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Incremental note-taking

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Re: Incremental note-taking

#31

Post by VladimirGolovin »

discardable_dan wrote: post #2

No 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…

Workflowy is fantastic for keeping project journals, which are my form of incremental note taking. It's great at "behaving like memory" and documenting "a story of how I arrived at the ideas".

Currently, however, I'm drifting away from the journal format to a Zettelkasten, which I keep in Obsidian, a plain-text / markdown desktop app. I guess I could keep my Zettelkasten in Workflowy, but I rather like the dedicated desktop app approach for it.

Re: Incremental note-taking

#32

Post by krychu »

This is a good research topic but my opinion differs

- The article claims that the forgetting of 90% is an underrated problem. I think it’s generally a feature that enables us to converse, read stories, and live. It’s a garbage collector. More specifically, however, it gets in the way when we learn new things. You read something important, have an aha moment, but then forget it a minute later when your short-term memory gets refilled. And so you need to run into the same important thing multiple times before it really sticks with you.

- The article claims that the time element is of upmost importance. I think it’s important only in very specific cases, and generally unimportant. The passing of time also makes the value of it decay.

- The article claims that new notes are better than re-working old ones. I feel the opposite is my preference. You re-work your knowledge, review, correct, and restructure it. What matters is your current understanding, not how you arrived there, or what your 0.1 version was. The art is in simplification and distillation over time, not accumulation.

Re: Incremental note-taking

#33

Post by yanis_t »

To me, the main point was always the need to refresh the knowledge. Ive built a note taking webapp (http://rekowl.com), that will pop up some of your older notes for review, not unsimilar to anki. I have to say the experience is amazing. The retention improves, but also there's always a chance to update a note on a particular topic with some new knowledge and put links to other related notes.

Re: Incremental note-taking

#34

Post by mackrevinack »

senectus1 wrote: post #14
discardable_dan wrote: post #2

No 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…

oh wow. workflowy is a amazing. I need to dump onenote for this i think

i found workflowy a few years ago, within the space of a weekend i moved everything from onenote, todoist and some evernote stuff into workflowy. i liked it that much!

im using dyanlist now which is similar enough, just more options, but i can't see myself moving away from outliners ever again

Re: Incremental note-taking

#35

Post by arael »

CoderPuppy wrote: post #22

My personal note taking system is based around plain text files in Git repositories. I edit with NeoVIM and use ripgrep (and other shell tools) to recall. I started out (in 2014 or 2015) with a wiki-like style, but I switched to a time-based/append-only style (in 2019) when I realized that not everything that I wanted to write down needed its own name. I still use some remnants of the old wiki style, but I mostly use…

I have started with a similar approach but my deal breaker were math symbols and pictures.

Do you have any need to include drawings to illustrate some of the concepts?

How do you manage the math symbols and graphs, if you have any?

Re: Incremental note-taking

#36

Post by mackrevinack »

discardable_dan wrote: post #2

No 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…

> freely move content as you take it, and also after

workflowy is great but dynalist has a leg up here with its 'move' feature. it allows you to write a note anywhere and then search for another note to move it to. its useful when I'm in a completely different context, like if I'm in my todo list section and i want to write down a idea in my programming section, i don't have to go to that location and then back

Re: Incremental note-taking

#37

Post by mbrock »

I use Roam a lot like this. Everything goes on the Daily Notes page. I refer back to older notes with block references. I don’t write anything on other pages, I just refer to ideas and names with the [[Link Syntax]] and then the pages are just like queries for finding those links within Daily Notes. I think this is right in line with the Roam paradigm and I expect the temporal aspect to be a focus of their product development.

Re: Incremental note-taking

#38

Post by arael »

I take my notes in org-mode with deft plugin and latex snippets. I have shortcuts for taking screenshots and importing them in the org document. I use blocks for gnuplot, octave, etc.

It is very powerful but at the same time slow. Every time emacs generates the latex bits it takes some time to generate and open the file.

There is also a little bit of overhead because it is a lot of elements and a lot of syntax to generate documents.

I am learning math so my org files are full of latex code, screenshots and graphs.

It is very powerful but I wonder if I am wasting my time into details.

Sometimes I think I should limit myself to text only, but I am not sure I can convey textually ideas that are better represented in picture.

Also, although I very much like emacs I find it very slow.

So...there is this tradeoff, either very complete and detailed but slow (emacs/orgmode/deft/latex) or very basic and simple but quick (neovim/plain_txt/fzf).

I still do not know what would be better.

Re: Incremental note-taking

#39

Post by inferense »

> We don’t remember things by modifying our past memories – we simply accumulate more, as if adding entries to a log or a journal. We search through them by traversing time, looking for links between ideas and experiences.

This is a good write-up. Not the first one mentioning this, but ideas first, organisation second, that's the natural workflow. Yet most note-taking apps have it backwards. The self-promoting ones in the comment section seem no different besides offering a new color theme.

The only app I used that was true to this was apple notes. But then, organisation sucked and my workflow is not just about taking notes. It's about organising my knowledge and time around it.

I'm going to be no different here and promote https://acreom.com which launched recently and is unique. It's simple just like apple notes, the functionality is either well designed or hidden in the backend using machine learning.

It's time for a new approach. I'm happy to share access and get ridiculed if someone doesn't find it so.

Re: Incremental note-taking

#40

Post by foxes »

How are some of those other apps too slow? Stream of consciousness definitely doesn't need to be recorded, you can polish the thought a bit before recording something. Even then I imagine a lot of my notes are junk I won't ever look at again. It was just useful at the time to scribble stuff down to help my own thought process, doesn't all have to go on record. OP seems to suffer a bit from "note anxiety".

Further, some minimal command line app would truly suck for me. What if I want to draw a diagram/sketch, express something that doesn't neatly fit into some text? Maths symbols? I don't want to type stuff. Embedding links? References? Screenshots?

An ipad pro has been a boon, I use notability or apple notes and just organise by date. What this is lacking is a good query feature.

The end game would be a clean infinite paper interface but still maybe something that I can go query on my desktop later. It should be able to at least parse maths symbols and convert it to sensible text. Diagrams it could stick into a picture.

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