HACKER Q&A
📣 mcsgroi

Do you write things down for your future self? If so, how?


I have been thinking about how often I wish I remembered what I was thinking at an earlier point in time.

Not just what decision I made, but the reasoning behind it, the assumptions I was operating under, or the message I would have wanted to leave for myself once more time had passed.

I sometimes write notes, but they usually capture facts or outcomes, not my thinking. When I come back later, the context is missing, and it is easy to second guess decisions that actually made sense at the time.

I am curious how others approach this.

Do you write down decisions or reasoning explicitly? Do you leave notes or messages for your future self? Do you ever revisit past thinking intentionally, or do you mostly let it go?

I am exploring a small personal tool focused on recording thinking and returning it later, but I am more interested in how people already handle this today.

  👤 toomuchtodo Accepted Answer ✓
Paper. Goes in a pile. Pile goes in a scanner. Digital files from scanner get automatically processed into digital files, OCR, indexed, etc.
👤 Redster
Two angles to answering your 2nd question: One, how do you ensure what you write down is useful to your future self? Two, how do you make sure you find it when and where you need it?

To ensure your future notes are useful to you, read what you have already written weeks or months (or more!) ago. Initially, I found my writing was too sparse. Too much context stayed in my head and my notes were almost useless. I reviewed them just before I completely forgot the context and updated them. The feedback loop of reading my own writing has helped me improve a lot at writing well for future me. I have to write to myself as if I will be an amnesiac in the future.

As for finding my writing when and where I need it, I try to give every file a unique and memorable title so I can refer to it in other notes and writings I access more frequently. For me, this means linking to notes and thoughts in Obsidian and creating aliases. If I know I wrote something down, but think the title is "Note B", but the title is "Note A", when I find Note A, I will add an alias with an additional title or keyword so that in the future, searching for Note B will surface Note A (and Note B, if it exists). Or, I will add a link to Note from the 1 or more of the most topically relevant note.

P.S. This maintenance doesn't take me much time. I only do it if I notice that a note was harder to find than it should have been and it usually only takes a few seconds to make sure it's easier next time.

(I used to use OneNote and Evernote, but bi-directional links with auto-suggest and a file quickswitcher are such gamechangers.

I was there when Obsidian and Roam Research felt like the first two options doing this seriously. The ecosystem has grown up around me and I love it. But you can do this with loads of other tools now.)

My filenames generally follow a "YYYY_MM_DD_HHmm Descriptive Title, perhaps a thesis statement - Source, if applicable" format.