Ask HN: How do you take notes throughout your work day?

I'm a product manager not an engineer...but i manage digital products, so i hope that is close enough.

I use text files employing simple markdown within them. I use one text file per project/product...however i'm thinking of going back to a single monolithic text file regardless of project/product...since it might make grokking things a little easier (good ol' CTRL F is fine)...also, sometimes some efforts span more than a single product...so i get slightly paralyzed trying to think if this effort belongs in text file for product A or B, etc. So a single file would resolve that. In any case, the text file approach makes selection of tools much easier (and with lots more choice). For work/dayjob, i use NotePad++ (99.9% of my jobs simply issue me a Windows machine with no choice in the matter), and for personal matters, since i use linux, i use Geany for working with the text files (though have been playing with Kate/KWrite). Over the last 6 months, i moved away from dropbox to NextCloud to synch all the text files. Here again, by using simple text files, i have flexibility for the authoring tools as well as synching tools. As far as referencing/looking back at my notes, yes i do and quite often (hence why i think going back to a single big text file might ease my searching a tad). Also, i have very slightly started to take work notes on paper when in person - a little for diplomacy but also because when i go back to my machine to type them into my text files, i find that it helps with recall/memorization.

I'm stealing this system! I too have found I tend to remember things better if I write them down, but some things you need electronically in order to be able to easily search. I love the idea of waiting for a while to translate over to your notes app because most notes are ephemeral.

Thank you!

Pen + paper, and sometimes Omni Outliner.

I'm a fan of Omni over plain text tools like Obsidian because it makes the sub-nesting and drag and drop hierarchy very pleasant (almost Roam-like) but is also a fast native Mac app.

Same. Been using Obsidian for a year now and it's been great so far. I use obsidian-git plugin to backup my notes to a private git repository and for syncing notes.

Obsidian's community plugins are awesome!

OneNote. Since 2006. The sections and subsections may vary, but each note is purpose driven and dated. Each meeting gets an entry and Outlook has a good feature where I can "create notes" which will let me mark who was present with their contact info for easy reference.

Typically, the notes these days are hand written. If I want, I can use OCR to convert hand written notes to tired text, but search finds my hand written entries so I don't bother.

Notes are generally bulleted lists. I go back later and make TODO items from them. I can also clean them up and send meeting notes out to the group.

I like OneNote because I can embed images, screen clips, use hand written notes, access them anywhere, link to files (directly or embedded) and organize how I like. I don't like the newer "non desktop" versions of OneNote so I use the old 2016 desktop version.