Great deep dive into core principles of a good note-taking system. There are a few things I'd add. Curious to hear your thoughts.
> 1) Captured ideas are better than missed ones
> 2) Adding new ideas is better than updating old ones. Updating notes in-place is inherently lossy, and I think it’s unnecessary.
Yes. And, setting the intention to "add," not "update" reduces friction to capturing.
When you write something in a "source of truth" - like a wiki - you've now made a commitment to keep it updated. (It's a commitment you probably don't want to keep). So, what do you do? You don't write stuff there. Instead you write it somewhere more ephemeral like Slack or a scratchpad.
Setting the expectation that your notes are to be "added to," not "updated" lets you add notes with more ease.
> 3) Ideas that can’t be recalled are worse than useless
> Regardless of how you recall information back from your notes, a great note-taking system should make it trivial to get ideas out, as well as in.
Two things I'd add here are
i) It should be easy to deliver ideas to the right location (not just to recall them).
This means copy-paste should be fast. Your notes should use integrations with the tools you use to make it easy to get them there in a snap. If there's a lot of friction to getting notes organized or shared, you're less likely to do it. It's also just annoying to have to highlight text, pull it apart with your mouse, open the app you need, and paste it in.
ii) Most of what you need to recall is actually very simple to find. It's what you recently wrote.
Most of what's most important from personal working notes is stuff that's immediately relevant. Stuff that was probably written in the past week or so. This explains why so many people use Apple Notes. It's messy but it's fast to get things down and you usually can find what you need using the recency filter.
> 4) Time is essential to how we remember, and should be a first-class concept in a good note-taking system.
YES YES YES. And the stuff that we need the most right now is most likely to be stuff we wrote recently.
At https://bytebase.io we're building the fastest notepad for engineers. Our focus is on the notes that are most helpful to you as you do your work today.