Incremental note-taking
thesephist.com
Incremental note-taking
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Re: Incremental note-taking
#2No discussion of Workflowy (https://workflowy.com/)? It is, in my opinion, by far the best note-taking app I have used. You can search, reorganize, and freely move content as you take it, and also after. You can nest a whole campaign of D&D notes next to your favorite recipes, and it feels natural due to their focus level model. More importantly, it's absolutely dead simple, and it "gets out of the way."
The author dances around the two main properties that all good note-taking methods have:
1. It's easy to add new notes 2. It's easy to look through old notes to find what you want
Pencil and paper, or bound journals, do the former very easily. The latter is much harder, unless you start some indexing system (such as a bullet journal solution). This suggests searching and tagging are ideal, which digital is good for. But, and I cannot stress this enough, (1) is more important than (2). It is not impossible to find information in hand-written notes, just harder. But the exact moment it becomes hard to take new notes, the solution fails because you won't use it. And I believe Workflowy does all of this, with quick nesting, easy extension, and even quick reorganization. And you can quickly drop into "just let me write some notes," then go back and organize later (even splitting your notes up into subcomponents, if you want).
Re: Incremental note-taking
#3The incremental note-taking approach is interesting - it's definitely a solid primitive for tracking the history of data. But it also puts an even greater burden on the surrounding features for sorting, organizing, summarizing, because now you can't just delete something that is better represented elsewhere.
Re: Incremental note-taking
#4No discussion of Workflowy ( https://workflowy.com/ )? It is, in my opinion, by far the best note-taking app I have used. You can search, reorganize, and freely move content as you take it, and also after. You can nest a whole campaign of D&D notes next to your favorite recipes, and it feels natural due to their focus level model. More importantly, it's absolutely dead simple, and it "gets out of the way." The author…
OP here. There are a lot that I left out -- Workflowy of course, but also Notational Velocity and its cousins (nvAlt, nvUltra) are another favorite of mine. I guess I mostly mentioned the ones that were top of mind / in the zeitgeist in my work. But you can extrapolate this philosophy to other apps like Workflowy for sure.
Re: Incremental note-taking
#5Is any of this influenced by How to Take Smart Notes by Sönke Ahrens, or the increasingly trendy personal knowledge management scene?
It seems there's been a mini-renaissance surrounding some of these topics.
Re: Incremental note-taking
#6Interesting text. But by the end of the day I think it is quite subjective how people optimally capture their thoughts and ideas. I spent many years doing research to find an optimal tool. Netmanage Ecco worked very well for me, but had some limitations - interestingly some which also the referenced article considers important. Other people were fan of completely different tools which I couldn't get much out of (and vice versa). Finally I implemented my own tool (not for the first time) ten years ago which I'm successfully using since then (https://github.com/rochus-keller/crossline/). It looks certainly old fashioned to younger people, but I'm very efficient with it because I can talk to people and record/organize the discussion at the same time without moving my hands away from the keyboard (what helps me to focus on the topic and counterparts and not to be distracted by handling the tool). If I assess my approach with the "Principles of incremental notes" it looks like a good match. Point 1 is met by efficient shortcuts and capturing information in context due to outlining approach. Point 4 is met in that each outline is automatically added to a history list; of course I can organize outlines in that some outlines are used as directories, and there is also a full text search; I agree that I very often rediscover notes from the history context. Point 2 is met in that I can consolidate notes from old ones without copying, i.e. I just take the items from different outlines I want and put them together in a new outline without losing the link to the original context; much more to say. And yes, I carry a small laptop with me wherever I go; it has a good keyboard on which I can type faster than people usually talk. Doesn't work with a smartphone.
Re: Incremental note-taking
#7>The tragedy of Apple Notes is that it’s an idea black hole.
I don't quite understand what's the problem here. You capture ideas digitally, and later, you can revisit them just the same as you revisit paper notebooks.
Re: Incremental note-taking
#8>The tragedy of Apple Notes is that it’s an idea black hole. I don't quite understand what's the problem here. You capture ideas digitally, and later, you can revisit them just the same as you revisit paper notebooks.
Agreed. I didn't understand this part. I exclusively use Apple Notes for typed and handwritten notes. I also find the search functionality to be excellent at finding stuff I need, so I'm not sure why the author bashes Apple Notes search either.
Re: Incremental note-taking
#9>The tragedy of Apple Notes is that it’s an idea black hole. I don't quite understand what's the problem here. You capture ideas digitally, and later, you can revisit them just the same as you revisit paper notebooks.
Agreed. I didn't understand this part. I exclusively use Apple Notes for typed and handwritten notes. I also find the search functionality to be excellent at finding stuff I need, so I'm not sure why the author bashes Apple Notes search either.
Fair points. But I was going less off of raw capability here and more from how I've observed these tools to be used in the wild. It was very common for most people to dump things like contact info, recommendations, random links into Apple Notes and very very rarely search for what they put in (because they forgot what they put in). So you can search — it seems like the product isn't conducive to frequent recall.
Re: Incremental note-taking
#10Shameless self-promotion: I've built an app - thinktype[1] - that I think fulfills three of these four principles:
> Captured ideas are better than missed ones.
> Ideas that can’t be recalled are worse than useless – effective search and recall form the soul of great notes.
In thinktype, you write and search notes at the same time. You can start both writing and searching (which are the same) right when you open the app.
> Time is essential to how we remember, and should be a first-class concept in a good note-taking system.
In thinktype, you see a relative time for every note ("two weeks").
When you open the app you see all notes sorted by recency. You can also easily sort search results by recency, for example to see how your thinking on a topic developed.