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

Ask HN: What's your note-taking methodology?

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–77 of 77 posts

Re: Ask HN: What's your note-taking methodology?

#71

Post by zs234465234165 »

bityard wrote: post #33

I don't understand the question. Or at least I don't see what you hope to learn from the responses. Pretty much every aspect of note-taking is a deeply personal choice based on what you are doing, what the subject is, and what you want the notes to represent in the end. And probably changes over time, of course. You can learn about tools and methodologies but at the end of the day, these are just options to make your…

Not op but I enjoy trying different note taking processes

One take away from this thread is to try going all in making my notes into anki format as i take them. Currently my workflow has the anki creation separately and I never get around to converting the notes.

I also wish that I could narrow myself down to 1 tool, rather than todoist, googledocs, and anki it would be freeing(and more effective) to only use anki

Now that I think about this, creating the anki on the fly will force me to actively read and might improve the note quality in general.

Re: Ask HN: What's your note-taking methodology?

#72

Post by stvrsxz »

For me the best methodology can be abstracted to the following 3 things and in the end of the day is all I really need:

    1. Ability for a tree-like organization of notes. It can be as simple as some directories in your OS with text files and subdirectories. Or a cool app with Notebooks and Sub-notebooks etc. It doesn't matter.

    2. Ability to search everything at once. It can be a grep command or a an app with text search functionality. It doesn't matter again. Strive to have easily searchable titles and content in the notes (What "easily" means here, depends on your search preferences and habits).

    3. Ability to effortlessly synchronize your notes to different hosts. Maybe you'll put your simple directories and subdirectories of text files in Dropbox or something. Maybe you'll use a paid or open-source application with a mobile app or a web client etc.
---

I explain the thought process here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31799695 but it isn't important as those basic rules above.

Re: Ask HN: What's your note-taking methodology?

#73

Post by pw4001 »

A work I take notes of all the meetings I attend in Markdown with Notepad++, and they're in a folder that's backed up automatically. There are pages in Confluence for ongoing work, and I no longer use OneNote.

A home, I keep a diary, one file per month, lightly formatted text (not Markdown) edited with vim with a nightly script that converts parts of the text into a set of web pages and drops them into an in-house Wiki. That's the Wiki I wrote close to 20 years ago that's a holding pen for pages on pretty much any subject that interests me. A hand-written NLP/NER pipeline munges the pages looking for interesting material and generates indexes that get added into the Wiki as well. The pipeline still needs a lot of work, because right now it's more "interest" than production ready.

The wiki is hugely useful for material clipped from web pages and emails as well as notes that I write myself. Documentation for any of the software I've written for myself and still use is there as are several hundred old Usenet threads. There's a big list of media that I want to view/read/consume at some point, and more gets added than gets marked off.

I'm still looking for the perfect PIM (and yes, I do know there's no such thing), and the search generates notes as well. If I ever find it, it's going to replace Joplin (like the UI but not the need for a database), Dendron (like flat files but not the UI), Drafts (like the virtual notebooks built from tags but find the UI clumsy) and of course the wiki I wrote.

Re: Ask HN: What's your note-taking methodology?

#74

Post by vasili111 »

I am using Libre Writer. It allows good organization with headers and makes it very easy to navigate. Including images is just paste, inlike writing code in markdown. You can even include videos but I would jot recommend it because the document becomes slower. I always add sources of the note from where they came.

Re: Ask HN: What's your note-taking methodology?

#75

Post by dotancohen »

ngetchell wrote: post #69
dotancohen wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The comment reflects reality, which I agree is disgusting.

Ask a benign question about note-taking and recieve a "kids these days", "back in my day", "everyone wants to be a victim" bullshit. The discourse on this site is certainly lacking.

You're right. I really went off in the wrong direction with that, when I see other people doing that I call them trolls. Thank you for bringing it to my attention, I must be becoming some jaded old man!

Re: Ask HN: What's your note-taking methodology?

#76

Post by gaws »

ngetchell wrote: post #69
dotancohen wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The comment reflects reality, which I agree is disgusting.

Ask a benign question about note-taking and recieve a "kids these days", "back in my day", "everyone wants to be a victim" bullshit. The discourse on this site is certainly lacking.

> The discourse on this site is certainly lacking.

You don't have to post or read anything here.

Re: Ask HN: What's your note-taking methodology?

#77

Post by dSebastien »

I use journaling and daily notes in particular as the entry point of all my notes and information I collect. Just going through the daily notes I should find my way to the rest of the knowledge I've collected. I've described there in [1] and created a small visualization [2].

Each day, I scribble ideas and take notes about my discoveries as part of my daily note. It's just an outline at that point (most of the time).

At the end of each week, during my weekly review, I extract the content of my daily notes into separate notes, keeping a link there to respect my traceability principle.

When I extract the content, I use the Zettelkasten method and split content between literature notes and permanent notes. I wrote about this method in [3] and described my own organization in [4].

[1]: https://dsebastien.net/blog/2021-10-07-periodic-journaling-p... [2]: https://dsebastien.net/_next/image?url=%2Fstatic%2Fimages%2F... [3]: https://dsebastien.net/blog/2022-05-01-zettelkasten-method [4]: https://dsebastien.net/blog/2021-12-03-personal-knowledge-ma...

Post reply on HN