I've always been a note taker. It enables me to accomplish things I couldn't otherwise. I used to fill thick drawing pads. The advent of cloud-backed multi-device apps was a marked improvement. I've switched a couple of times for a slightly streamlined workflow. But the slight streamlining doesn't make a big difference. Taking notes vs not taking them makes a big difference.
Ask HN: Why the obsession with note taking?
41–50 of 219 posts
Re: Ask HN: Why the obsession with note taking?
#42My take - note taking is a symtom of ADHD. The fact these topics are popular on HN suggests there are quite a lot of ADHD people here. The counter intuitive thing is that these apps are thought of as something that helps with attention disorders. But wanting to "organize life", "track thoughts and ideas", "never forget what you learned", etc, are symptoms, not cures.
> My take - note taking is a symtom of ADHD
It's not a symptom of ADHD. It's one of the coping strategies for people with ADHD who have problems memorising things.
Re: Ask HN: Why the obsession with note taking?
#43My deep dark secret is that I never take notes. Not for lack of trying, I just don't know how to do it. I never did it at school, never did it at work, never did it outside of work. I'm in my mid-thirties now, I just gave up on the concept. Every time I see a post on HN about how somebody manages to organize their lives around a personal wiki or org-mode or whatever I get a bit jealous.
I'm on the same boat, I managed to work with GTD method on trello for a bit, but I gave up.
Thing is, after all these years, I actually think I don't need to take notes, that's why my mind doesn't feel like it's worth it in the end to organize everything into notes, when I rarely forgot about something.
I just use one physical calendar at home, and flags in outlook at work, and I'm fine.
Re: Ask HN: Why the obsession with note taking?
#44>What's this about? Do we all secretly believe we can be truly better people if we can just get this right? Or are we just endlessly curious about what everyone else does?
I don't think it's just a belief as some of us have personal evidence of quality-of-life improvement from being able to easily retrieve a saved piece of knowledge. We then wonder if whatever system we happen to be using (paper notebooks, emacs Org-Mode, Evernote, plain text files, Roam, etc, etc) ... can be improved or generalized to others.
Earlier in computing (i.e. 1980s DOS) the acronym "PIM" "Personal Information Manager" was the meme for note-taking. You had attempts like Borland Sidekick[1] and Lotus Agenda[2]. In the 1990s, you had PIM devices like the PalmPilot where enthusiasts tried to convince us that it was worth investing the time to learn its idiosyncratic stylus strokes to save notes.[3]
Today's recurring "Show HN" of the latest note-taking software attempt is the continuation of an unsolved problem for the general population. Each of the following functions have many degrees-of-freedom:
(1) saving notes in a friction-free way: local-first file or cloud? save in freeform text files (Markdown?), or JSON, or in SQLite? Or handdrawn pen input on a tablet and save the image files with OCR conversion? Sync data across all devices how?
(2) organizing and retrieving notes : hierarchies? tags? graph links? mindmaps? or no friction of organizing at all and just use full-text search?
We get a combinatorial explosion of tools instead of everybody converging on The One True Way.
Personally, I've settled on not using dedicated note-taking software. Just use a combination of text files with a text editor and folders hierarchy in the operating system. But I acknowledge that my idiosyncratic system doesn't generalize to the population and it doesn't have simple data sync so I can't retrieve my notes on my smartphone.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Borland_Sidekick
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lotus_Agenda
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graffiti_(Palm_OS)#/media/File...
#/media/File:Palm_Graffiti_gestures.png){kind=link}
Re: Ask HN: Why the obsession with note taking?
#45My take - note taking is a symtom of ADHD. The fact these topics are popular on HN suggests there are quite a lot of ADHD people here. The counter intuitive thing is that these apps are thought of as something that helps with attention disorders. But wanting to "organize life", "track thoughts and ideas", "never forget what you learned", etc, are symptoms, not cures.
Absolutely "not necessarily". SWE requires an extensive amount of learning (if you're lucky :)).
Unless one has extraordinary mnemonic capabilities, note taking is a way to structure and store concepts.
Even if this wasn't the case, personal notes are still a more efficient/effective way than googling, for two reasons: 1. on the notes, one puts the processed version of a concept, so that it's safer/more stable/improved/cleaner/adapted etc. 2. personal notes follow the mind of who writes them, so the concepts are faster to find.
Re: Ask HN: Why the obsession with note taking?
#46A big part of modern identity is constructed of your beliefs and knowledge. The things you think about are what define you as a person.
As such, when we don’t write an idea down, it feels like we are losing a part of ourselves.
Re: Ask HN: Why the obsession with note taking?
#47The simple act of taking notes helps me to remember. Even if I don't read them again in the future, the actual act of writing/typing out notes helps embed them as memories.
Re: Ask HN: Why the obsession with note taking?
#48Its because my note taking is an extension of me - it's a succinct representation of my knowledge boundary written in my own vernacular.
It's dynamic and heirarchical and gives me: - Discipline for spaced repetition - Creative stimulation through re-reading - Generalized thought ordering
At some point the complex state machines, schematics and plans are too big to be held in my working memory all at once so I must decompose and interface them.
Re: Ask HN: Why the obsession with note taking?
#49I think taking notes to remember important things is just in our nature. I have yet to find a piece of note taking software that will prevent my opening up a dozen Notepad instances and leaving them open (unsaved) for all eternity... I take notes to remember TODOs, to draft communication, to write random crap I want to come back to. Sometimes I don't even come back to it, but somehow writing it down still helps. I st…
Absolutely, in 20 odd years my muscle memory still opens notepad and the only thing I would love is some kind of autosave/persistence across devices as I always have a dread when occasionally I lose stuff on a crash or something.
However when I think about it this may be why notepad still works for me, it doesn't become overwhelming. I've tried to use quite a few systems over the years and the trajectory is always the same - it starts great but the unresolved tasks accumulate until the whole thing seems inefficient or pointless or just overwhelming.
In a round about Notepad along with occasional data loss solves that problem for me :D
Re: Ask HN: Why the obsession with note taking?
#50My take - note taking is a symtom of ADHD. The fact these topics are popular on HN suggests there are quite a lot of ADHD people here. The counter intuitive thing is that these apps are thought of as something that helps with attention disorders. But wanting to "organize life", "track thoughts and ideas", "never forget what you learned", etc, are symptoms, not cures.
Do you not have a need to regularly record information in your life for later (genuine question)? I am curious how you avoid note taking without forgetting a ton of things.
I'm not the person you're directing the question to, but I actively have to self medicate so I don't remember every thing.
I also need to take notes to raise the important things above the useless things that I remember.