions come after that, if any.

Lastly, organized knowledge allows me to see what I know and where can I go from there. I find this property immensely useful over the years.

multitude of reasons:

* We operate on gigantic sets of data (not from CS perspective, average human consumes more data in 10 years than avg man in his lifetime only few decades ago)

* Reasoning about data is not easy, and storing what matters is crucial in being effective worker/citizen/parent/etc.

* Promo of zettelkasten

* Good money too? Making note-taking app is not as difficult as coming up with novel startup and takes less time and money

* Internet figures promoting it (David Perell)

* Feels like we've done something without too much effort (motion vs action by James Clear - https://jamesclear.com/taking-action)

* This is the way to create articles and papers - most of the tech are not writers and their writings had happened naturally and by some impulse/itch. To repeat that we cannot rely on these forces all the time

* You can make your own personal wiki which can be the new blog, feels sexy for tech (whereas other people are doing that by cultivating their ig/fb profiles)

For the software side of things, I was frustrated enough to develop what basically ended up as sticky notes in 2D+3D (shameless plug: https://www.temin.net/). I use it for note-taking quite a bit.

How I experience those notes in Temin is different to other software, but my methodology is basically unchanged:

- Even if it's just text (I doodle/sketch a lot) I actively consider using a pen before a keyboard.

- If it's something external I'm trying to remember/integrate I experience it (listen/read/watch/do etc), then take notes.

I think some of the allure of note-taking software comes down to the idea it can eat your vegetables for you when it comes to methodology. It can't. Software can add value to your notes via how experience/relate/link/query etc them, but if you put garbage in, you will get garbage out.

I do it for two reasons:

- I gradually forget a skill if I don't practice, but dumping that knowledge in a structured form can help me recall it quickly if I need it in the future.

- Every note program/app that I've used, I've found it wanting in some way.

The last point is why I keep changing ways. My ideal note application would be hierarchical, multimedia, encrypted, cross-platform (desktop/mobile), and usable if offline. There are many note apps that fulfill some criteria, but not all. My favorite UX is with CherryTree, but it's desktop-only. The best I have used is Joplin, but it's not truly hierarchical or locally encrypted.

I personally don't attach any weight to note-taking as part of my identity or care about how other people do it. It's just a way to remember stuff. For example if I do personal therapy for an hour I'll take notes on what was discussed so I can refer to it. Otherwise I'm going to forget most of it and the therapy session was wasted. If I'm losing weight I'll plan exercises to do and record my weight. Etc. etc. It's not that complicated or meaningful.

I've noticed if I really care about and love a subject I don't need to take notes. Those things are easy to remember and revisited often.

How to Take Smart Notes by Sönke Ahrens also gets touched upon in the HN discourse on Note taking apps.

One of the salient points made in the book is the idea that externalising thought is:

1. Helps us with our internal thinking 2. Is difficult to do

Personally as a user of Obsidian, i'm here for it. I want to take notes, they help me in numerous ways and i'm interested in the structure and approach in which I take notes.

I'd draw a parallel between note taking systems and efficiency systems in the workplace. It's good to apportion sometime to getting better at stuff and I feel often there's a discourse on what the proportion should be.

I think taking notes to remember important things is just in our nature. I have yet to find a piece of note taking software that will prevent my opening up a dozen Notepad instances and leaving them open (unsaved) for all eternity...

I take notes to remember TODOs, to draft communication, to write random crap I want to come back to. Sometimes I don't even come back to it, but somehow writing it down still helps.

I started using Obsidian which has been nice, but feels a bit clunky in a lot of ways on Windows...I'm hoping to find something more lightweight.

> What's this about? Do we all secretly believe we can be truly better people if we can just get this right?

I think so. In the end I just use Google Keep for mundane things like grocery lists (haven't found anything better for that, checkboxes and autocompletes most common items so it's quick) or random ideas I have (it's easy since it's on a phone and cloud). For programming shit it's todos in a readme in the repository. It's more about the act of writing it down than any feature in any app.

Because when people try to over-engineer something as simple at writing notes, they can loop on it forever.

Look up the term Exobrain[0]. It's related to externalism[1], defined as: "Externalism, the philosophy of the mind's existence outside of the brain and body".

> The extended mind model suggests that cognition is larger than the body of the subject. According to such a model, the boundaries of cognitive processes are not always inside the skin. "Minds are composed of tools for thinking" (Dennett 2000,[23] p. 21). According to Andy Clark, "cognition leaks out into body and world". The mind then is no longer inside the skull, but it is extended to comprehend whatever tools are useful (ranging from notepad and pencils up to smartphones and USB memories). This, in a nutshell, is the model of the extended mind.

Note taking is my 'other brain' that I use to get things done. I casually glance at past notes, and am often shocked how much progress I've made all due to these notes. I don't get everything done, but that's not the point. The point is to get thoughts out of your system and into notes so you can organize your life better.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exobrain

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Externalism

I started something that I need to finish: I need to find the best personal note taking app for Android!

I use Google Keep at work on my work phone, tablet, and laptop and I love it. Simple to use, clean UI, I can attach photos, I can add sketches, and color and label each note. It's completely replaced my Engineering Log Books.

In my personal life I've been trying to go Google free for years even though I love Android. I've been using NextCloud for my files and notes for a few years but I've found the Notes app too basic. I can't attach images. It has markdown support but not much else.

So, last Summer I decided to look for a good note taking app for Android. Instead of figuring out my needs first, I just dove in and downloaded a whack of them and tried them out.

I've tried 80 Android apps and counting!

As I used the apps, I kept finding the different ways people designed their apps, what functions they included and became amazed at the creativity and interesting approaches (not all good). With each app my wants started diverging from what I thought I needed. I found myself wanting checklists, labels, colors, audio recording, and text highlighting to name a few.

As I shared my notes with the Developers, it started conversations with a couple of them.

If you share this passion, join my ride: https://www.noteapps.ca

People have written notes, sketches, essays, letters, journals and diaries for as long as there has been writing. Even mathematicians of Gauss's or Newton's stature wrote vastly more than they published. It helps to organize and clarify one's thought processes and if one is particularly well organized about it, boosts recall. Careful application can also boost WM, a key component of fluid intelligence. Modern Note taking seems to be about formalizing the process of getting the most out of one's writing and learnings. I have personally not found anything that clearly beats notepad level text editors or plain pencil and paper, however.

My thoughts on this is as tools for thought, there can never be a one size fits all solution for the reason that there are many thinking styles and personalities. Todo lists, project planning and time tracking, programming languages, note taking apps, UI frameworks, game engines all fit the pattern of tools meant to organize complex mental processes and artifacts and where everyone settles for what best matches them though never fully satisfied. Meanwhile those who can find the time and ability to make something better suited to their taste do so, also bringing something to those most aligned to their tastes.

> If there's one thing absolutely guaranteed to get a gazillion comments on HN, it's a post about either 1) note taking software, 2) note taking methodology 3) a combination of the two.

> Ask HN: Why the Obsession with Note Taking?

Is this some sort of social experiment? (I shall not be suc-- oh, damn!)

For me it's notes but more the closely related to-dos, and I'm always interested because it's something I want to be better at doing (from a very low starting point of almost never having anything up to date written down) but never quite manage or find myself happy with methods/apps/sites I can find.

A while ago I decided/realised my personal preference would be GitHub issues, trouble is I need them to do two things:

1. Implement 'projects' in the mobile app - https://github.com/github/feedback/discussions/5609

2. Option to auto-add all my repos to a project - https://github.com/github/feedback/discussions/6258

then I'll be happy, shall stop obsessing over it, and stop upvoting and participating in these threads. /s

I'm interested in note-taking / improving the way we learn for the following reasons:

- Having a trace of what I've learned that I can go back to. I consume loads of content (books, articles, etc...) and want to be able to use their insights in my future discoveries and general creative process. Being able to go through my ideas in my notes helps with this.

- that point links back to the idea of optimizing for discovery. I find that I can find much better ideas when I have a nuanced perspective and can oppose different content, so having an organized knowledge base allows me to link and discover new hierarchies in my thinking to enhance it. It's also why I'm building tools to automate connections between notes with AI, and it's why my knowledge base is heavily integrated with content I consume online, for example this post that I can now search in my knowledge.

- I think there's untapped value in sharing notes and tidbits of knowledge with other people. Blog posts take more time and have different aims than notes, but notes are also valuable / can be useful for others. My public wiki is at https://knowledge.uzpg.me

- having a time-logged track of what I've been learning: I like tracking my goals / progression (for eg yearly reviews https://www.uzpg.me/general/2022/01/01/a-year-in-review-v2.h...) and going through my knowledge base helps with this

I started typing insights when I became a parent - as a “What should they know one day” kinda tool. Then I became obsessive about collecting resources and insights I get when reading or talking to people. Your writing and insights is the only thing that’s left of your brain after you pass (even if that happens 50 years from now).

Some people do daily journaling - not me, but possibly many here. Some see it as therapy - laying out what bothers you, or what you’re grateful for, to share with someone or put it away. Some use it as a way to get anxiety and stress out of your head by extracting down what needs done where and taking it out of your active memory. The Getting Things Done method.

A lot of people have writing as a way of relieving FOMO if your mind is much faster than your ability to articulate all of your thoughts. Call it ADHD, or a way to brainstorm with yourself - you surface your thoughts in front of you and can then edit and manipulate them - see if and what parts make sense, or if it’s just a nebulous cloud of general ideas that melts down when you read it as if it’s told to you by someone else. For that you need a really fast, possibly visual tool like Figma or Remarkable (I find figma easier to re-organize) or Visio (expensive) or a white board.

So the use cases are very wide range and no single tool yet can cover them - mostly because you need either low latency, or high ability to organize, or ways of manipulating data visually, or search, or ability to ensure your external brain software will be alive in 2 years (aka open source), or available on all of your devices to capture anywhere anytime. One requirement steps on the others usually.

Notetaking is a popular topic because it is an utterly unsolved problem. The early ideas of computing envisioned computers as augmentation of the mind, [1] where automation would enhance our insights in the same way that writing augmented the insights of people in the antiquity.

However, all we got are lame attempts to replicate pen and paper in terms of annotation, with the only real improvement is instant text search, with very limited capabilities for incorporating meta data into queries. Where are the automated mind maps, statistics about how frequently you use terms in your discipline, inference of the times of day where we think about each topic...?

A programmer could built their own tools for that, but there is no standardized way to do them, it takes a lot of effort, there's no way to share the best practices that others use to their benefit; the best we've got is subchanels at Slack. And of course, all those capabilities are off-limits to end users.

Note taking tools are only now starting to explore those possibilities beyond the raw text file on hierarchical folders.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Augmented_cognition

This is just mostly bike shedding [1]. People waste a lot of time in thinking about which tool to use for note taking rather than actually doing the note taking. The tools are there to just support note taking, most of the times just a pen and paper is enough to get the job done.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_triviality

One thing I notice about the people who seem to achieve the most in this world - few of them seem to have intricate PKM/organizational systems.

I say this as someone as guilty of productivity app porn as anyone.

I think these systems appeal very much to certain kinds of people with adhd/adhdish issues looking to maximize their potential. And yeah a good system can really help with that when you don’t let obsessing over it get out of control.

Rich Hickey, the creator of the programming language Clojure, once talked about the human capacity for juggling and how that actual physical limitation is something that cannot be overcome. Someone can juggle 3, 4, or 20 or more objects, but there is a finite limit to it. https://youtu.be/SxdOUGdseq4?t=735

And in that same vein, the actual physical limitations of what we can juggle in our minds is fallible. So with the leverage that we get with digital note-taking tools, we think that we may be able to cross that chasm with this technology.

Then there's this elusive HOLY GRAIL, which we all think can actually be realized if we find the right tools to solve this problem of off-loading our thinking — so we can do more thinking. Basically, if the notes can be remembered for us, almost automatically, then we can go deeper in ways we never could have imagined, because we're not the ones doing the juggling. We've made use of the digital tools, that are leaps and bounds more powerful than the scattered and siloed, handwritten notes of yesterday.

So as new ways of connecting our thinking through digital writing, such as bi-directional linking and transclusion become commonplace, we get glimmers that maybe it's possible now. And the hunting down of just the right mixture of this primitive, and that feature-set, may turn over the right stones to help us juggle that which used to be impossible.

And in my experience leading and coaching people through implementing a digital Zettelkasten (simple, lightweight note-taking system) it doesn't take a genius to see a pattern from the response to "what do you want?"

The answers all circle around this idea of "leaving something behind."

For me it's a combination of two factors. I recognize that well-written notes is a really valuable thing to have because there's a ton of things I need to know about and I won't remember it all, and I know that it's a lot of work to codify things well because I've tried and failed. I strongly suspect that, for me, "taking notes" is the problem. I want to believe I'll remember things, so note taking actually represents a failure on my part rather than the virtuous thing that I know I should do.

I think the answer for me is actually to share what I write with my team more. I'm quite good at documenting things, and the reason for that is because I'm writing docs for other people. If people mention seeing something in the docs then I tend to write more docs. If no one mentions them for a while my documenting dies off until I need to write more. If I could easily apply that mechanism to notes I might be more inclined to write things down.

Okay, this is a weird one for me to have a solution for - especially since I don't take a whole lot of notes (relative to university days).

The American Competitive Debate Community has quietly "solved" note taking using MS Word for Windows and Mac. This is done using a really neat plugin called Verbatim: https://paperlessdebate.com/verbatim/

Ignore the stuff about debate and think of it as a note taking app which exploits already built in hierarchical features in word (the navigation panel) and creates hotkeys for rapidly creating notes. See this video for more details: https://youtu.be/AkoYLBgChQw?t=393

I used this tool for note taking (and also extensively for debate) and everyone who saw me use it was flat out jealous. I had a few friends actually start using it in their own daily experience.

I'd say that the only reason that we have so many posts on the topic is because org-mode has a learning curve ))

We all recognize the importance of learning from experience, and we all recognize that we cannot reliably remember everything important. So the question becomes - where to store it.

Then the question becomes how to organize it. Do we optimize for quick writes or quickly finding things? Do we optimize for space? Is appearance important? Syncing to mobile devices? Reminders? Right-to-Left writing support? Must the data be in plain text files? Must there be multiple implementations of the technology? Does it run on Linux / Windows / Mac? Does it leak private information? Can I recover it? Does it support embedded images / video / audio / flowcharts / etc.

Etc etc etc

Because it's a productivity fetish and a whole lot of wishful thinking that a new app can give you superpowers whereas a proper search functionality to find what you are looking for is sufficient in 90% of the cases. To reap its benefits, and for the remaining 10% of the cases, you need some simple but consistent conventions and discipline to document things that matters. It's no magic, but people love treating it as such. I always find everything I am looking for by searching in only three different places: (1) my mailbox [I never delete emails but archive], (2) my Dropbox [which OCRs my scans as well], and (3) my note-taking app Joplin[0].

[0] https://joplinapp.org/

I forget things, I know that I will forget things.

My brain doesn't remember full facts, it's more like the old school card index from a library. I retain information on where I can find things, not the things itself.

Note taking speeds this process up by letting me store all the things in a single place . With the added bonus that I know my notes won't just disappear from the internet one day.

I use Notion for stuff I need to share with others and things that need a bunch of embeds or images. Obsidian for text-only notes and more private stuff. Pinboard for bookmarks with the paid archiving feature enabled.

I treat bookmarks as mostly ephemeral, I can't usually be arsed to configure bookmark syncing between all the computers I use, Pinboard is mostly enough for long-term storage.

I think this plays to two human traits. One is the need to remember and thus right something down. Humans have been doing this for years. Second is trying something new.

And you are right, trying something new is exciting. I remember when I first discovered Evernote, I thought it was super cool, then Roam, then Obsidian.

But I think the following will happen at some point in your journey (at least it happened to me). You will find a system/approach that works for you and you will not want to try other things. The workflow that I have configure for myself with the use of Obsidian, Readwise, and a couple of other tools, that the hustle of moving it to some other stack is just too big. It is so big in fact, that it trumps the novelty card completely.

My interest in the subject is mostly that I've not yet found a system that I can work with, I'm absolutely terrible at taking notes, and at using the notes I take, to the point where I don't even know where or what they are.

I'm also terrible at identifying which information to note down, and inconsistent in even attempting to identify it.

So I'm following the topic out of curiosity that a tool might appear that will truly argument my disorganized mind with the skill and dicipline of organization.

I've found Dendron interesting, and have started using it a bit, but I feel it's not "ambient" enough, I need something that interacts extremely well with my phone, home computer and work computer, and is not cloud based.

I'm hanging over this for a long time too, util I dive into the https://orgmode.org/, yes! It's all about "organize your life in plain text", I think this is the answer.

Most of the notes you carefully and "secretly" took, are nothing more than some useless information for others, but it helps you to understand the things you're taking or just make yourself to understand your own idea better.

From my perspective, I do not think some note taking procedure would help me to become a better person, to become better, one has to put hard working and generates good ideas, not just pass the exercise or get an A in you exam.

As Stephen King has said, and Edgar Allen Poe as well, in a different way, writing something down is the perfect way to make sure you keep bad ideas around. I’m not against all notetaking, but I do believe that doing it by default does have some drawbacks.

I just use a moleskin classic notebook [1] with a Schneider Topliner 967[2] in black, blue and red.

Everyday I put on my tasks, and notes.

Easy simple, classy :)

[1] - https://www.moleskine.com/en-us/shop/notebooks/the-original-...

[2] - https://schneiderpen.com/en_ng/fineliners-and-fibrepens/topl...

I like note taking because it augments my thinking. Specifically, it helps me store knowledge for later and organize my thoughts when I'm thinking.

I think what makes it obsessive for me is that I always want to improve my thinking, even if it's a tiny increase. That's why I always check out other people's note taking methods and software, in the hopes of finding a little nugget of optimization.

As for my method, I use plain text and vim to store my notes. If I need to think deeply about a problem, I use a paper notebook and pencil. This is because that combination is good for visualizing a problem.

Note taking itself is an interesting thing but also a robust and usable 'my-archive.org' experience. That's where all notetaking solutions fail for me; I can take notes and organize info, but in 5 years, all of it will be lost or at least not in a usable form. I have tried a lot of apps, but nothing really works over time. Everything works for 'today'; that's nice, but deo volente I am around 10-20 years from now (as I am 20 years after 2000 when I also took notes which are worthless now because broken links, images, not searchable etc).

I too am very torn about this. And a large part of this may be I am not an early adopter of things. What I found is I suck at taking notes for longetivity. I take notes to understand (say few first times). But where it fails me is in finding things. What I do feel well endowed with is my ability to use a search engine. So I tend to keep pointers (in my mind) to areas and concepts reasonably well and then am confident that I can find it when I need it so don't have to depend on notes. This could also be why I suck at typical tech interviews!!

I like the idea of note taking, but my brain really doesn’t sit still enough to ever put the current contents down on the page.

That’s a problem I’ll have to solve before I ever get around to trying any new note taking software.

I still haven't found any note taking software that has a variety of strikethrough styles. Besides single and double strikethrough, I'd like to see squiggly line and diagonal dashes at least.

Note taking is a tool. Like editors/IDEs, programming languages, frameworks, and so on. Why do we have obsessions for those? Isn't it because it gives us power, control and a way to expression our thoughts and materialize our goals, or something like that? It depends on each's personal situation and reasons for taking notes. But some people surely use it to become better versions of themselves, others just need it to be better workers. Other might wanna fill a hole they feel they have. Each is different there.

I use note taking to think. With a good process and sharp tools, writing let's me solve harder problems, better.

And I do want to think better.

Currently really happy with Slack, Org-mode and Roam Research, each for its own use.

The simple act of taking notes helps me to remember. Even if I don't read them again in the future, the actual act of writing/typing out notes helps embed them as memories.

Fear of death and fear of the flow of time. We want to capture every feeling, every emotion, every thought that we have. Even in written from it feels like gaining immortality.

I unfortunately am a rote learner. So it helps me to type things out to further remember. I also sometimes like being able to look stuff up/previous thoughts and then just the process of making an interface/storing info... something to do I guess. When I work I keep a daily log of what I do/what I'm thinking.

Also something about it helps me "relax" particularly with regard to finance tabulation/burn rate, like no I won't be homeless anytime soon.

Productivity is a holy grail. People are always looking to figure out how to be productive.

Ergo you’ll see a bunch of FOTM note taking/ todo list/ etc applications every so often.

I don't know, but, if you want to actually remember stuff, handwritten notes are better than digital notes. Unless you need to write down a detailed set of instructions, handwriting will generally be the better way to go. See https://effectiviology.com/handwriting-vs-typing-how-to-take...

In fact, note taking are a fairly effective learning strategy. Whether you read a book or learn a new language, it all pays off if you write down the new information correctly. In this article, you can find out why this is so important: https://ivypanda.com/blog/everything-you-need-to-know-about-...

This is a big topic, with a lot of use cases (capturing information, tracking stuff you have to do, learning, etc.) In my case, I have the work roles of professor, administrator running our grad programs, and journal editor. That's a lot of data that has to be captured, processed, and queried over and over. Without a good system, I literally couldn't do my job. The better I am at handling that data, the easier my job gets.

Its because my note taking is an extension of me - it's a succinct representation of my knowledge boundary written in my own vernacular.

It's dynamic and heirarchical and gives me: - Discipline for spaced repetition - Creative stimulation through re-reading - Generalized thought ordering

At some point the complex state machines, schematics and plans are too big to be held in my working memory all at once so I must decompose and interface them.

I've always been a note taker. It enables me to accomplish things I couldn't otherwise. I used to fill thick drawing pads. The advent of cloud-backed multi-device apps was a marked improvement. I've switched a couple of times for a slightly streamlined workflow. But the slight streamlining doesn't make a big difference. Taking notes vs not taking them makes a big difference.

I was expecting this question as some point and I was wondering myself the exact same thing. I started out takes notes a long time ago and it was helpful it was just not easy accessible so started my journey to find a better tool. I still have not found the best tool to do it in but the one I am using now is OKish. So each time the topic arises I really 'take note' (pun intended)

Taking notes fosters creativity. Creativity seems, among other things, to be “usefully” putting together things which were not perceived to be related before, and it may be the initial psychological distance between the things which counts most. Note-taking apps and methodologies can help reduce the distance between things that seem unrelated, which leads to new ideas and solutions.

I think we naturally hit our limits of retention and started searching for solution. Then bought into the promise of silver-bullet solutions promising us both retention and synthesis of our thoughts.

However, we forgot that just reached our natural constraints, and maybe its a good thing. So instead of buying into the next solution, maybe, just maybe we should just do less and filter more.

I think it's because we want to adopt a note taking system that works (as advertised) but in practice many people aren't happy and try out the next one. It's like that project that sits in a corner and you sporadically try and make progress but it's never going anywhere. Add the fact that many people think they really need to get better organized.

Learning isn't necessarily arduous. Particularly if love and/or have the time to immerse yourself in the topic. Language (and therefore music, poetry, other arts, math, programming, and surely more stuff) can be like that. It's rare, but even at the PhD level they can still be like that.

(And a good frictionless note taking system makes it easier to love studying.)

Keeping a diary of activities is an age old practice that has evolved with our use of written language. As programmers I think we want our brains to work like the computers we work with. We're looking for ways to use written language to facilitate retrieval of critical information effectively. I can't see the obsession stopping anytime in the near future.

I am not into writing notes. However I do write myself documentation and I also write a log book for how I configured servers (less necessary now I use ansible).

I frequently forget how I did some specific task or solved a particular problem or even how my own software libraries work.

Having something at hand (even doc comments) saves me the time of having to go through the same steps again.

What's better than posts about note taking apps and note taking methodology is meta posts about note taking apps and note taking methodology!

More seriously though, it's a very central topic to the software world since many things in this world deal with how to work with information. And note taking is a very central thing when working with personal information.

I think people are interested in these tools, because they help them mitigate stress from cognitive load: If you have written it down, you don't have the fear of losing your thought.

For me personally, writing notes down is indeed the most important step. I don't read most of the notes ever again :)

A nice UX gives dopamine bonus points for this act of getting peace of mind.

I think it's mostly procrastination. Spending time on tools and methods means avoiding doing any actual work. For 99% of cases, just writing down a few points with pen and paper will do the job. Most of the value of note taking comes from writing it down anyway (which helps memorize it), not actually reading the notes at a later point in time.

Everyone takes notes differently and retains information differently. So every developer thinks there's no app that covers exactly their use case and the others do it wrong. So they build their own app.

It is similar to people chasing endless productivity by reading about it while actually not getting anything done. It feels productive, but you are just busy.

Because if you want to learn Rust, make money on the blockchain, or engineer optimal colonies of bacteria in your gut, it helps to write down and keep track of all the complicated stuff you learn.

Seriously though, I think Hackernews is making up for all the notes they didn't take in college as they expected to breeze through on smarts alone.

Side question, I believe, there was some startup in the early 2000 or maybe in the dotcom bubble era, they were selling "brain-enhancing tools" which were akin to MS Clippy Office Assitant + marketing sauce on top. And iirc they got to an insane market cap and then it all popped.

Could anyone remind of the name?

I think people are starting to realize that our brains are finite and building a second brain is the way forward given the technology is accessible.

There's also the novelty of it all in which each method or program may do it in a completely new way. This helps us build our own philosophy of the art of note taking.

I think for me, it's a kind of coping thing where I secretly hope that the next software will be the one thing I was missing the entire time and from here on out learning will be a breeze. Of course, that's not going to happen ... or will it? I am sure the next thing I find will be it!

Yesterday I was thinking this exact thing. Now I see this post. Creepy.

Anyway back to the topic, I think everyone wants to create the simples, sleekiest, cleanest note taking app which is easy to use and also very easy to develop.

On the other hand I find the stock Notes.app and TextEdit more than enough for all my needs.

Notes are a record taking of your state of mind, or more importantly, of your life. I would guess that users who come to HN are the type who would also like to optimise their workflow to the nth degree, and that would most certainly include note taking.

>What's this about?

We're overloaded with BS information, BS demands, and BS business "requirements" non-stop, plus BS aspirations and BS role models (from Ferris to "wake up at 4am founders").

This is an (appropriately BS itself) attempt to cop.

I only 'take notes' before I go to make shopping. For anything else I use my brain. My wife notes all day, any rubbish. She wrote books of notes in years. Why ? I've no idea. Neither does she. She never read them again.

Everyone focuses on note taking.

Without the review and transformative writing curation of past notes its not very useful as it then mirrors someone focusing solely on getting good grades via route but never ever transforming that route into knowledge.

No fear, it's just a mild and hygienic form of compulsive hoarding. Instead of cluttering up the house your physical form is living in, you do it with the mental doll house in your head you're really living in.

A big part of modern identity is constructed of your beliefs and knowledge. The things you think about are what define you as a person.

As such, when we don’t write an idea down, it feels like we are losing a part of ourselves.

It's just a pragmatic desire to transfer your memory and knowledge to a digital form. Current digital access interfaces are very primitive in comparison to what we can do in our mind.

Fck note taking, live the moment and stop care about irrelevant BS.

There is a saying in japanese that ideas don't come from kami but from kami. Kami in the first meaning means god. In the second it means paper.

So ideas don't come from god but from paper.

>What's this about? Do we all secretly believe we can be truly better people if we can just get this right? Or are we just endlessly curious about what everyone else does?

I don't think it's just a belief as some of us have personal evidence of quality-of-life improvement from being able to easily retrieve a saved piece of knowledge. We then wonder if whatever system we happen to be using (paper notebooks, emacs Org-Mode, Evernote, plain text files, Roam, etc, etc) ... can be improved or generalized to others.

Earlier in computing (i.e. 1980s DOS) the acronym "PIM" "Personal Information Manager" was the meme for note-taking. You had attempts like Borland Sidekick[1] and Lotus Agenda[2]. In the 1990s, you had PIM devices like the PalmPilot where enthusiasts tried to convince us that it was worth investing the time to learn its idiosyncratic stylus strokes to save notes.[3]

Today's recurring "Show HN" of the latest note-taking software attempt is the continuation of an unsolved problem for the general population. Each of the following functions have many degrees-of-freedom:

(1) saving notes in a friction-free way: local-first file or cloud? save in freeform text files (Markdown?), or JSON, or in SQLite? Or handdrawn pen input on a tablet and save the image files with OCR conversion? Sync data across all devices how?

(2) organizing and retrieving notes : hierarchies? tags? graph links? mindmaps? or no friction of organizing at all and just use full-text search?

We get a combinatorial explosion of tools instead of everybody converging on The One True Way.

Personally, I've settled on not using dedicated note-taking software. Just use a combination of text files with a text editor and folders hierarchy in the operating system. But I acknowledge that my idiosyncratic system doesn't generalize to the population and it doesn't have simple data sync so I can't retrieve my notes on my smartphone.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Borland_Sidekick

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lotus_Agenda

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graffiti_(Palm_OS)#/media/File...

I don’t even read my notes, so I don’t know why I take them. It’s a habit I picked up in college where I need to write something down to start understanding it

IF YOU DON"T WRITE IT DOWN... IT NEVER HAPPENED

I’m not writing notes to refer to them in the future. I’m writing notes so I don't need to refer to them in the future.

Just another sophisticated form of procrastination.

Like search for perfect todo app etc.

Writing is faster than remembering. Reading is faster than recalling.

Fear of missing out

What note taking methods did great thinkers use?

I suspect it's a form of procrastination.

Taking notes is the alternative to passively consuming information. It's how I work out the consequences of my ideas and bring together relevant information. It's how I remember what happened three months ago when I tried the same thing but with twice as much cornstarch. Sometimes I take my notes in the form of Wikipedia articles (e.g., https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drafting_film), but most of them contain original research, so more usually I take notes in Emacs in Markdown (about 1.7 million words so far), or on paper with a pencil or pen. (Markdown is pretty shitty at sketching out process flow diagrams for air conditioners or drawing circuit schematics.) Occasionally I use graphviz, org-mode, Falstad's circuit.js, or Jupyter.

When I want to remember who did that paper on implicit fractal rendering with reduced affine arithmetic, I grep my notes (Gamito and Maddock, cf. https://dercuano.github.io/notes/affine-arithmetic-newton.ht...).

When I want to remember when Putin said a third world war was imminent due to US precision-guided munitions, I grep my notes (at Sochi in 02014, cf. https://dercuano.github.io/notes/wwiii-genesis.html).

When some dumbfuck on HN is saying "Yes China is making big growth in renewables but they're making even bigger growth in coal" and accusing anyone who disagrees of "brushing off scary conclusions" because they "can't get their heads around" the reality of the situation, I can just paste my analysis of growth in the Chinese energy market from my notes, which demonstrates that the opposite is the case: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29843985

I learn more from fifteen minutes of taking notes on a book or a video than I do from an hour of passively reading it. Better still is taking notes as a way of contrasting two or three different sources of information, or using them to bring into focus inconsistencies or contradictions I wouldn't have noticed otherwise, or bring my attention to the information I lack in order to understand something.

I had read about configuring an opamp as a differential-to-single-ended amplifier (say, for high-side current sensing for a power supply current limit) half a dozen times over the years. But it wasn't until a few weeks ago when I tackled the problem with a mechanical pencil in my notebook (schematics, equations, paragraphs of flawed reasoning) that I really understood how to do it. After three tries. Maybe if I'd taken better notes when I was reading about it, it wouldn't have taken me so long.

Reading over my old notes, I see how incredibly wrong and clueless I was about so many things. Without notes, people tend to forget their past errors, which leads them to overestimate their judgment. I also see how I've changed, not always for the better.

Diagrams, equations, and data tables in my notes are much easier to show to someone than to tell them verbally in a conversation, and they're generally better drawn than what I can manage to sketch out on scratch paper or a blackboard during a conversation.

It would be great to have software that enabled better integration of my notes with databases and computer models, but the more important thing is retrievability. I want to reduce the chance I'll lose my notes, or that I won't be able to find things in them.

Programming, like writing, is deliberating over several rabbit holes. If you don't write down why you did or didn't do something, you're doomed to repeat the deliberation a week from now. Also worth recording are throwaway code snippets and gnarly awk-sed invocations.

A plaintext file is sufficient. I noticed every programmer who even mentions zettlekasten produces bad, verbose code. Fortunately, obsessing over note taking naturally limits how much bad code he produces.

I have a degenerative brain disease so if I don't write it up it's gone.