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Ask HN: Why the obsession with note taking?

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Re: Ask HN: Why the obsession with note taking?

#71

Post by greggsy »

eternityforest wrote: post #4

All notetaking apps are disappointing with the possibile exception of Obsidian that I haven't tried long enough to have an opinion on. There's no open source standard. No LibreOffice or Krita of notetaking. They all only have a small subset of features one might want. And yet they are critical infrastructure for people's entire life. It's a pretty exciting space.

The markdown-based apps like obsidian are probably on the right track, but there’s too much dogma associated with methodologies like zettelkasten today that it just it’s probably a deterrent for some people.

For those who just want a generic and easy to use app like OneNote, they’re not going to find it in Obsidian.

Re: Ask HN: Why the obsession with note taking?

#73

Post by Farbklex »

anon2020dot00 wrote: post #67

A lot of people think that traditional note-taking can be improved (me included). As evidence, below is a short list of note-taking companies that YC has recently given money to. Clover: https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/clover Athens: https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/athens-research Dendron: https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/dendron Heptabase: https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/heptabase My current f…

Whenever I feel like I don't have great enough ideas to become a software millionaire, I just think about the guy who made "Wunderlist" [1], sold it to Microsoft (Microsoft discontinued it) and is now making "Superlist"[2].

Clearly, it is not the lack of great ideas that is holding me back...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wunderlist

[2] https://superlist.com/

Re: Ask HN: Why the obsession with note taking?

#74

Post by MattGaiser »

tgaj wrote: post #51
MattGaiser wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 am not sure if I understood this question but with unmedicated ADHD you really have to write everything down, even the smallest, simplest tasks, and a lot of information for "future me". I even have to write about things that I do every day. Nothing really sticks in your mind. Notetaking is not a choice but a neccesity. When you are medicated you still want to take notes it you want to be even more organized but yo…

As far as I know I do not have ADHD. I still find it quite useful to write everything down and make sure that I completed everything I needed to do that day. Very easy to forget to reply to someone or that some small thing has a deadline upcoming.

If I really care about the meetings I attended being useful (not often), I will take notes on what is discussed and decided.

Re: Ask HN: Why the obsession with note taking?

#75

Post by ollysb »

It isn't about note taking, it's about supporting a brain that simply isn't capable of retaining the level of information that we have to deal with. The ultimate note taking device is actually an augmented human brain that has perfect recollection and organisation.

In the mean time the note taking apps help with:

Working memory - a page can hold far more information than I can retain in my working memory. Having a bunch of information helps me build a working model without having to retain all the information while I'm building. Spot patterns - by organising information it's easier to spot patterns.

Long term memory - your brain just isn't very good at retaining information long term. Maybe you have a company wide wiki but the act of building your own notes is enough to form some connections in your brain so that when you come back you have far greater familiarity and insight associated with the information.

Re: Ask HN: Why the obsession with note taking?

#76

Post by stareatgoats »

I believe the main reason for the obsession is that we intuitively know that it can be done "right" (according to our own personal preferences) - but that a solution is not yet at hand. So we install every possible attempt we come across, only to find that no - not yet.

Here is some of what I am personally looking for:

- a wysiwyg rich text interface, with embedding capabilities, with an optional markdown interface and (closest) representation

- integrated web clipper a la Evernote

- multidimensional categorization (i.e. not a single hierarchy of notebooks) that links to universal categories

- AI-supported automatic summaries and categorization

- Optionally encrypted when stored centrally, with finegrained visibility options.

- Optionally savable locally only, encrypted or not-encrypted

- Datahandling and coding capabilities, a la ObservableHQ/Jupyter/Datasette

- Linkable in various ways to other notes, my own or others

- and more!

Re: Ask HN: Why the obsession with note taking?

#77

Post by pdinny »

A related question for note-takers: what would you estimate as your rate of reference to prior notes? For my own part that rate is so dismally low that right now I get more value out of making notes than retrieving and reading notes.

I'm reminded of a response to another thread on HN a few weeks back about organizing physical documents. Many commenters had very sophisticated processes with scanning, OCR, indexing etc but there was one commenter who organized their documents as a stack of paper, divided by year. The use case for documents might be a bit different because the number of times you're likely to need a document is probably quite different the number of times you will benefit from reading a note.

A more concise reframing of the above: for those who have adopted a disciplined approach to note taking (geared towards retrieval and linking) do you get enough value from the disciplined approach to encourage us unstructured notes-everywhere to invest the effort of adopting a better process?

Re: Ask HN: Why the obsession with note taking?

#78

Post by [deleted] »

stareatgoats wrote: post #76

I believe the main reason for the obsession is that we intuitively know that it can be done "right" (according to our own personal preferences) - but that a solution is not yet at hand. So we install every possible attempt we come across, only to find that no - not yet. Here is some of what I am personally looking for: - a wysiwyg rich text interface, with embedding capabilities, with an optional markdown interface a…

[deleted]

Re: Ask HN: Why the obsession with note taking?

#79

Post by bachmeier »

This is a big topic, with a lot of use cases (capturing information, tracking stuff you have to do, learning, etc.) In my case, I have the work roles of professor, administrator running our grad programs, and journal editor. That's a lot of data that has to be captured, processed, and queried over and over. Without a good system, I literally couldn't do my job. The better I am at handling that data, the easier my job gets.

Re: Ask HN: Why the obsession with note taking?

#80

Post by walterbell »

jasode wrote: post #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-…

There still one classic PIM being maintained with a perpetual license: doogiePIM

https://bitespire.com/

2018 Show HN, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18120483

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