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Ask HN: How do you take notes?

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Re: Ask HN: How do you take notes?

#61

Post by atlei »

Some notes about Note-taking:

Write it down

- 1. "copying" the information

- 2. using your own words

1. is great for storing information,

2. is better for learning (and recall) !

Spending all your time in class doing 1. is often a waste of time (lecturer should provide handouts instead).

"Never memorize what you can look up in books" - Albert Einstein

Having an "extra copy of your books" written down in your notes is not very useful - write a summary and your understanding instead.

A personal wiki can be a great tool (as an alternative to Evernote and OneNote):

- Tiddlywiki is very simple, mediawiki is very powerful, PpcSoft iKnow is personal Wysiwyg wiki (with automatic linking and storing the data in plaintext "markdown")

About Pen and paper

- "Nothing beats pen and paper for speed, efficiency, portability , usability, economy, and ease of use."

- However, it sucks when it comes to editing, re-organizing, copying, sharing and re-finding

(Disclaimer: I'm the founder of PpcSoft)

Re: Ask HN: How do you take notes?

#62

Post by Mz »

_corbett wrote: post #43
Mz wrote: post #20

I used to email myself links to articles and HN discussions...which got totally lost in the avalanche of email my inbox gets. I started a posterous account so I could email myself stuff like that and actually have some hope of finding it again. If I want to add some kind of commentary (aka "notes" to myself), I can add it to the email before hitting 'send'. Most of the time though, I just put in a title and link to t…

you might checkout delicious.com or some other bookmark tracking site. I use delicious to track thousands of parallel threads and topics and keep notes for myself on websites. you can keep all your links private if you like, although most of mine are public. for example, I would track a HN thread as follows: keyboard shortcut, type notes, tab, HN_topic other_tags actions_to_take_tags, tab tab, return. then I'd search…

I have considered using delicious or something. But I'm very much an email person and usually have my email open anyway. I went with posterous because it fits this personal quirk, so, for me, it's a very easy solution. Perhaps at some point I will need to be more organized and such. For now, I don't really need something better bad enough to put in the effort to find another alternative and make it part of my routine.

Thanks!

Re: Ask HN: How do you take notes?

#63

Post by Mz »

tsmall wrote: post #25

All of the comments here seem to be about which tools are used to take notes. That's an interesting part of the problem, and it may be what the OP was looking for, but I'm more interested in finding out which notes you keep and how you organize them and use them later than what format or tool they're stored in. When you're reading or learning something, when do you stop and think "I should make a note of that"?

At work, there are some bits of information I fairly frequently need but which aren't readily available in any of the manuals and such we have. We get email updates saying "This procedure has changed. Henceforth, the new procedure is..." and you can't find it anywhere in the manual or anything. I have a folder to put those types of emails in. For some things I need to access fairly frequently which are also fairly lengthy, I save a copy to my desktop, even if I have to create a different document in a different format to do so. For shorter things, I use the "notes" function available in the microsoft suite of applications I use at work.

When making myself outlines of things at work, I focus on stuff I need to know but for some reason am having difficulty with it. If I get certain types of requests to correct a particular type of error repeatedly, I focus on trying to figure out why I am doing it wrong and how I can stop doing it wrong. Then I note the stuff that I feel I personally won't feel is intuitive or obvious and expect to have trouble remembering to do. If I think the instructions we have suck, I rewrite it in a format that makes more sense to me and run it past my superior to see if my re-interpretation is still an accurate depiction of things.

Am I happy with all this? Nope. But they don't really give us a better method and I am making this stuff up as I go and it is getting to the point where team-members email me and say "do you have a copy of...?", so I have the general impression that my slap-dash, thrown together approach is more effective than whatever other people are generally doing. For at home -- working on my websites and such -- I am not really at a point of "production". I am still surfing HN and talking with my adult sons a lot and trying to nail down a more concrete idea of where to go next. My big focus for a long time was getting well. That still takes a lot of my time, so hopes of figuring out how to support myself as an entrepreneur are still almost a "hobby". That is changing and I may soon need to get a lot more organized and focused. So far, just collecting links to articles and information and emailing stuff to my sons is working okay.

Re: Ask HN: How do you take notes?

#65

Post by brudgers »

I rarely take notes on anything I read, however, I will often write a reaction to something I read because of the ideas the material sparks (eg. this reply).

I also write when I listen to a speaker and often that writing is more notelike. I find the process of taking notes tends to cause me to pay attention to what the speaker is saying and thereby increase my retention. It also gives me the opportunity to doodle should the speaker be boring.

Re: Ask HN: How do you take notes?

#66

Post by AustinBlues »

dgallagher wrote: post #53
adbge wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For some (myself included), visualizing something is part of memorization. I find constructing diagrams of a system really helps me just get how it works. So, the OP is probably memorizing the content of the diagram through creating it.

Exactly. The actual creation process helps with memorization considerably. If someone just handed the diagram to me, I'd have a much harder time understanding it. An untested theory of mine is that this would not be the case if the diagram was more entertaining. If walking through it told a story, possibly in comic-form, maybe with animation, you might have a better chance of grasping it. TV networks do this all the…

IMHO, note taking is effective because it incorporates 2 or 3 of the common learning modes: seeing (visual), doing (kinesthetic), and if from a talk, hearing (aural). Generally this is enough to get something in my brain. I rarely need to look at the notes unless they are meeting notes and there is disagreement. For skills, e.g. differential calculus and programming, doing sample problems is especially important.

Re: Ask HN: How do you take notes?

#67

Post by AdamGibbins »

jules wrote: post #41
dgallagher wrote: post #36

Currently I'm learning C taking notes using Numbers (iWork) alongside OminiGraffle. I like to create visual diagrams of complicated things, and then dump them into Numbers alongside text. Actually making the diagrams is the best part, because it helps imprint the info into my brain, and it's more fun than simply taking notes all the time. Here are a few diagrams I made recently: http://www.dave-gallagher.net/coding/C…

These diagrams look very good. So good in fact that it would take more time to make them than to completely memorize their content?

They are indeed very nice. Does anyone know an application for Linux or Windows (via VM) that is able to create such nice diagrams? I could really benefit from a tool like this but Linux seems to be lacking in this department unfortunately.

Re: Ask HN: How do you take notes?

#68

Post by maguay »

AdamGibbins wrote: post #67
jules wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These diagrams look very good. So good in fact that it would take more time to make them than to completely memorize their content?

They are indeed very nice. Does anyone know an application for Linux or Windows (via VM) that is able to create such nice diagrams? I could really benefit from a tool like this but Linux seems to be lacking in this department unfortunately.

Visio is one of the most common apps for Windows that makes similar diagrams, but I really like http://www.gliffy.com and http://www.mindmeister.com. Both are webapps and would work equally good on Windows, Mac OS, or Linux.

Re: Ask HN: How do you take notes?

#69

Post by maguay »

larrywright wrote: post #58
jakarta wrote: post #4

I think Evernote is pretty decent for this. I just use the web version, but because of the work I do, I have to read a ton of documents online and usually want to refer to them later. Evernote helps because I can use the web clipper to save whatever I am looking at and then tag it and even write some notes on it. Then later I can fire up the desktop application and go through my notes. I believe the mobile versions a…

I like Evernote as well. It's far from perfect, but the ability to clip random bits of text or entire web pages along with plain notes is very useful.

The Web Clipper is very, very useful. It's almost replaced bookmarking for me. Actually, it's better than normal bookmarking since you can clip the important text, add your own note, and sync the whole thing to all your devices. Evernote's not perfect, but they've got this down great.

Re: Ask HN: How do you take notes?

#70

Post by maguay »

I use a wide variety of apps to take notes, but the majority of my notes end up in OneNote or Evernote. OneNote is best for rich notes that include a lot of content (college lecture notes especially), while Evernote is better for info snippets.

That said, my favorite tool for saving information is 37signals Backpack. I currently use the free version, which is nice but limiting, but upgrading is rather expensive. I'd love a self-hosted alternative that was cheaper if anyone has any ideas ... but it would need to work as nice as Backpack (drag and drop sections of pages is especially nice).

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