from Hacker News

My Personal Note Taking Journey

by scottrblock on 1/4/22, 12:37 AM with 85 comments

• by kirso on 1/5/22, 4:11 AM

  I am a Logseq user. One thing I realised is that PKM people tend to spend 99% of intellectualising and fetishising different systems like Zettlekasten and P.A.R.A. when in the end your output is what matters.

  I wasted months, just to realise the tools or systems do not matter at all. Interlinking notes doesn't scientifically make you a better writer, writing does.

• by Jaepa on 1/5/22, 3:43 AM

  Well where 2 hours into this and no-one mentioned org / org-roam, so I feel a begrudging responsibility to do so.

  Org-mode is a combination of note taking, todolist, jupyter notebook, & calendar major-mode for Emacs. It is wonderful and terrible in a lot of the ways emacs itself is. It is incredibly configurable and extendable, and feature rich to the degree that discovering spreadsheet support after using it for 6 months seems to be a rite of passage.

  Org-roam is an extension ontop of org-mode that creates an roam like layer.

  The largest drawback stems from it being so flexible making it hard to develop a good phone client for it. Through Álvaro Ramírez's PlainOrg(iOS) & Orgzly (Android) do help somewhat.

• by gennarro on 1/5/22, 2:28 AM

  Would highly recommend reconsidering paper notes. Get a small notebook [0] and write down what you need. You’ll lose it and spill coffee on it but you’ll be fine. For the vast majority of things the note writing experience is what makes the difference, not the actual paper. For the rest a subscription is not for me, but to each their own.

  0 - https://unsharpen.com/pocket-notebooks/

• by dopu on 1/5/22, 4:52 AM

  I'm a pretty happy logseq user. I've found that I still need some degree of hierarchy in my notes, as opposed to just having organic, non-hierarchical linking between everything. So I end up making subnotes: [[Topic A/subtopic x]] is a pretty common occurrence in my knowledge database. As an example, all projects I'm currently working on get [[ProjectA/log]] and [[ProjectA/todo]] subnotes. Keeps my TODOs segregated by topic. You could of course do most of these things with typical note-taking apps that rely on the hierarchical file system motif. But the fact that it's up to me to explictly construct my organizational structure in logseq forces me to be more intentional about how I organize my notes.

  Perhaps the greatest benefit I've found in using logseq is in organizing the scientific literature I'm reading. At any point while writing, linking a paper I've read (the PDF itself, as well as my notes on it) is a few keystrokes away. This linking allows me to externalize the context with which I know a paper. I just need to browse the backlinks to see all the ways in which I've made reference to it over the entire history of my notes.

• by cjlm on 1/5/22, 1:58 AM

  As someone who built a small tool [0] to send notes to Workflowy [1] from my phone this is an interesting read. Pretty savvy to move over to Logseq.

  Kinopio is also such a delightful tool. I wrote about it a while ago [2] in my network thinking newsletter, source/target

  [0] https://github.com/cjlm/send-to-workflowy [1] https://workflowy.com/ [2] https://sourcetarget.email/editions/15/

• by rvieira on 1/5/22, 8:59 AM

  My journey was somewhat similar (Evernote, Any.do, Bear, Noteplan, Obsidian, LoqSeq) but now I've settled with org-{mode, roam}.

  There was always _something_ missing from those apps. If you have time and inclination, Emacs can be customised to behave almost exactly like you want it.

• by d82nsjk9 on 1/5/22, 11:03 AM

  This year I'm just trying a paper agenda. Pretty standard small agenda I think. Each page view is a week: on the left page a detailed view of the week with space for each day, on the right a freeform text area to jot down unstructured ideas/goals for the week.

  I find this approach quite similar to TeuxDeux in the OP.

• by crossroadsguy on 1/5/22, 2:28 AM

  Here’s one FOSS and native note app for iOS and Mac https://fsnot.es/

  Especially if someone is looking for a non-subscription Bear alternative.

• by blippage on 1/6/22, 9:36 AM

  This topic has been touched on before, but what I do is use a paper-bound notebook. I number the pages.

  The topics come in fairly random order. I keep a table of contents at front, and compile an index at the back as I go. After trying this system for a few months, I can attest that an index is, indeed, a useful thing. The great things about an index is that it allows you to find information based on multiple viewpoints.

  The acid test of all these systems is "how useful have they been in practise?" As a lady in QA once sagely said: add value, not process. Or, as another poster noted, we have a tendency to fetishise different systems. As programmers, we're likely to be more guilty of this than most. But remember the whole point of the exercise. We're here to find information, not obsessively adhere to a system.

• by mixcocam on 1/5/22, 8:09 AM

  Just start using #OneBigTextFile already. All roads lead there.

• by synergy20 on 1/5/22, 1:50 PM

  As a software devloper, I only write post-it notes or to-dos on my phone, 99.9% I use computer to type notes, I use vim-markdown+nerdtree+git all these years and they work well for me.

• by vgchh on 1/5/22, 11:44 AM

  After having tried a number of approaches, including various VIM plugins, I decided to go with the Apple Notes. If you are bought into Apples ecosystem, it works incredibly well. Syncs to cloud. Available on both my desktop and phone. I recently went through a prep phase, which required tons of note taking with screenshots, pictures etc. it scaled beautifully.

• by dbieber on 1/5/22, 2:24 AM

  Hey Scott, I like how you're generalizing PhoneToNote to support multiple note-taking services. I have a project Go Note Go where I also aim to support whatever note-taking service the user uses as the backend. We currently support Roam, RemNote, Mem, Notion, and IdeaFlow. https://davidbieber.com/projects/go-note-go/

  It'd be great to standardize the interop with note-taking services so people like us can write applications once and easily have them work with all the note-taking platforms out there. E.g. I'd love for someone to be able to write a spaced repetition app once, and immediately have it support any of the dozens of note-taking apps without needing special handling for each one.

• by sylens on 1/5/22, 1:20 PM

  Author's journey is pretty similar to mine, where I used OneNote extensively in college for lecture notes but fell off when I started working and needed something that would better capture technical documentation including code blocks.

  I also initially went to Bear before trying out Notion and am now happily using Obsidian, which just got a Live Preview mode.

• by rnmp on 1/5/22, 5:53 AM

  I’m curious as to what made you choose Kinopio over Are.na. I use the latter a lot and find it really useful for unstructured thoughts. I mainly use it privately though.

  Kinopio looks great I will take it for a spin soon.

• by francis-io on 1/5/22, 10:42 AM

  Is it just me, but using local files just gives me an uneasy feeling when it comes to robust backups. How do I make sure my local files are backed up somewhere? What happens when I want to revert? How do I really know I didn't accidentally just wipe out all my notes locally with a bad command. How do I 100% know that changes I made on my desktop are reflected on other devices?

  The obvious solution is to keep files in dropbox or google drive. This handles sync but not backup. I'm not sure about dropbox, but I know google drive is a nightmare to backup. You can use a few paid services to backup google drive, but you then need some kind of alerting to know when it's not running. Having to rely on a cloud storage service and a cloud backup storage does not give me long term confidence. I want something that works on most devices, is as future proof as possible and keep me in control of my data as much as possible.

  Another option would be to use git to store notes, but I ran into problems when I tried to set up an auto commit and auto push. I couldn't get it working reliably. Some kind of auto pull would also be needed. Git just isn't designed to work like this so it seems like any setup would be janky at best.

  Some options I've considered:

    - Evernote: cloud based. rigid structure. Bad performance. I'm not in control of my data.
    - emacs: I don't use emacs any more, so it's not already part of my workflow. Bad mobile experience. Same local syncing issues.
    - Trilium: Really complex for someone who does not want to work with javascript. It might be too flexible for me.
    - Roam: no web app last time i looked. No self hosted version.
    - Logseq: Same issues as roam. Not server based / self hosted. The FAQ did mention a future option to maybe self host the optional server sync config, but it looks like it's not even on the roadmap.
  
  

  My ultimate solution would be this:

    - Web based. This will give the ultimate flexibility for me. Day to day I either live in a browser or VSCode. An optional app would be great, but not required.
    - Ideally it would save files in simple, directory based, markdown files. This would be optimal for longevity. A second best would be storing it in a Postgres database. 
    - Easy to backup. Flat files or a database can be easily dumped and pushed off site with a cron. I use an easy dead mans switch / healthchecks.io alert if a job has not been fired off recently. The cron does some simple checks to make sure the data is a reasonable size (above 1MB). In an ideal world, if I used a DB I would dump the contents, restore it in docker somewhere and query a test entry before pushing it off site (encrypted s3, backblaze, or both).
    - The right mix of simple, but feature rich. This will be different for everyone, but for me, the key things I want are: tags, search, task lists/todo lists, directory based structure and an auto daily notes template. I'd love a button that I could click to auto generate todays notes, with some pre-set todo tasks at the top, all in a specific format. Trilium could do this, but I'm not a javascript developer, so it was a non-starter for me.
    - Docker based would be ideal. I run everything I personally self host in docker. It's not a deal breaker, but I would try to implement it my self in docker if I needed to.
  
  

  I know my needs are different to most. My ideal setup is based on my deep understanding of tech, containerization, cloud and the cloud. The reason my ideal setup does not exist is likely because throwing a few docker containers up on a server is a non-trivial task for most people, and a desirable thing to maintain for even less people.

  I'm still looking for my golden tool. Right now, I've actually gone back to evernote. It's "good enough" at its core task of note taking, but for someone with an eye to build a personal knowledge base over the rest of my career (20 years left), I'm still looking for the ideal tool.

• by GordonFreemanX on 1/6/22, 5:41 AM

  Look up Bullet Journal

• by morninglight on 1/5/22, 1:52 AM

  Just what I need. Another subscription service. Happy New Year