Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Note-Taking and Personal Knowledge Management

unattributed.cc

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 101 posts

Re: Note-Taking and Personal Knowledge Management

#11

Post by matheusmoreira »

noelwelsh wrote: post #9
matheusmoreira wrote: post #3

AI memory systems have replaced that for me. AIs will actually read those things too. I never read my own notes.

Writing the notes is more the point than re-reading them, at least for me. Writing stuff down forces me to kick things around and find a good structure, and that's where the useful stuff happens.

> Writing the notes is more the point

Yeah, that's a good method. Never forgetting stuff is such an amazing side effect of putting them down in writing. Instead of throwaway notes, I write articles for my website now. I actually have fun re-reading those.

Re: Note-Taking and Personal Knowledge Management

#12

Post by jokellum »

udbhavs wrote: post #2

I've realized that most of my tendencies to set up elaborate note-taking systems and frameworks have been an attempt to address my anxiety around learning and productivity. I'm constantly in the mode of "learning defensively" - questioning what I'm absorbing into my mental toolkit, how much I retain, and how much I'd be able to conjure if I needed to solve a problem in that domain. In this context, noting down whatev…

I don't know your specifics, so I'm going to reply with what I've learned about learning:

I found reading a textbook, and typing notes into a dumb markdown file with the textbooks name is good enough. Typically: definitions, quotes, and personal thoughts while reading. Did this for stats/comp sci/etc. Obsidian + markdown worked for that, even without plugins. Being able to text search is useful, which is why I don't hand write.

Anything beyond that you have to be cautious about paralyzing yourself from trying XYZ PKM.

Theres a quote from stephen king that goes somewhere along the lines of "during first draft don't try referencing or fixing grammar because it breaks your train of thought". I think similarly, when learning something, choose the thing thats most out of the way (usually the simplest) that is least likely to break your train of thought.

In terms of tracking how much you're learning, I'd be very very slow and incremental in what tooling/methods you pick. For me, I just trust myself after reading/notetaking a textbook. Usually homeworks get very easy which is a good sign. Being able to explain what I learned to someone else is a good sign.

Re: Note-Taking and Personal Knowledge Management

#13

Post by freshchilled »

bauerd wrote: post #5

I returned to hand-written notebooks. None of these knowledge management frameworks ever worked for me. Sure my agents have their own semantic memory system but I’m not an agent.

I also much prefer handwritten notes. The act of writing something down helps it to stay in my memory more than typing it up. The main for me downside is there's no Cmd+F for my handwritten notes.

I read a post recently about using a local LLM to OCR handwritten notes that I intend to trial soon:

https://andrewdoering.org/blog/2026/remarkable-local-handwri...

Re: Note-Taking and Personal Knowledge Management

#14

Post by watwut »

udbhavs wrote: post #2

I've realized that most of my tendencies to set up elaborate note-taking systems and frameworks have been an attempt to address my anxiety around learning and productivity. I'm constantly in the mode of "learning defensively" - questioning what I'm absorbing into my mental toolkit, how much I retain, and how much I'd be able to conjure if I needed to solve a problem in that domain. In this context, noting down whatev…

> how do I know I'm learning anything at all?

I keep "proofs" of past performance. Like a drawing or a name of netflix series I barely understood or a text I wrote.

Once in months, I check that stuff and see myself understand the series better, see that I do better pictures etc etc.

When I feel anxiety, I check old stuff and compare it to the new stuff. It brings pleasure.

Re: Note-Taking and Personal Knowledge Management

#15

Post by mpfh »

I realized about the time I bought my first Moleskine that there existed in me a predisposition to fawn, for the lack of a better word, over the stationary and shift my mind towards not the subject matter that I should have been writing about, but the execution of writing in that it has to be this perfect thing rather than a messy exploration of thoughts where things are thrown away constantly and information becomes out of date. That there exists very little reason, if any, to archive any of it once it’s been written. And if it does have to be archived, that it’s done at a much later stage when more of the what-matters has been determined and everything else pared away.

So it struck me as strange that people devised these extravagant note taking systems because I could easily sense the procrastination rearing its ugly head. The actual work behind the notes is always the difficult part. Not the notes themselves. But it’s good people realize this eventually even if it takes them years to come to their senses.

As for the Moleskine, decades later it sits unused. I went back to cheap spiral bound paper and pens, because my mind does not register any of it as some shrine to my thinking, I’m free to actually focus on what I should be writing about. A few color coded pens just for my own sake is all that’s needed.

The financial investment of that one stupidly overpriced and overrated notebook was enough to paralyze me to the point where I never want to use it.

Re: Note-Taking and Personal Knowledge Management

#16

Post by disposedtrolley »

freshchilled wrote: post #13
bauerd wrote: post #5

I returned to hand-written notebooks. None of these knowledge management frameworks ever worked for me. Sure my agents have their own semantic memory system but I’m not an agent.

I also much prefer handwritten notes. The act of writing something down helps it to stay in my memory more than typing it up. The main for me downside is there's no Cmd+F for my handwritten notes. I read a post recently about using a local LLM to OCR handwritten notes that I intend to trial soon: https://andrewdoering.org/blog/2026/remarkable-local-handwri...

The premise of that article is neat, but it looks to be entirely LLM-generated (in addition to the header image) that it’s almost impossible to read.

Re: Note-Taking and Personal Knowledge Management

#17

Post by high_priest »

bauerd wrote: post #5

I returned to hand-written notebooks. None of these knowledge management frameworks ever worked for me. Sure my agents have their own semantic memory system but I’m not an agent.

I've taken hand-written, on paper, notes throughout my education, up to high school level. In university, I've switched to hand-written notes on a tablet device. At the end of uni, when I started working on my final thesis & Obsidian was becoming popular, I've switched to it and since then, everything I note is organized into markdown files or at least is somehow referenced through pure text.

Having experienced all of these methods. I've found myself regularly searching through my vault and referencing older material. While the notes hand-written on a tablet, made it much easier to sift through vast amounts of material I was ingesting at the time. I find myself unable to re-use these notes in any meaningful way. They still exist, I can access them, but I don't find myself going back to them. Old paper notebooks? Most of them are destroyed, lost, forgotten to time.

The knowledge management, with easily indexable and searchable contents, has this invaluable perk of being accessible at a moments notice. Keeping potential of being relevant.

Re: Note-Taking and Personal Knowledge Management

#18

Post by obscurette »

noelwelsh wrote: post #9
matheusmoreira wrote: post #3

AI memory systems have replaced that for me. AIs will actually read those things too. I never read my own notes.

Writing the notes is more the point than re-reading them, at least for me. Writing stuff down forces me to kick things around and find a good structure, and that's where the useful stuff happens.

This is especially relevant today where there are thousands of attempts to create AI "voice to text" apps to automate away "boring" note taking. My daughter working in medical field says that she is contacted at least once a week "hey, we are startup having a novel idea for voice to text app". And she have to explain yet again that she doesn't want to automate note taking away. Writing is the process how we structure our thoughts and discover new things. This is how we learn.

Re: Note-Taking and Personal Knowledge Management

#19

Post by Apocryphon »

bauerd wrote: post #5

I returned to hand-written notebooks. None of these knowledge management frameworks ever worked for me. Sure my agents have their own semantic memory system but I’m not an agent.

I think it’s less notebooks or typed notes, and more the issue of cargo cults built around frameworks and systems. Bullet journals are a handwritten PKM, aren’t they? And they were definitely a fad around the fetishized ideal of creating perfect notebooks.
Post reply on HN