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Ask HN: How to take notes?
11–20 of 80 posts
Re: Ask HN: How to take notes?
#12Start with whatever feels intuitive to you.
Whenever you feel your current note-taking method isn't good enough, improve on that.
Maybe your notes will suck and you'll never read them, but it will still help to have written them.
Maybe you'll read your notes and think they suck, and you'll know what you wish you'd written.
I don't think you can "remember everything in notes" in a one-shot process, though.
Re: Ask HN: How to take notes?
#13I try very hard not to get caught in bikeshedding the perfect note system over actually writing things down. This is very much in the “don’t let the perfect be the enemy of doing literally anything at all” territory. Features i find are actually helpful: - keep a link to the source where you found the information summarized in the note. A url, a DOI and an equation number, whatever. - when you can, physically recopy…
ELI5 : I did not know about this acronym. For those who don't know, it means "Explain me Like I'm 5 years old".
https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/
Re: Ask HN: How to take notes?
#14A paper notebook is severely underrated. I tried replacing it with onenote, chery tree and others. It's just not the same. Things I write down by hand seem to be burned in my brain much easier than when I mindlessly type them on the keyboard.
I feel the same. But,i think taking notes in software is faster.
Re: Ask HN: How to take notes?
#15I suggest two systems.
1. Long term notes - in your website - non blog - just a website, keep them small, cheatsheet but long term.
2. Short term notes - where you dump your stuff into - for this you can use tiddlywiki.
Re: Ask HN: How to take notes?
#16You should try http://roamresearch.com/ and follow #RoamCult on Twitter - they are way ahead on note taking.
Re: Ask HN: How to take notes?
#17Cheatsheets are a very helpful resource and you need to have a tool to keep, interlink, retrieve and organize them. A physical notebook is not the optimal choice because of some limitations like fast retrieval of topics and almost impossible filtered searching etc.
Organize your "new things" and resources to cheatsheets in a Zettelkasten like tool. You can use a simple text editor or there are applications and plug-ins available to get a Zettelkasten-like app. I personally use Passfindr (https://passfindr.com), a freemium Personal Information Manager with powerful and fast search capabilities.
Learn what a Zettelkasten (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zettelkasten) is, how it can help you and make yourself familiar with its concept.
Re: Ask HN: How to take notes?
#18I’ve tried everything, and my latest iteration is a single textfile in markdown for everything (topical notes, personal TODOs, work TODOs, random paste snippets etc) which then gets turned into HTML for easy viewing (I may style it in the future). It’s also in git, and on the hour, cron commits the changes themselves as the git message itself so changes are searchable via git log.
Re: Ask HN: How to take notes?
#19I have a bind (3+n) to open notes.md file in Sublime Text I can drop things into. Although I don't use it much as often I can write notes directly under some topic in my wiki. It usually fits under some of the 840+ topics I have
https://github.com/nikitavoloboev/knowledge/blob/master/SUMM...
On mobile, I take quick notes with Telegram's Saved Messages.
This kind of question has been asked many times before on HN and elsewhere. Here are some links I collected around note/wiki management.
https://wiki.nikitavoloboev.xyz/other/wiki-workflow#links
Oh and for effortless sharing of notes, I use my tool gitupdate to automatically push changes made to my folder of notes. i.e. here is a commit where I add this very thread to my wiki under `wiki-workflow.md` topic. To do it, I pressed two buttons (`+v) (https://github.com/nikitavoloboev/dotfiles/blob/194d8453b2af...) which runs a KM macro (https://i.imgur.com/fmXgUYv.png).
https://github.com/nikitavoloboev/knowledge/commit/cfaab75dd...
Re: Ask HN: How to take notes?
#20I try very hard not to get caught in bikeshedding the perfect note system over actually writing things down. This is very much in the “don’t let the perfect be the enemy of doing literally anything at all” territory. Features i find are actually helpful: - keep a link to the source where you found the information summarized in the note. A url, a DOI and an equation number, whatever. - when you can, physically recopy…
I second the practice of transcribing notes.
This "two-pass" process aids my retention substantially (maybe from 30% retention to 70%).