Ask HN: What's your way of saving/recollecting important career notes?

#1

Post by anudeep2011 » Sat, Jan 06, 2018, 4:24 AM UTC

I read a good amount of articles every day and whenever I find something useful I note them down digitally. Once a week I go over my notes and filter out the ones I want to retain and look back after a while (let's call them 'important-notes'). My 'important-notes' are filled with 'mistakes-not-to-repeat', 'career-advice', 'motivational-stuff', 'quotes', 'things-experience-taught-me' and so on.

When I am starting out on new things (like learning a new framework), or just lacking motivation, or looking to improve productivity I go back to my 'important-notes' and read them over.

This has been super helpful for me. I can give a bunch of reasons as to why it's helpful but they all boil down to this: It helps me avoid repeating mistakes, and to avoid stupidity.

In theory, it's perfect but I do not execute it well. I do not go back to them every week to filter. I do not read the 'important-notes' often. A lot of times I still make mistakes which I should not because I have clearly written about those in 'important-notes'.

Anyone else in similar situation? Do you take notes that you want to go back and read? If yes, what's your model to deal with this? Any tools that you found helpful? Any better solution to the whole idea of 'important-notes' and going back to them?

Re: Ask HN: What's your way of saving/recollecting important career notes?

#2

Post by m-s-sripati » Sat, Jan 06, 2018, 4:59 AM UTC

I use tagging heavily with any note taking application (like One Note / evernote). I use voice recorder to record any useful ideas / lessons that my subconscious brain tells me. I then push it to my note taking application with appropriate tag and push it to my cloud drive. I review them once in a while.

Re: Ask HN: What's your way of saving/recollecting important career notes?

#3

Post by anudeep2011 » Sat, Jan 06, 2018, 5:03 AM UTC

m-s-sripati wrote: post #2

I use tagging heavily with any note taking application (like One Note / evernote). I use voice recorder to record any useful ideas / lessons that my subconscious brain tells me. I then push it to my note taking application with appropriate tag and push it to my cloud drive. I review them once in a while.

I am assuming you will not review them all but only the important ones. So you probably have a tag called 'important'?

Re: Ask HN: What's your way of saving/recollecting important career notes?

#4

Post by m2n037 » Sat, Jan 06, 2018, 5:39 AM UTC

I do almost the same thing with pocket and GitHub. I use Pocket to save articles. I slack in tagging them but sometimes sit down and tag all the untagged items at once. About going back, I have recently started taking notes from them in a Github readme so that I can just go back to the readme and find the appropriate one to see. I have only recently started doing this as the number of saved articles have become overwhelming.

It works out well, if not perfect. Usually, articles are not to be re-read completely, only the important parts or the gist is enough.

https://github.com/m2n037/learning_notes

Please let me know what are your thoughts regarding this. May be we will both find a better way to deal with this.

Re: Ask HN: What's your way of saving/recollecting important career notes?

#5

Post by akulbe » Sat, Jan 06, 2018, 6:13 AM UTC

I'd recommend looking into Standard Notes. Cross-platform, and mobile. I really like it.

http://standardnotes.org

Re: Ask HN: What's your way of saving/recollecting important career notes?

#6

Post by anudeep2011 » Sat, Jan 06, 2018, 7:01 AM UTC

m2n037 wrote: post #4

I do almost the same thing with pocket and GitHub. I use Pocket to save articles. I slack in tagging them but sometimes sit down and tag all the untagged items at once. About going back, I have recently started taking notes from them in a Github readme so that I can just go back to the readme and find the appropriate one to see. I have only recently started doing this as the number of saved articles have become overw…

This is similar to what I do, save brief notes about important stuff. I hardly save links. Mostly it's a line or 2 from the link that I save.

Re: Ask HN: What's your way of saving/recollecting important career notes?

#7

Post by jeffshek » Sat, Jan 06, 2018, 7:12 AM UTC

Most articles are saved to pocket. If I really like it, you can "favorite it". When I'm bored from time to time, I'll scroll through what I've favorited. A good chunk of the time I'll prune stuff I no longer appreciate.

If there's certain types of learnings that I really appreciate --> I'll add it to Anki, but just a little snippet of Q/A.

Q - How should you view SSDs when scaling high traffic sites? A - "Think of SSDs as cheap memory, not expensive disk" - This was from an article from High Scalability about Reddit.

Re: Ask HN: What's your way of saving/recollecting important career notes?

#8

Post by anudeep2011 » Sat, Jan 06, 2018, 7:27 AM UTC

jeffshek wrote: post #7

Most articles are saved to pocket. If I really like it, you can "favorite it". When I'm bored from time to time, I'll scroll through what I've favorited. A good chunk of the time I'll prune stuff I no longer appreciate. If there's certain types of learnings that I really appreciate --> I'll add it to Anki, but just a little snippet of Q/A. Q - How should you view SSDs when scaling high traffic sites? A - "Think of SS…

I have always looked at pocket like 'read it later' (it's previous name as well). Save -> read -> archive.

However, looks like a lot of people use it like a bookmarking tool.

and thanks for sharing your flow.

Re: Ask HN: What's your way of saving/recollecting important career notes?

#9

Post by AndrewConn » Sat, Jan 06, 2018, 7:30 AM UTC

Filters and labels in Gmail.

Any email I send to myself is automatically marked as read... then based on what’s in the subject line a label is automatically applied. For example, if I have an idea for a design I send an email with a subject of “Design - blah blah” and whatever text in the body. The filter I set up in Gmail looks for the word “Design” in the subject, marks it as read so I don’t get notified of a new email, and then applies the Design label. From there, I usually start an email thread on that subject line as I have more ideas.

Re: Ask HN: What's your way of saving/recollecting important career notes?

#10

Post by anudeep2011 » Sat, Jan 06, 2018, 7:43 AM UTC

AndrewConn wrote: post #9

Filters and labels in Gmail. Any email I send to myself is automatically marked as read... then based on what’s in the subject line a label is automatically applied. For example, if I have an idea for a design I send an email with a subject of “Design - blah blah” and whatever text in the body. The filter I set up in Gmail looks for the word “Design” in the subject, marks it as read so I don’t get notified of a new e…

That's awesome.

But it should soon become overwhelming if you have a lot of content coming in. If you want to have a glance at all your saved quotes, let's say, you have to expand into each mail to read them even if they are just 2-3 lines.

I can see how this works nicely for half-baked ideas in mind. You can simple reply to the thread each time you have more points.